How to have Employees be more Creative for Continuous Improvement

How to Build a Collaborative Culture

There are plenty of enterprise collaboration tools to get work done better and faster. But are we optimizing the use of those tools to make collaboration the best it can possibly be?

“A little bit of culture change can go a very long way — and you don't have to tackle the entire organizational culture or its myriad of potential sub-cultures,” Jed Cawthorne told us this month. “You should not shy away from small, incremental changes that can potentially make a big difference.”

So what should you do?

The Question

How do you build a collaborative workplace culture?

The Answers

Michael Fitzpatrick, CEO, ConnectSolutions

Fitzpatrick is CEO and founder of ConnectSolutions, a private-cloud solutions provider for Microsoft Skype for Business and Adobe Connect. With more than 13 years of experience in software and technology development, Fitzpatrick has built a track record in enterprise and government solutions. Tweet to Michael Fitzpatrick.

At CoSo, we believe high-quality experiences with collaboration, communication and learning solutions can dramatically improve the worker’s ability to support the goals of the organization.

But a truly collaborative culture can’t be achieved without carefully tuning your technology, people and processes so that they’re in perfect alignment with each other.

You can tell your people to work together, but you can’t create a truly collaborative workplace culture if you don’t provide them with the tools they need to work together — especially with the growing reliance on dispersed workforces and teleworking.

For a time, this was a tough task as the enterprise was flooded with personal tech that served the user’s needs but tended to fragment collaboration within the team at large. But unified communications has since evolved from the deployment of disparate tools to platforms designed to serve all in a seamless and standardized way.

Now, we can support more collaborative work environments by embedding UC into the organization’s business process workflows, creating frictionless communication that threads email, instant messaging, voice over internet protocol and video collaboration through the very apps and documents that people work with every day.

The work environment becomes more flexible.

Collaboration for workers becomes, once again, a human task that isn't disrupted by the very technology that's supposed to enable it.

Of course, the workforce must also be primed to support collaboration in the enterprise. This means ensuring everyone from on-site workers to mobile teams and freelancers is participating and that the desired collaborative behavior is being exemplified at the C-level.

It means working with HR to create best practices, prioritizing cooperation in the hiring process and creating clearly defined roles. Once your technology, people and process are in sync, a truly collaborative environment will take hold.

Sameer Patel, GM and SVP, SAP

Patel is GM and senior vice president of product management and go-to-market at SAP Cloud/SuccessFactors. Before SAP, he lead enterprise technology teams in the consulting and systems integrator business, where he focused on designing and executing customer, employee and partner networks and associated applications. Customers have included Intel, Nike, CA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, XO Communications, Symex, McKesson, Wrigley and others.Tweet to Sameer Patel.

You start by throwing out all the nebulous metrics such as sharing and productivity that don’t matter to most executives or aren’t easily measurable by employees.

What does matter to executives and most employees is executing their individual and team mission and charter. And if you can channel the benefits of collaboration to executing those objectives better and faster, the basis for a collaborative culture emerges in a much more organic and natural way.

To start, identify two to three functional areas where the cost of not collaborating on a given business activity is terribly obvious.

Examples are selling or supporting customers, on-boarding new employees, developing product or coordinating hundreds of vendors across your supply chain. Such tasks have established key performance indicators that everyone is already swimming toward and innately require collective output.

It becomes readily apparent to everyone that a collaborative culture around tangible functional processes can be an indispensible enabler to meeting core performance goals.

Deidre Paknad, CEO, Workboard

Paknad shapes Workboard’s product strategy, customer engagement model and thought leadership efforts. She said she is passionate about providing tools and insights that help leaders engage their teams in great achievement. At IBM, she was vice president of a global business and worked to improve information economics for enterprise customers. She has been recognized by the Smithsonian for innovation twice and has more than a dozen patents. Tweet to Deidre Paknad.

How team leaders and executives listen and engage has a huge impact. People hear what we say and may miss what we mean, so leaders’ words invite or crush engagement.

Start with "yes" to get ideas and information to flow. Show people you’re open to their ideas, facts and input. You shut things down when your first answer is no — “no, we can’t do that” or “no, we don’t have the budget.”

While there are instances where there is no budget, the instant “no” can be more habit than fact. When people anticipate a “no”, they avoid bringing forward information or ideas altogether. As Tina Fey says, “start with yes and see where that takes you.”

