Growth Depends On A Company’s Ability to Reinvent Culture

Digital technology can make a difference in how a company operates, but it is only intelligent and impactful if people actually use it. Automating a point in a process will speed it up and reduce a person’s tactical workload; however, real impact on business outcomes is when an end-to-end process is automated as part of an overall effort to change the way an organization produces a business outcome, such as improving customer experience. And that means changing the way many managers and employees work today. It means encouraging, enabling, and incenting managers and employees to work across organizational silos and touch customers because, as one executive said, “the customer doesn’t care how we are organized, and shouldn’t have to.” In short: To use digital technology effectively to impact business outcomes requires that many organizations reinvent their culture of how and why people work – to recreate the employee experience.

The role of “experience” in cultural and organizational change

In a recent interview with Ben Little, VP, Design Strategy at Hill Holiday, who participated in a panel discussion on this topic at the Chicago HfS Summit in September, we explored the importance of employee experience and culture in business operations for corporate growth.

Barbra: Ben, What is the role of “culture” in a company? What impact does culture have on how a company can grow?

Ben: Think of culture as the dynamic representation of a collection of beliefs and behaviors in an organization. What people do and how they do it has an impact on business. While companies have strategy, mission, and vision, people naturally have their own interpretation and this is reflected in how they go about their day, what they do, the style of how they do it, and how they interact. It’s reflected in their personality and tone.  And the overall culture and how a person feels and acts within it – how they fit in – have a huge impact on how they enjoy their jobs, which in turn impacts the success and growth of the company.

Barbra: Leading toward a clear and shared vision is a key element of successful shift, but it won’t be realized without the employees being a part of the movement. What would you say is key to reinventing culture successfully?

Ben: Many organizations are built on the mental model of industrial labor and a chain of handoffs that have an outcome of unit and service. Companies create customer experiences with that mental model, and they produce employee experiences with that model.  Increasingly, however, we’re realizing that this approach doesn’t reflect how people actually experience services. So, in the same way marketing organizes brand around the customer journey, we also need to organize company culture around the employee journey. Otherwise we get culture that is a function of policies, decisions, and personalities interacting sequentially, through that production mindset. What we want, ideally, is a culture that is introduced, supported, and realized through an intentional employee experience, one that brings meaning to the work and aligns to the values of the brand.

Barbra: So employee experience makes the company’s goods and services meaningful and relevant to the customer and leads to a productive outcome for the company… within some kind of governance structure? 

Ben: The ideal governance structure is one that treats the outcomes as paramount. We often attempt to interpret “outcomes” as discretely measurable KPIs.  “Hit this number and it represents a good outcome.” However, what we lose in this approach is the complexity of an experience. We can have good NPS and still have a poor experience or a diminishing competitive position. The companies I’ve seen that are really moving forward in terms of outcome-oriented governance are treating employee and customer journeys as the unifying vision of what they’re aiming to produce. Through this lens, they can evaluate policy and procedural decisions to see if they bring the company closer to realizing the vision or if they are stepping away from it.

Consider the debate between a cheapest option and various versions of “better.”  To evaluate what is really better and whether it is worth spending more than the cheapest option, you need to be governing towards some sense of an envisioned human experience you are trying to make real. This is true for all companies – the ones used to thinking about experience (e.g., retail) and those for which managing experience is new and unfamiliar (e.g., industrial components). Every company that has a future it is working towards has human factors to consider.

Barbra: How do you measure the impact of this human factor – the experience?

Ben: Organizations typically operate as a bunch of independent divisions, e.g., retail, field marketing, scheduling, recruiting, with different types of people and types of operational metrics. These operational divisions in companies are holding them back by creating “small boundaries” that get in the way of managing a coherent experience for customers and employees. Sharing outcomes across the organization and employee experience – that’s key to reinventing culture. The customer doesn’t see the organizational divisions but does feel the impact. For experience-led governance you can set goals and metrics along the customer and employee journey, keeping them aligned and contextualized with the vision. With the metrics, include stories and competitive analysis to triangulate a pulse on the market with internal experience and numbers. A reporting and insights calendar can provide a visual representation and story line. The intent here is to pull these divisions together under a single vision and then feed them with insightful stories that show progress in more than numbers.

Barbra: What else do companies need to “watch out for” when reinventing culture?

Ben:

• Interaction over time: We also have a tendency to start initiatives with workshops and conversations that peter out or simply end. It’s important to continue interactions over time and through tests of new design elements, new apps, prototyping, etc. We’re not so much “reinventing culture,” which sounds like it has an end point, as we are trying to instill a new intentionality to our culture. After the initial push and high activity, it winds down but also doesn’t go back to the “before” state of business.
• The sinkhole of sunk costs: When people have the attitude and behavior of “we’ve already paid for ‘x” and we have to do something with it.” From an accounting perspective, this is a real concern, but if you can go out and buy something for $3/seat versus millions to implement or maintain what’s already been chosen… it’s about seeing the big picture, long term and balancing with the short.
• Actioning the plan: One the biggest challenges is how to realize and scale change. We can work with designers to build journeys, craft solutions and services, and to create integrated models of how it pulls together. However, there is often not enough focus and capability on how to operationalize it, such as how to bring together the leaders that manage the different parts of the business that are impacted.

Tackling these challenges is re-inventing culture.

Bottom-line: Customer experiences will get better as employee experiences do

To operate as OneOffice – talent and technology that is brokered across the organization to solve problems and create experience – many organizations will need to reinvent culture, change the norms and behaviors of their employees. Leaders and managers need to consider how to eliminate hierarchies and open lines of communication, tolerate more risk, and encourage learning. It means that people need to step outside of the “not my job” mentality, taking off the blinders that often keep us from working together and creating an optimal experience for everyone.  There needs to be a governance structure that facilitates the breaking down of big pictures and journey into smaller ones and building them up again to keep changing dynamically – to create and re-create culture through experience.