Developing a Behaviour-based Corporate Culture.
Much has been written, tried and tested in the field of Culture Development on a corporate level. But what remains obvious is that every company will develop a culture - whether it is by design or by default. So much so that a client I've worked with stated that one of their core values was "honour amongst thieves". This was a new Executive at the company. He replaced the Financial Director who was fired for fraud. He'd only been with the company for a couple of weeks. This company has since rolled out the Behaviour-based Culture Development programme and re-invented itself.
Particularly in South Africa, where we are faced with several global as well as uniquely South African challenges when looking to instill an effective corporate culture in our companies. These challenges include:
• Cultural Diversity
• The number of young professionals entering the workforce
• Fast growth, particularly in the FMCG, Construction and Services industries
• Unionisation of the SA workforce
• Global Economic Crisis
• Growing uncertainty relating to job security
• A lack of understanding how to create a connection between personal motivators and company goals, and
• How to create a sustainable culture that is driven by behaviours.
In response to this, Erik Vermeulen has developed a process-based model that allows for the creation of a culture that “gets off the wall” and into very employee’s day-to-day behaviour. This process allows for both management and employee input and takes into account personal as well as company goals. It allows us to create a set of value-driven behaviours that makes people at all levels of the organisation accountable for their actions. Only the correct behaviours will lead to the employees and the company achieving their goals!
For the most part, these types of programmes have remained ineffective because employees are seldom part of the process and cannot see the new "culture" translating into sustainable behaviours.
Besides this, from a personal psychological point of view, people will only engage in behaviours if they get a personal reward from it.
Behaviours that shape a culture will always be born from a perspective of meeting personal goals before company goals. Thus this model marries corporate goals with personal goals, and uses the resultant behaviours to bridge the gap between Values and Goals.
Once behaviours are clearly defined, on purpose and not by default, they can be built into performance appraisal processes and monitored.
