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With over 7,000 people now signed up to our Shaping the Future community, we have been out and about presenting on our interim findings as well as holding focus groups and discussions to help inform the next phase of the project.
How are you driving culture and shared purpose?
On 20 May we ran a focus group on culture and shared purpose, two of the key themes emerging from our work on what is driving sustainable organisation performance. We sent the invites out to our Shaping the Future community and were inundated with requests to attend. We regret that we couldn’t accommodate everyone. However, we had great discussions with interesting insights about both topics.
Participants told us that their key issues are:
Culture
- how to manage subcultures within different parts of an organisation
- how to get your desired culture to ‘stick’
- pursuing the culture that will be right for your organisation in the long term
- where responsibility lies for driving the culture
- how to assess and evaluate your progress towards your desired culture.
Shared purpose
- articulating the organisation’s purpose in such a way that all employees can identify with it
- enabling employees in all functions to see how they contribute to the purpose
- how to bring the purpose to life
- embedding the purpose in large and dispersed organisations
- how to get people engaged with your organisational purpose when it is not obviously inspiring.
Results of our culture poll
We’d like to thank you for an overwhelming response to our poll on culture. Although the poll is still open, we'd like to give you a flavour of the responses so far:
The three most common cultures aspired to are: a customer-focused culture; a performance-orientated culture; and a culture which drives learning and knowledge sharing.
How are you developing your desired culture? 134 of the 212 people who have responded to the poll said they are focusing on ensuring that organisational practices, processes and structure fit with the desired culture. Another important consideration for 115 people is tying the culture in with the organisation’s shared purpose. 110 respondents said they are grappling with how to get line managers to embrace and promote the desired culture and 106 said getting top leadership to put significant emphasis on creating the desired culture is a priority.
The key challenges you told us you are facing in developing the right cultures are how to overcome strong subcultures and how to communicate the new values to the workforce. A lack of resources is a key issue, as is developing a culture across geographically dispersed business units.
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