
How do you implement and measure genuine cultural change?
It’s a big question. One of the biggest. Alright, it’s not “Britain leaving the European Union” or “Marathon being renamed Snickers” big but, for HR professionals, it’s not far off. You may have a vision in mind for a big shift in your organisation’s culture: one that will improve efficiency, performance and engagement. How do you persuade your CEO that you can deliver it, embed it and make it work?
When we talk to businesses about what we do, they nearly always agree that the system of annual appraisal is well past its sell-by date. What concerns them is the challenge of embedding a more continuous system. One where managers and team members engage regularly to have more meaningful conversations, more often, and without the yearly purgatory that makes up their current review process. They worry about visibility. They feel that their managers might not be ready to engage in a more fluid way of feeding back to their teams. Which brings us back to cultural change.
The truth is that businesses change all the time: that’s one of the pillars on which our strategy is based. Business priorities can shift. Targets can become outdated or be superseded. One of the key reasons that we advocate a move to continuous performance conversations is precisely this: that annual objectives don’t give employees the flexibility that truly reflects how a modern business operates. So if your business can adapt — to market conditions, to your competitors, to the way your customers behave — then surely your team can too.
We believe that all companies can benefit from reviewing and feeding back on performance in a clear, prompt and candid way. We create technology, strategy and consultancy that helps them to start it off, make it stick and understand the benefits from the very first day. And we work with businesses that know they have exceptional people working for them, and trust that if they offer the right environment and the right tools, their people will grow just as their business does.
Of course, a few hundred words in a blog may not convince you, which is why we’ve created a whole page to prove all the points we’ve made above. This page has multiple resources including our popular eBook on “Embedding a culture of meaningful conversations.” All the resources are free!
The 5 most important performance conversations
Learn everything you need to know about having more meaningful performance conversations.