Secondly, assume AND rather than OR to improve collaborative decisions. Sometimes in conversations people assume each new idea supersedes or displaces those expressed before it — my idea or yours, one option or the other when in fact it’s my idea and yours, one option and another.

Without realizing it, we pit ideas against each other and shut down consideration of additive ideas. This wastes time on false debates. Growth requires more than one idea, market segment, revenue source, and initiative so the false competition undermines collaboration, culture and profit.

Finally, Ask "why" to signal and ensure you heard. It signals authentic engagement and provides people with an opportunity to share logic so you genuinely understand. It also gives you pause to consider the idea’s merits before moving on, to frame your “yes and” response, add another “why” or provide a well-considered “no.”

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t take more management time to be an authentic listener than it does to resolve false debates, dig for facts that people don’t want to share or recover from decisions that were ill informed.

Guy Nirpaz, CEO, Totango

Nirpaz is the CEO and co-founder at Totango, a customer success and user engagement management platform. Before starting Totango, he focused on real time big data as EVP of engineering at GigaSpaces and was chief architect at Mercury. Nirpaz said he's driven by the possibilities technology offers to improve the way people do business. Tweet to Guy Nirpaz.

Culture is about people, motivations, successes and frustrations. The first rule of collaborative culture is making sure the company acts as a team and that the mission and goals are all collaborative. We succeed and fail together as a team.

It starts with hiring people that are not only excellent at what they do, but people that are comfortable to work as a team. Sometimes very talented people are not hired due to massive ego.

A good smelling sign to recognize it is when they are being asked about their previous company, you get the sense that they were the stars while everyone else was completely useless.

The second part is to foster collaboration. This is first and foremost the role of the executive team. As a start the executive team needs to demonstrate characteristics of collaboration. You know that you're not there when fingers are started to be pointed out when stakes are high.

Beyond that the executive team should continuously figure out ways to communicate the joint goals, and actively take part at conflict resolution by always pointing out the joint goals and missions and how those should be interpreted in this case.

Anthony Smith, CEO, Insightly

Smith is CEO of Insightly, a San Francisco-based SaaS CRM application. Before Insightly, he was a consultant for IBM and a software engineer for global-mining consultancy Snowden. Tweet to Anthony Smith.

Building a collaborative culture starts with identifying your company’s core values, like clear and frequent communication, and then establishing those right off the bat. At Insightly, we want our employees to have a healthy balance between work and their personal lives so we offer flexible hours and work locations.

Everyone still works at least 40 hours a week, but many employees are remote or choose hours outside the typical working day. One big challenge that comes with implementing a remote-workforce program is making sure that employees are collaborating just as much as they would if they sat next to each other.

To maintain constant communication and collaboration between team members, provide remote employees with extra services that help to ensure that they are clued in on everything that’s going on in the company.

Beyond the day-to-day tasks, fly in remote employees every quarter to encourage team bonding. And when we first hire a new employee, we have them spend a week at company headquarters so they can become acquainted with co-workers, attend in-person training meetings and familiarize themselves with business processes. This helps to ease them in and move them toward the end goal of becoming completely ingrained in the team.

Title image by Asa Aarons Smith/all rights reserved.

SOURCE: CMSWiRE

Customer Experience Management: 10 Best Practices to Create Real Business Value

I was speaking at a Customer Experience conference recently and was asked by one of the delegates “So what comes after CEM?” We have grown up on a diet of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) first being exhorted to embrace TQM, then BPR, through CRM, CMR and now CEM (Customer Experience Management), so it seems perfectly reasonable to ask about the NBT (Next Big Thing!).

But to do so runs the risk that CEM will follow a path of being a fad rather than a sustainable route to achieving competitive advantage and customer growth. My answer was that I don’t believe there will be a “next big thing,” rather we will find more rigorous ways of implementing CEM across new channels and employing innovative new ways to satisfy customers. I can’t conceive of a time when customers or what they experience will ever become obsolete.

CEM has become well established in the US and UK markets and is becoming increasingly a “hot” topic in the newer emerging markets. Unfortunately with so many consultancies jumping on the CE bandwagon it is not always implemented with the level of rigor needed to achieve significant business results.

