Is your organisation talking a good game when it comes to culture?

Culture is still something that senior managers love to talk about, but also avoid investing in. It’s an interesting dichotomy. They want high performance and results… for next to no money or time investment.

HR and People leaders continually scrabble around trying to create learning programs that provide the best chance of success, but that ultimately fail to hit the mark. Principally because it’s only through intentional cultural design, building a different set of management skills, accountability and continual evolution that high performance can be achieved and targets met.

Put simply, when time and effort is spent developing the conditions by which people can work together in pursuit of a set of goals, organisations see significant increases in engagement, productivity, sales, profitability and also a reduction in physical and mental health issues.

The highest performing ‘Best Places to Work’ cultures last year saw an average profit increase of almost 30%. These organisations invest 1-2% of revenue purely on building culture making skills and investing in culture evolution programs.

The leaders of these organisations don’t just talk about culture, they value it and recognise that creating the conditions where humans can do their best work is beneficial for all.

Without this investment, the culture will naturally evolve and, in my experience of working with global teams, it’s almost always negative.

There is an incredible amount of value and potential within every organisation and it is available almost immediately. However, without leaders investing in the culture-making capabilities of managers this opportunity will be lost.

Does your organisation value culture or is it merely talking a good game?