The Way Cultural Changes in the Workplace Can Grow Your Business
What Is Culture Change in the Workplace?
Corporate culture is a set of values and rules that are adhered to when making certain decisions in different situations. Every business has its own set of unwritten rules that determine the atmosphere in the office, workers’ behavior in everyday situations, rituals like morning tea, discussing the latest news, or playing Power Stars.
With the development of the Internet and social networks and globalization being the most crucial culture change factors, culture change in the workplace is inevitable.
Culture Change and Business Development
It is hard to argue that culture change grows your business. The most significant characteristics of corporate culture include the employee’s awareness of his place in the company, communication, business etiquette, company traditions, and work ethics. If culture change management is done correctly, the business will skyrocket to the next level.
If you want to create better conditions for your business to grow, you must clearly determine future culture change goals. Once you understand your company’s culture better, you can find a solution in any situation.
Cultural change in your company directly depends on the people in it. If you want to change the culture, you will need to convince people, especially the right people. What do we mean by the right people? These are often the people who best represent the team spirit or those who realized that the team needed to move in a new direction and facilitate culture change at work. To do so, you will need to create a team to move in a new direction. You will need one or two formal and informal leaders to support and lead change actively.
The Inside of the Corporate Change
The most common center of power of any company is the CEO’s office. It is the place where the most important financial and structural issues are solved. Ideally, any significant change initiative should come from this level of corporate influence, but this is not always the case. However, you will always require the support of this executive branch. You can enjoy the benefits of culture change only if you have the support of senior management.
Once you have identified the core forces, you will need to identify the formal and informal leaders and start getting support for the change you want to see. It’s helpful to think about what is important to the people you want to influence. Cultural change management is crucial because it defines the direction and the future success (or failure) of your business.
However, the culture change plan will not be successful if it is not properly presented to all company members. To do this, you need to communicate in a clear, consistent, and transparent way. By clarity, we mean that everyone must understand the plan in its simplest form, what exactly is changing, how it will be implemented, and what their roles are.
Most businesses have departments that specialize in communications, and they usually fall into two areas — internal communications and external communications.
Internal communications’ ultimate goal is to share the information within the company of workers in different departments and is usually done with the help of management meetings, presentations, and newsletters. The important thing is to transmit culture change messages in a clear, consistent, and transparent way.
External communications consist of two branches of information transfer: relations with the media or press and relations with investors.
As culture changes take place, social media also does its job. It is pretty standard for employees to share internal company information on social media, which cannot be prevented. That is why internal communications are so sensitive.
One of the greatest difficulties to culture change at work is people’s views and beliefs. Our views are shaped by our experiences over time, and it is hard to change them completely or even slightly modify them. Most people like to think they are right most of the time and assume that their beliefs are always accurate. Therefore, only strong evidence will be able to change your workers’ views.
Culture change is one of the few ways to make the future of your business bright and prosperous. You need to make sure the plan of action is long-lasting and consistent. Think about where you would like to go and how you plan to get there, weigh all the pros and cons of your plan, and start to implement it to grow your business.
Conclusion
One of the biggest challenges for businesses maintaining a new culture is a short-term strategy. Most companies “live” from quarter to quarter when they report their financial results and are not interested in what is inside the company. When the result is less than expected, many companies abandon their strategy and new culture, which puts them back to square one.
If you want to grow your business, you must bring your culture changes to perfection and maintain them. It might seem complicated to organize people and change their beliefs, but if you give them solid evidence, the result will be more than perfect. Think about how to involve your team in the process and contribute to it yourself to gain the authority and credibility of the leader
Author’s bio: Chris Delgado has been running a successful business for over a decade and knows everything about how to adjust cultural changes in the workplace to make the business prosper. In his spare time, he likes to travel, yoga sessions.