We hypothesised in Smith+co that the newer European markets would follow a similar trajectory as their US and UK counterparts along a path of awareness, enthusiasm, adoption and finally, for some, disillusionment. But could we share the lessons of successful implementations to increase the probability of success of CEM in these markets?

To answer these questions we decided to conduct research in the Polish market in early 2008 with our local partners, Executive Conversation Polska to find out the level of awareness, enthusiasm and the current status of implementation of CEM. We used a number of dimensions identified in our book Managing the Customer Experience. In this article we shall share our findings, but more importantly, some of the lessons we have learned in working with organisations world-wide to implement CEM successfully.

We hope to encourage executives in some of the newer markets to implement best practice and for their US and UK colleagues to focus on what we already know about CEM rather than look for the next silver bullet.

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership

Execution is the hardest part of creating a customer experience because in order to deploy successfully we have to mobilise employees at all levels and align competing agendas, functions and executives. This is no easy task. Perhaps that is why that so many of the exemplars of Customer Experience tend to be organisations led by passionate founders or CEOs that see it as a primary source of differentiation. Think of Starbucks, Amazon, Southwest Airlines or Virgin and inevitably you quickly think of Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, Herb Kelleher and Richard Branson. CEM can work just as successfully and achieve startling results in large mature corporates too; but the need for leadership is even greater.

Many of the exemplars of Customer Experience tend to be organisations led by passionate founders or CEOs that see it as a primary source of differentiation.

Leadership is vital for any significant organisational change yet, as we concluded in our book Uncommon Practice: People who deliver a great brand experience—most leaders “stumble the mumble” rather than “walk the talk.” They fail to clearly communicate its importance to the organisation and then fail to take decisive action to demonstrate that it is high on the management agenda.

Our survey in the Polish market revealed some interesting perspectives in this regard. For example, 63 percent of the senior management respondents in our survey agreed with the statement ”Leaders make decisions that are consistent with our customer experience strategy” yet only 41 percent of their non-management colleagues agreed with them: This matters. No matter how committed to customer experience you feel it is what you do that counts. We found the highest correlation in the survey between those respondents agreeing with the statement just mentioned and “Our company’s top executives demonstrate their commitment to our customer experience strategy.”

Our experience has shown, time and time again, that the most significant factor in creating strong companies are leaders who take personal responsibility for communicating, demonstrating and rewarding brand or company values. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos says “Our mission is to be the earth’s most customer-centric company.” Jeff Bezos and his executive team personally demonstrate their commitment to this mission through their actions and decisions and in the process have created an enviable reputation for reliability and one of the most widely recognised brands in the world today. Amazon reports one of the highest Net Promoter Scores (highly satisfied customers) we have seen.

2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital

If the CEO or President recognises that it will take more than rhetoric to make a difference, the next common mistake is asking the Marketing VP, HR Director or Customer Service Executive to “fix the problem.” The brand and the customer experience must be owned collectively by the senior management team. Each function has its particular part to play, but to be successful these three functions must operate as what we refer to as a “Triad” to optimise resources, efforts and budgets to create an organisation-wide strategy for delivering the brand.

Our research found a strong positive correlation between the statement “We have created a partnership between marketing, HR and Operations to define and deliver the customer experience” and another survey item “Our leaders have been trained as champions of our customer experience and are leading its implementation.” When we work with clients on CEM projects, one of our first actions is to form a Steering Group comprising executives from marketing, operations or customer services and HR. One of the first meetings with this group is to educate them on what it means to lead this kind of change effort. The fact is that the experience you deliver is a result of these functions working together around a common agenda. Unfortunately, in many companies the effort is fragmented and often beset with politics.

3. Focusing on your most strategically important customers

The starting point for our work is collecting customer data to inform the definition of a promise and design the new experience. The most frequent client response to this suggestion is “We already have lots of customer data and research so you don’t need to bother.” In reality whilst organisations undertake customer research and collect mountains of data, relatively few know who their most profitable (not largest) customers are. The fact is that a few customers will typically represent the significant proportion of your profit and these are the ones to focus improvement efforts on.

Harrah’s, the US-based entertainment and gaming company, found that 82 percent of its profits came from just 26 percent of its customers and yet it only enjoyed 36 percent of their spend. However, when these customers were very satisfied their average spend with Harrah’s increased by 24 percent. By focusing on this target segment Harrah’s was able to fine-tune its offer to create greater value for these profitable customers. In the year following revenues increased by 17 percent.

