Organisational Culture Change

Make the culture ambition specific

A statement such as becoming more collaborative is too broad to guide action on its own. Describe what collaboration would look like in the situations that matter. That might mean involving colleagues before a decision, agreeing ownership at a handover or sharing information early enough for others to act.

The CIPD’s factsheet on organisational climate and culture recommends focusing on the policies, practices and procedures employees experience. This gives organisations more tangible opportunities for change than relying on an abstract description of culture.

Our recommendation is to choose a small number of situations where the current way of working creates a clear problem. Link each one to a behaviour and to the organisational conditions that make that behaviour possible.

Read the CIPD organisational climate and culture factsheet

Diagnose the experience people actually have

Combine employee feedback with operational and people data. Surveys can identify patterns; interviews and focus groups can help explain them. Review how experiences differ across teams, locations, roles and levels rather than assuming one organisation-wide average tells the whole story.

Look at decisions, performance conversations, progression, meetings and how concerns are handled. Ask people for recent examples. A value such as respect becomes easier to examine when you understand what happens when someone disagrees or raises a problem.

Treat data as evidence to interpret. Turnover or grievances may indicate an issue worth exploring, but they do not establish its cause. Protect confidentiality, explain how information will be used and give people a credible way to contribute.

Find what reinforces the current behaviour

People respond to the conditions in which they work. Review incentives, targets, decision rights, workload and the behaviour senior leaders reward. A request for teamwork will struggle if recognition goes only to individual results.

Consider informal signals as well as formal policy. Who gets heard in a meeting? What happens when a deadline is challenged? Are difficult issues addressed consistently? These experiences help explain which behaviours people learn to repeat.

Avoid making managers solely responsible for a culture problem created by the organisation. Managers need clear expectations and development, while senior leaders need to address systems that encourage the opposite behaviour.

Translate values into working practices

Choose practical changes that people can apply. If meetings exclude relevant voices, change how input is gathered and decisions are made. If performance standards are inconsistent, clarify expectations and review how managers apply them.

Work with people affected by the change. Test the practice in a defined area, gather feedback and adjust it before scaling. Keep what already works rather than assuming every existing habit needs to be replaced.

Provide managers with the skills and support to handle the new expectations. Explaining a policy is different from helping a manager apply it during a difficult conversation or under delivery pressure.

Show leadership commitment through decisions

Leaders need to demonstrate the behaviour they ask others to adopt. That includes how they receive challenge, explain trade-offs and respond when the desired standard is missed. Consistency matters particularly when the decision is uncomfortable.

Give the work an accountable owner and a realistic review rhythm. Employees should understand what is changing, why it matters and how they can raise problems. Share progress in terms of actual changes to working practices.

A campaign can introduce the ambition. The continuing work is to align decisions, expectations and systems so that the behaviour becomes credible in everyday experience.

Measure change at the level of behaviour

Agree a baseline and repeat questions about specific experiences. If the priority is speaking up, ask whether people can raise a concern and what happens afterwards. If the priority is fairness in performance conversations, examine clarity of expectations and consistency of treatment.

Use relevant operational measures alongside feedback, with attention to context. Look for patterns across several sources and investigate differences. Do not declare culture change complete because a launch event was well attended or a survey score moved once.

How Enolla supports organisational culture change

Enolla combines consulting, analytics and strategy, and learning solutions. Quantitative data can help identify trends and gaps, while qualitative work explores the experiences and practices behind them.

We connect cultural priorities to leadership behaviour and organisational performance. Practical development can support managers to apply new expectations, while consulting helps examine the conditions around them.

The starting point is a clear conversation about the culture problem, the business consequences and the evidence available. That gives the work a purpose people can understand and a basis for reviewing progress.

Frequently asked questions