Give your teams more meaningful conversations

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!