How to build the right culture in your company?

Most people assume building the right culture within a company is simple, but the reality is, it’s quite difficult and very few do this well.

Being a start-up or smaller company makes it easier to manage, influence and build the desired culture but as companies grow and evolve it is important that you hold the right culture, and ensure it is driven from the top down.

Let's explore factors that drive culture in organisations:

Recruitment.
Companies recruit based on whether the candidate is the right fit for the company’s culture.

Performance.
Are employees rewarded for practicing the right behaviours, that align with the culture of the organisation.

Values.
Most companies have values that are core to their operations. These are usually displayed on their website, the walls in their office and screensavers to remind their community of what their foundations are built around. Many companies have values but very few actually live them; this needs to be driven from the top. Do your executives live/display the company’s values?

Leadership.
The leadership in the organisation sets the tone, and ultimately that culture of an organisation.

We all want to work for a company with the right culture. While there are some things we can control – culture is the responsibility of the leadership team to drive.

“If you change your mindset, you have the ability to change your whole world.”

— Damien Thomas

4 key things to consider when influencing culture:

1. Leadership team - right people, right behaviours and help build out the culture in organisation.

2. Reward performance/behaviour aligned with culture and values.

3. Continuously remind/train employees on what is expected of them from the time they join

4. Ensure there is an outcome if employees are not aligned to expectations

As a leader in a company you must set the right culture and foster it. A positive culture is the biggest driver of productivity in any organization and people spend a lot of time working, so it is important to create an enjoyable workplace environment.  

You can have the best business strategy in the world but if your culture is rotten you won't be successful in the long-term.

“Alone, we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

— Helen Keller

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Looking to create a lasting culture and rally the team in your organisation? Let us help.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes. We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Does it take a crisis for change to occur quickly?

Sitting around the table at Christmas everyone talked about how quickly their companies responded to Covid-19. People were shocked and surprised and impressed all at once.

In general companies are slow to make a change but when faced with a crisis they were able to respond differently, quickly, decisively and achieve an outcome. Why does it take a crisis to make a change this quickly? In recent conversations on this topic with my network, many people believe that's just how it is and nothing you can do to fix it -- but I'm not convinced that is right and would love to explore this further.

Speed is a differentiator for companies:

•    Speed to market competitive advantage

•    Speed on process drives efficiency and productivity

•    Speed to deliver product or service

•    Speed to pivot when something goes wrong

So if speed is so important why don't companies focus on what is slowing them down and focus on increasing speed. There seems like a lot of benefits of speed.

The Four Factors…

Below are 4 key factors that slow companies down. Do any of these resonate for your company?

1.         Process, policies and red tape.

Companies implement processes, policies and standards to ensure consistent application of outcomes across the company. This can create barriers for speed to get things done.

2.         Unclear accountabilities.

It's not clear who is responsible or accountable for the activity. Many meetings but no one takes responsibility.

3.         Unclear delegation.

It's not clear who can make the decision or it needs executive approval and therefore this is a formal process that takes time (6-8 weeks).

4.         Leadership team unable to make a decision.

They go around in circles on the pros and cons before making a decision - sometimes a decision is ever made. Making no decision is worse than making the wrong decisions.

I don't believe there needs to be a crisis to speed up businesses.

Survival and competitive positioning rely on speed and therefore every company needs to consider how they increase their speed. Consider what is slowing your company down and what changes are required to speed it up and the benefits.

Reflect, reset and charge -- take charge in leading your company to increase the speed across all aspects. What are you waiting for? Time is money!!

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Looking to reset your own strategic priorities and make some change in your organisation? Let us help.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes. We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Measure what matters

It seems simple and makes sense but many companies struggle to track and measure their financial and strategic performance.

At the beginning of the year, as you reset your priorities post covid-19, it is imperative that you understand the following:

•          Lead indicators of financial health

•          Key measures that are aligned to your strategic priorities

•          Targets for your key measures

•          Accountabilities for the key metrics

•          Investment required for each metric

•          How each metric feeds into the financials of the company

Having a weekly scorecard that measures your top 10-15 metrics is critical. When metrics are off target having clear accountability for someone to build a plan to address and reset expectations and understand impact on the financials.  

A very simple scorecard is a very useful tool to drive the right focus across the company. If you have too many metrics, you will lose your focus on the ones that are most critical.

Example metrics:

It is important to use a simple format that calls out variances to targets or prior comparative period. See below example.

A weekly / fortnight meeting to walk through metrics with actions and follow ups is critical to driving the right behaviour. Performance reviews and incentives should be aligned with these metrics to drive the desired strategic/financial results.

At the beginning of 2023 make sure you spend time getting this right. If you need help please reach out to us, we have a lot of experience with building metrics scorecards for companies and help drive accountability across the leadership team.

I believe driver trees are critical to determining your key metrics – please check out our recent article on driver trees here.

Change isn’t easy, our guide to successfully navigate change

Change is not easy.  There are so many leadership books around change. Leading people through change, the change curve etc stories to tell people, videos to get people engaged and management courses on how to navigate it but change is a strange thing…

There is a natural resistant to change – more often than not people will put up a wall in relation to change – there are so many reasons not to change, to not do thing differently but above all else change takes effort and courageous and most people don’t want to make the extra effort or be courageous enough.

This explains why 70% of organisations fail to executive change.  They have the plan and strategy and it all makes sense but can’t make the change.  This is a major issue, cost and reason for poor financial / commercial outcomes for businesses, so what is the secret?

Strong leadership that explains the why and takes people on the journey to deliver.  A mandate to make change in the organisation is required from the senior leaders / shareholders otherwise it will fail.  Having strong leaders that understand the why and how and work with the team in the trenches to drive champion celebrate and push the change. 