This would seem to be an area where companies in Poland too feel on strong ground because over 75 percent of executives agreed with the statement “We have identified our most profitable customers” however, only 52 percent feel that they are clear about how these customers rate their experience on the things that are most important to them.

4. Finding out what these customers truly value

Knowing who are your most profitable customers is all very well, but if you do not know what these customers value and the three or four most important attributes which drive their intention to repurchase you cannot influence their behaviour. Without the answers to these questions you may have data, but you do not have insight. A key component of a branded customer experience is being differentiated in a way that is valuable to target customers.

A key component of a branded customer experience is being differentiated in a way that is valuable to target customers.

At Harrah’s, the gaming experience was redesigned to increase customer satisfaction and differentiate the brand. So for example, its Total Gold loyalty program was transformed into “Total Rewards,” which segmented customers into Gold, Platinum and Diamond categories, depending on their loyalty to Harrah’s. Harrah’s executives discovered that delays at reception were a turn-off for customers, so Gold customers benefit from fast-track lines; Platinum customers have shorter lines still; and Diamond customers have no lines at all. Harrah’s share of these customers spend rose significantly.

5. Being clear about what you stand for

In 2001, UK-based bank Barclays aired a television advertisement called “Big Idea.” It was a beautifully crafted ad featuring Anthony Hopkins as a big shot businessman with a big house, a big car and a big meeting to attend. The tagline was, “A big world needs a big bank.” The ad received a bronze award at that year’s British Television Advertising Awards, but customers replied with a less than enthusiastic, “big deal!” The ad simply reinforced common customer pre-conceptions about large banks: that they don’t care about the average person and are interested only in making as much money as they can.

Contrast this with First Direct, the online U.K. bank. Executives at First Direct spoke to their most loyal customers and asked them what they liked most about the bank. Their research identified that being able to engage with a real person was an important driver of satisfaction. As a result, First Direct’s advertising agency created ads that featured customers speaking of their experience calling First Direct and getting through to a real person, any time of day or night. The engaging message and apparent empathy struck a chord with target customers.

First Direct promises to be the bank that is “designed to fit around you, not us.” It’s no accident that First Direct claims to win a new customer every 8 seconds and is the UK’s highest rated bank. Or, that 36 percent of its new customers join as a result of a personal referral. First Direct’s customers have become the bank’s biggest advocates, reducing its costs of sale and increasing its share of these customers’ spend.

In the Polish market, 55 percent of executives feel that they have “defined a brand promise that differentiates us in the eyes of our target customers” but only 35 percent “have mapped our customer touchline to determine the key points of contact our customers have with us and how our promise should be delivered at each.” This omission is quite common in our experience and takes us on to our next point. Making a promise to your customers is one thing, delivering it quite another.

6. Delivering the promise at every touch point

In response to the statement “We have identified how to improve our services and processes to deliver our customer promise in a way that is consistently valuable to target customers,” 41 percent of executives agreed achieving a mean score of 5.8 on the ten point scale—indicating that this is a significant opportunity for many organisations. Without a rigorous process for mapping the customer touchline and designing the experience to deliver the promise the danger is that an expectation will be raised that you cannot deliver.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Chairman of easyGroup and founder of easyJet, makes this clear by saying: “You can spend £15m on advertising, go bankrupt and your name can still mean nothing to people. Your brand is created out of customer contact and the experience your customers have of you”

This is particularly true in today’s economy. With the pressure on sales and costs you have to make sure that every effort is made delivering those things that customers value rather than things that they don’t. This means having an intimate understanding of the customer experience and being intentional about designing it to deliver value at the key touch-points

7. Providing branded training to ensure that employees understand the brand story

Many organisations provide customer service training yet few are differentiated in the service they provide. The reason is that “vanilla” training creates “vanilla” service. This is not to say that all generic service training is bad. In fact there are some very good off-the-shelf programmes that really help to improve customer-facing skills and make service more consistent.

But if your goal is to differentiate from competitors, “branded training” is required to bring to life the values of your brand in a way that is consistent, intentional, differentiated and valuable. Most importantly it has to start at the top. Some years ago, Orange, the mobile phone company launched its famous campaign “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange.” The company wanted to differentiate on the basis of the customer experience rather than product functionality or price. As a result, it launched a series of road-shows that set out to bring the brand to life for employees. They were taught the profiles of their target customers, what these consumers wanted, the brand values and the kind of experience that would deliver them. Orange redefined the mobile phone market and opened it up to many new consumers who were intimidated by the new technology.

