The Role of Culture in OneOffice
The classic Peter Drucker adage goes “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and this holds true for both enterprises and service providers as they make a shift to support digital customer experience. Culture is the foundation that will hold up and ultimately allow for execution on that strategy. So, it is critical not only to design a transformation approach that puts the customer at the heart of all processes and functions, but also to cultivate a culture that supports the values of this OneOffice. In order to do that, people often need to “un-learn”—whether it’s bad habits, ways of doing work, or ways of measuring results. In short, when the goal changes, the team needs to realign and behave differently as well.
At our recent HfS Summit in Chicago, we facilitated two breakout sessions entitled “Un-Learning to Embrace a Digital OneOffice Culture” to discuss among attendees: What are the biggest challenges and opportunities within their organization for changing a culture to one that embraces customer centricity?
Keeping an Eye on the Prize
Before diving into the exact challenges for changing culture and ways to approach that change, we asked summit attendees what they wanted to accomplish from changing the culture. In other words, what are the benefits and outcomes of moving to OneOffice that can create a burning platform for change? In a OneOffice culture, attendees believe they would achieve greater levels of:
- The ability to make decisions quicker: Becoming agiler and gaining the ability to move faster with decisions and projects can be great motivators to shifting company culture. The OneOffice premise of converged and actionable data can enable a greater speed to action within an organization.
- Collaborate more effectively: People can often feel stifled when stuck within a silo, but creating a culture that embraces greater collaboration can help generate motivation and employee engagement.
- Becoming more customer-centric: This is the crux of the whole digital OneOffice, and a major aspiration for companies looking to better understand and service their customers.
- Improved performance: Ultimately, as altruistic as a company may be, financial performance and growth are the endgame to shifting toward a OneOffice culture.
Embracing Change by Un-Learning
Of course, one of the biggest barriers to effective change is people’s natural resistance to it. Summit breakout attendees gave some of the following ideas help people embrace change:
- “OK to innovate” and “OK to fail”: Several of the summit attendees mentioned the desire to create a culture of innovation where people are encouraged to generate ideas. One operations executive mentioned her company’s initiative for having “innovation jams,” which are collaborative exercises bringing together various employee levels and functions to bring ideas to the forefront. Ideas need to lead to action, however, or get lost. So, there also needs to be a level of acceptance for experimentation and acknowledgment that with new ideas comes the risk that there will be dead ends. Some companies have proposed the concept of a “minimum failure rate” as a KPI, with the idea that if there aren’t any failed projects, there also can’t be any real innovation happening. The concept of “no blame” also came up—that we innovate as a team and therefore own the failure as a team.
- Unhooking from how we keep score: Whether it’s SLAs, performance metrics, or even company financials, one way to embrace change is to re-evaluate how we’re keeping score. Are the traditional measurements aligned with the changes we are trying to effect? Is bigger always better? In the contact center, for example, many companies still track average handle time (AHT) as a metric but have shifted the core KPIs to outcomes like improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores(NPS). Other companies are even pivoting how they incentivize all employees toward customer-centric metrics in order to get even non-customer facing employees aligned with the customer experience. And as one attendee noted, often becoming customer-centric means moving away from being process-centric—and design thinking can play a big role in shifting that focus.
- Organic, ground-up change: As much as leaders want to drive these culture changes, the group recognized that employees do not want to have these changes imposed on them or told which cultural values they must exemplify; there must be some element of allowing for people to feel a part of creating that culture, with leadership guidance. The innovation jam example works well here too—thinking of ways to get people involved and invested in changing the culture. Along with this comes a need for the commitment to transparency, so that people feel aware of leadership’s intentions and planned changes and also see their contributions. This is very important when it comes to the topic of automation, where many employees feel threatened and unsure about how the implementation of automation will impact their jobs and their roles. Having employees involved from the very beginning in helping to cultivate the culture shift from automation is helpful. In one example, employees felt engaged in the process by helping to train and name the bots as if they were colleagues.
Un-learning… and Learning Again
It’s no secret that change is hard, and no company is immune to change right now. But a strong culture that embraces the fundamentals of OneOffice can help make those changes easier and more impactful. Breaking down silos requires much greater collaboration across your enterprise and a culture that embraces customer centricity at its core. After identifying what we need to stop doing and un-learn, we also have to learn to become students again—opening our minds to new ideas and concepts and leaving our egos at the door in the process.