It’s not easy  - it takes tenacity and persistent to continue to make changes to the organisation.  If you are doing it right there will be resistant and push back and barriers for you to keep going – you then know you are on the right track.  Find some people that support the change and can help champion with you to provide support.

Looking Back…

Looking back it’s the time in my career when I have overcome and adversity and made change despite the naysayers that I am most proud of the outcome.  Delivering outcomes for businesses is what I love – making a different to commercial model and financial outcomes is my number 1 passion.  There is such an opportunity to make a difference for businesses especially post COVID but having the courage to do this is critical.

What are the key things you should consider when making change:

• Having support at the senior level for the change

• Being clear on the why and communicating this

• Getting people to see the greater good of the work that needs to get done

• Track and measure the outcome

• Hold people to account

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Looking to reset your own strategic priorities and make some change in your organisation? Let us help.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes. We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Measuring transformation success

We know it’s cliché, but “what gets measured, gets managed”. A transformation program is undertaken to enhance an organisations performance and boost its health; it is fundamental to the success of your transformation that you measure your progress along the way.

The following checklist can be used as a guide for measuring the success of your transformation program:

Define Success

Agree on what success is for your transformation program. This is something you would have agreed early in the strategic planning phase.

KPI Scorecard

Define the key metrics that are crucial to evaluating the transformation’s success and build a scorecard. Use a combination of lead and lag indicators and qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Baseline

It is fundamental that you have a baseline for all your metrics prior to commencing your transformation program. This will allow you to understand the true impact the transformation is having on your organisation. You need to be able to see the movement on your scorecard.

Pivot

Incorporating leading indicators will help detect any challenges or risks early on and allow you to pivot in order to influence a more positive result for your transformation’s success.

Frequency

It is critical that your scorecard is refreshed at a reasonable frequency to monitor the movement relative to the effort/changes being executed.

Need to curate your own transformation checklist, specific to your business needs? Let us help.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations. Focused on delivering both commercial and financial outcomes. 

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

This pandemic has changed the way we serve our customers for ever; or has it?

Is that the sound of the end of the night out at the movies? Will any of us ever dare dream of heading to the gym again? Listening to the doom and gloom in this unprecedented time would have us believe that we are witnessing the end of any type of physical engagement with products or services?

The question is that whilst at this moment, customer experience might be suspended do you care enough to start transforming your customers now so that you don’t disconnect in this period of hiatus?

Sometime in recent years it became the height of modernity to have strangers sleep in your bed when you weren’t there or to sit next to you as you drove from one city to another. It felt futuristic to mention that the gym you went to was because you had a membership that allowed you to go anywhere, anytime. It was cool to catch a movie with your partner, order the meal online and be wined and dined in-front of the big screen. This movement was called the sharing economy and it relied upon certain widely held assumptions, such as that it is fine to be near other people and that it is alright to touch what they have touched what they touched, it was also enabled by clever technology and customer experience strategies.

In this age of pandemic anxiety, these assumptions have all but evaporated. The sharing, or peer-to-peer, economy was meant to represent the commerce of the future, the perfect fusion of technology and reality. That destiny now looks shaky at best. What will happen to Fitness First, to the Gold class movie experience, dating apps? What will become of the start-ups enabling us to monetise our health, our travel, our spare time? And, beyond the brands themselves, what will happen to the people who were making some or all of their income from these platforms?

Is life as we know it, over?

Given we have moved beyond bunkering in to wondering what we should do to safeguard tomorrow?

The immediate future for most businesses will surely involve some kind of grey area between house arrest and a version of pre-pandemic freedom. Lockdowns and physical distancing will be escalated and de-escalated by the government like the gears in a car.

Some businesses might suffer greatly in full lockdown but then thrive when movement is even slightly freer if they chose to face into their reality now and see this as an opportunity to improve or transform to tomorrow. I believe that when we open up, demand will be robust because people will be overjoyed to be liberated and if they can afford it, will indulge.

Most expect there to be a post-pandemic behavioural shift. We can expect for example that there will be a new normal around physical distancing. Employees I’m certain will be eager to return to work, but there will need to be a rethink of the workplace and of engagement to incorporate working from home and working from the office.

We will most certainly go back to the gym, maybe even venture out to dinner or to the movies but that too will be different, it will be defined by a new normal one that business must create and start engaging their customers on today. It will be defined by those who have a clear strategy for speaking to their customers now, sharing with them their thoughts and listening to the hopes and dreams of those they serve.

In order to assess the future of your business, it’s worth reflecting on the customers you serve and what might change for them?

The truth is that the future is likely to change in terms of the way we engage, our customers priorities might shift or their needs may be slightly different?

Make no mistake, the value shift towards an even more customer centric and   social consciousness will only continue – and part of that is a big vote for the value your organisation places on the customer versus your own needs. The idea that this is the way we’ve done and it’s the way we’ll always do it was radically shifted forever when we pivoted to the sharing economy. Who would have ever dreamed that I could book my car as I was having my coffee and not worry about trying to hail a cab? By providing customers with communications and strategies on how your organisation intends to serve their needs post this pandemic is something you should be working on now.

It’s always been about the customer right, that’s what we all tell ourselves and now that in some industries we are in a position that we can’t serve them we’ve stopped leveraging the time we have to continue talking to them, or have we?

Whatever happens with this pandemic, however long it takes to get to a better place, the sheer force of the technologies that are available to everyone will ensure that those who have a clear line of sight of their customers will most definitely be ready to go again.

It’s conceivable that the new world order may be different, however be clear that most of the underlying principles around customer experience will remain the same.

If nothing else, make this the moment that belongs to someone else, the customers you serve?

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Looking to build your own Go To Market strategy?

Let us help. To learn more about how to build a go-to-market strategy for your customers, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au