A key ingredient of successful branded training is to build executives into the process so that they have an active role in cascading the message. This is an approach we have used very successfully in a number of our engagements. This would seem to be true in the Polish market too because we found a high correlation between satisfaction with training and the statements, “We have continuing internal communications to build clarity and commitment around implementing the customer experience” and “Our leaders have been trained as champions of our customer experience and are leading its implementation.”

8. Designing CEM before installing CRM systems

At the peak of CRM hype, expenditure on CRM systems was estimated to have increased from $20 billion in 2001 to $46 billion in 2004. Yet one survey by Gartner research estimated that 55 percent of CRM systems drove customers away and diluted earnings.

This is because most CRM systems are installed without any thought about how they will be used to add value for the customer. These powerful systems allow companies to collect knowledge about the customer that can be used to offer them products and services tuned to their particular needs and preferences. However, for many customers the acronym CRM stands for “Constantly Receiving Mail-shots” since many organisations (and banks are the worst) use them as a blunt instrument to stalk, rather than woo, the customer through junk mail. Some software providers are now designing their products to support the customer experience and build CEM functionality into their call-centre products so that the agent is provided with all the information, tools and measures necessary to deliver the desired experience.

Gartner Research Group VP Ed Thompson speaking at a 2008 CRM Summit in London said “In terms of the user experience, perhaps only 4 percent of customers can demonstrate a genuine return on investment (ROI) from CRM initiatives, mainly because most companies fail to benchmark projects and real success stories tend to be anecdotal.” This takes us to our next tip for deployment.

9. Measuring the customer experience

Peter Drucker’s maxim that “what gets measured gets managed” is still true today. Yet most organisations focus exclusively on end-results measures. Market share, profitability and EPS growth are all vital measures of business performance but they are all lagging indicators—the result of differentiation, customer loyalty and brand preference. The answer is to move up-stream and measure and manage those activities that deliver the required customer experience and drive customer advocacy.

Market share, profitability and EPS growth are all vital measures of business performance but they are all lagging indicators.

Yet over 51 percent of the executives we surveyed reported that their organisation did not have a scorecard to measure the customer experience. The mean score for the statement “We have a scorecard of indicators that provide leaders with objective and timely feedback on how well we are delivering against our promise” was the lowest achieved in the survey scoring at just 4.6 on our ten-point scale.

CEO Andy Taylor and his team at US-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car only focus on one thing; the number of customers who give the highest rating for satisfaction and are willing to recommend the company to others. Frederick F. Reichheld, director emeritus of Bain & Company and author ofLoyalty Rules! calls these enthusiasts “Promoters” and by deducting the percentage of customers who say that they are unlikely to recommend he calculates a “net-promoter score.” Enterprise enjoys both the highest rate of growth and, at near 35 percent, the highest net-promoter percentage in the car-rental industry according to Reichheld.

World-class organizations like Amazon.com have net-promoter scores of 75-80 percent. Reichheld has been challenged on his “one-number” approach and some academics have doubted the Net-Promoter index as being suitable for all businesses. Our own view is that measuring customer advocacy is one of the most important, but not the only metric in a company’s customer experience scorecard. However, what is important is to reward the KPIs that you want to move. And that takes us to our last point.

10. Aligning KPIs with the customer experience

One of the lowest scoring items in our survey was “Leaders measure and monitor the quality of the customer experience.” As many respondents disagreed with this statement as agreed with it. This poor result was reinforced by the fact that only 47 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Our leaders reward employees who put customers first.” The fact is that unless there is a link between the desired business results, the customer experience necessary to achieve it and appropriate measurement and rewards then it is unlikely to happen.

We have been working with one the world’s best known luxury brands over the past year and have measured the impact of our customer experience work pre- and post-pilot and against control stores in the US, Asia and Europe. We used a concept called the “Power of One” which reduces the many complex and often conflicting KPIs to one primary success measure that the front line can influence.

