Keeping culture front of mind
If you’ve not yet read my new book ‘How do we create great cultures?’ you can download your copy here. As well as understanding what great culture looks like, you’ll learn how to start building yours, using this four step process:
1 Awareness – what values and behaviours are currently driving your business?
2 Agreement – what values and behaviours will steer it towards the future you want?
3 Application – how can you embed the values and behaviours into all business interactions?
4 Alignment – what processes will keep the values and behaviours front of mind?
The alignment phase is often the hardest one as it requires leaders to keep the culture front of mind when making decisions about what they do each day. Rather than leading through short term reactive thinking, conscious leaders use their values to inform how they think, speak and act. My book explains more about this.
Always seeking new ways to support my clients to build alignment, I became intrigued about a new culture tech platform one of my associates told me about in 2017, called Teamgage. So I reached out to Richard Wortley, to learn how leaders can use this tool to quickly and effectively build cultural alignment in their teams. I was impressed with what he showed me and in particular, how they have completely rethought the annual engagement survey, (which if we’re 100% honest was getting tired) and updated it.
Instead of an annual set of culture results, which are scrutinized for one week every year, then put in the bottom drawer and forgotten about, Teamgage have upped the game. This cloud based platform gives team leaders, HR directors and CEOs a real time dashboard of how their people are experiencing the culture. Teams are empowered to own and manage their progress based on feedback and trending from monthly 20 second submissions. This finally embeds cultural improvement within existing business processes while creating a working dashboard of the culture, in real time. Very neat!
And these clever folks at teamgage have gone one step further including task management functionality; agreed improvement actions can be assigned within the team to support local team culture and productivity. It seems my plan to go paperless with my clients this year, just got one step closer! I’m excited to be collaborating with this Adelaide based business, that is expanding globally and would love to get you connected with Richard to give you a demo of their kit. As an Outsourced Culture Director, working in collaboration with Teamgage, I am excited to see where we can all take this.
Richard is in Sydney on August 21st. If you’re interested in meeting us both, to experience the technology, drop me a line and let’s share a coffee and talk alignment.
