Facing increased pressure to deliver more growth and productivity while addressing workforce mobility trends and skills shortages, 87 percent of business leaders cite organizational culture and employee engagement as their top challenge, according to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015 report. Responding to this need, Deloitte developed CulturePath™, a culture-change solution that enables companies to measure their culture, pinpoint strengths and gaps, and drive behaviors needed to achieve critical business objectives.
“Organizational culture is top-of-mind for the C-suite today because business is changing more rapidly—and is more competitive—than ever before. To thrive in this environment, companies must understand their employees’ beliefs and motivations, and connect those emotionally-influenced decisions and actions to business strategy. Organizations that align people to purpose are more engaged and better able to achieve key business goals.” Anthony Abbatiello, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Using an analytics-driven diagnostic, CulturePath™ measures eight specific indices that help the leadership and HR professionals within an organization understand the company’s current culture. This includes four foundational attributes that are core to achievement of specific business strategies—collective focus, risk and governance, external orientation, and change and innovation. Plus, four differentiating attributes tied directly to behavioral motivations and emotions—courage, commitment, inclusion, and shared beliefs.
To transform corporate culture successfully, Deloitte recommends that organizations focus on three critical areas:
- Align culture with business strategy. Today, culture is an enabler of strategy. This means companies should define the behaviors that align to achieving their business strategy.
- Make emotional connections with employees. Companies need to take a page from consumer marketing and create emotional connections between the strategy and the workforce to create engaged, productive, and loyal employees. Research has found that “mission-driven” companies have 30 percent higher levels of innovation and 40 percent higher retention. (See Becoming irresistible: A new model for employee engagement)
- Take your culture off cruise control. A company must actively manage its culture and adjust desired behaviors and processes as business strategies evolve over time to have an enduring effect on business performance and the bottom line.
“To make a significant and lasting impact on culture change, the levers that drive performance and behaviors need to be adjusted over time because the business strategy, work, and employees continually change,” says Marc Kaplan, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and national leader of the organization transformation and talent service line. “While culture can sometimes seem amorphous, it is possible to measure and develop required cultural attributes. Still, there needs to be an ongoing commitment to monitoring, measuring, and actively shaping the culture organizations need to drive the organizational strategy.”
The solution is cloud-based and mobile-accessible, enabling business leaders to visualize, explore, and compare key data using an intuitive dashboard. Coupling this technology with deep experience in consumer behavior and organizational change, Deloitte delivers a precise plan with actionable insights for cultural transformation.
For more information about CulturePath and where you can download an infographic on corporate culture, read Deloitte’s recent perspective, Take your corporate culture off cruise control.