In this case it was “UPT” (Units Per Transaction), a measure of the ability of the front line to cross-sell as this is a key means to drive revenue in a recession. Whilst the market may be shrinking the challenge is to grow your share of it and this is done by creating a better experience for customers so that they choose to give you their business rather than a competitor. As a result of our work in creating a brand promise, designing a new experience to deliver it, creating branded training to engage equip the front line employees with the knowledge, motivation and skills to deliver the experience and finally, aligning measurement and rewards with it, sales in pilot stores have increased by 30 percent compared with the control stores in the worst market our client has ever experienced. This programme is now being rolled out world-wide and our client has said that the only thing that will not be subject to cost cutting is this project.

The fact is that when CEM is implemented systematically it produces results. Businesses will always have to deliver an experience that creates value for their customers and differentiates them from competitors. What we don’t need is another new fad that promises results without effort- the corporate equivalent of dieting. There is no simple or magic way to lose weight or implement CEM, it comes down to commitment and being willing to implement those things that will make a difference.

SOURCE: customer THINK

Blockbuster's Business Process Management Failure

In a rapidly evolving and increasingly intense global marketplace, accurately anticipating market changes and consumer desires is paramount to maintaining longevity.

Utilizing technology to collect data, track and respond to trends and expand employee collaboration helps businesses succeed in turbulent times. To secure a competitive edge, many companies use a responsive business process management system (BPM) to help them meet profit goals.

Blockbuster’s Lesson

Some companies that enjoy great success seem to ignore the fact that the business environment will change making it necessary to adapt or be challenged.

At one time the most successful movie rental company in the marketplace, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. The rising popularity of streaming movies opened the window for Netflix to outpace Blockbuster, which remained primarily a DVD rental company despite data indicating consumer trends were driving growth in another direction.

Understanding the data available through monitoring a company’s workflow process can give indicators about what customers want and are responding to most readily.

Connecting employees in different divisions with a good business process management system can allow them to view information and create reports most applicable to their work situation. Also, providing a companywide framework for accessing and sharing data can lead to better innovation and more creative problem-solving.

When the whole company is on board in solving problems and sharing ideas, new opportunities unfold and more agility is possible.

Business Process Management Supports Resilience

Smart business executives know that in order to stay ahead of the competition they need to make business process changes that reflect consumer trends. Reading data and listening to customers are key elements of success.

When data is available as needed through centralized and easy to access processes, employees can be more responsive to market trends and customer feedback. Reducing response time when there is a customer service issue is vital in an age when consumer reviews on social media sites are important for repeat business and word-of-mouth marketing.

Investing in business process management can mean a larger return on investment when the data provides a solid basis for a good decision and when employees can be more productive and innovative.

Any technology that can assist a business in getting the strongest market trend pulse possible is worth a second look. Reviewing your company’s business process management strategy may be just what you need to shift resources more effectively.

Technology Meets Leadership

Even companies like Netflix that seem to have figured out how to optimize their business process management still learn their own lessons along the way. Communication with customers remains the key factor in maintaining trust.

When Netflix used data indicators to raise rates and rework its services, it isolated customers. The lesson for savvy business professionals is that any business process management system is only as good as a leader’s ability to interpret the data with the customer’s needs in mind.

A service change or rate increase that looks good on paper also might be received positively by customers with the proper communication in advance. Employees who work directly with customers can be surveyed about the best way to communicate change to loyal clients. In addition, having data available through cloud computing can let employees show clients directly why a change is necessary and how it can improve services.

Connecting employees through a more efficient business process management system offers businesses the potential of being more responsive to market trends, which increases their chances of outpacing the competition.

SOURCE: University of San Francisco

Process Improvement: Six Sigma & Kaizen Methodologies

The Executive Guide to Business Process Management

CREATE A CULTURE CHANGE

Driving cultural change

The hardest part of a business transformation is changing the organizational culture – the mindset and instincts of the people in the company. Organizational culture is like an iceberg, with most of its weight and bulk below the surface.

An existing culture is based on shared philosophies, ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs and attitudes. Transforming, sustaining and allowing for evolution of a culture is a complex process requiring a clearly articulated strategic aim, underpinning objectives and long term programme coordination and mobilization of resources.

So, what are the keys to CREATE a cultural change?

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CREATE

• Clarify values and organizational culture code
• Reinforce the vision and purpose – Ensure that everyone in the organization is clear on vision, values, culture code and how those elements lead to success
• Empower behaviors aligned with values, culture code and vision
• Align conversations up and down the organization
• Target effort on high impacts areas
• Emphasize success, plan for wins, celebrate change

Don’t shortcut the process of cultural change

Organizations may try to shortcut the process of cultural change by:

• Changing practices without changing values – Leaders often create new programs or policies without attempting to change the underlying beliefs that guide individual choices. Employees and supervisors who don’t believe in the change will at best not support it, and at worst undermine it.
• Confusing “espoused” values with underlying values – Leaders often develop and publish new values, but forget to work on changing employees’ beliefs about how the world works. Ignoring what’s below the surface is what will ultimately undermine organizational transformation.

Patience and persistence is required

Any cultural change involves changing the mindset and instincts of each person in the company. This does not happen overnight. So, patience and persistence is required to continue down the path for the one to three years it will often take to realize a full and complete cultural change in your organization.

SOURCE: Torben Rick

Lean and the Corporate Agenda with Guest Jacob Stoller

A Little Bit of Collaboration Culture Goes a Long Way

One of July's themes at CMSWire is
"Keys to Successful Enterprise Collaboration." Allow me to recommend
a thought-provoking article by Sam
Marshall: "Why Collaboration Works for Others, But Not for You." Here I’d like
to offer our readership a different and,
I think, more basic approach than Sam’s.

I want to look at some very basic
frameworks — the "people-process-technology" triangle and the “W5H”
— and see how we can apply them to enterprise-wide collaboration. OK, you may
ask, beyond going back to these basic levels, where do I depart from the redoubtable
Mr. Marshall? Well, let’s get this out there up front: Culture.

Sam quite rightly states he is a bit fed up with people who trot out the overly simplistic statement that to be able to collaborate (or frankly, to do anything) you have to have
the right culture. Applied specifically to the collaboration scenario, he feels it’s not
quite right to embark on massive culture change across an organization just in order
to enable better collaboration.

In many respects, I agree with his statement:

"My own belief is that it is hard enough to change people’s ways of working, so

matching the approach to the current collaboration culture is the best approach. If
there is a really strong organization-wide push to change culture, then yes,
collaboration tools may support that, but they won’t drive that change on their own."

While I do agree that particular tools will only ever support culture change and can
never drive it, I disagree that you need to match your approach to collaboration to
the current culture. I think a little bit of culture change can go a very long way —
and you do not have to tackle the entire organizational culture or its myriad of
potential sub-cultures. You should not shy away from small, incremental changes
that can potentially make a big difference.

People, Process and Technology

If we look at the three sides of this triangle, giving equal weight to each (as the
model is normally presented), we can consider culture to be an intrinsic element
of the people and process dimensions. In the enterprise collaboration use case,
I believe that culture is far more important than the technology deployed, and this
is why I think a little highly targeted effort at cultural change, in whatever form it
might need to take, is worth the effort.

Sam quite rightly points out that for various reasons some tools work just fine in
some organizations, but the same ones gain no traction at all in others. Interestingly,
there was a lot of discussion on social collaboration at the recent J. Boye
Philadelphia 15 Conference. Many presenters suggested they did not like their
present technology, be it SharePoint, Yammer, Chatter, Tibbr or Jive, but that in the current fiscal situation they were not going to be able to swap to another one. Those
that were the most successful appeared to be the ones doing a little focused culture change in order to fit the tool into their process as best they could. For an organization
to be able to say "This is not the perfect tool, but it’s what I have got, so I am going to
lever the heck out of it" requires a little cultural remodeling.

Yes, I know the technological particularities of your specific platform can have an
impact, but I am ex-Army, and I know that when an EMP burst has taken down your satellite communications, data links, networks and laptops, you can still plan operations using paper maps, pencils and notebooks — it's all about that collaborative culture!

W5H

So lets examine a really basic model in the collaboration context: What, Who, Why, Where, When and How (or five W's and an H).

What Are Your Collaboration Goals?

Collaboration means people working together to achieve a common goal. So what is
your common goal? Is it clear, is it understood by all involved? This will become more important the bigger the collaborating group is and the more complex the environment
– for example, spread across the globe or in different operating units. Don't lose sight
of the goal: Collaborative work is for a reason. Broad-based information sharing can
be useful, but it is not the same as deliberative collaboration.

Who Is Collaborating?

Is this about a small team that often (or always) works together, or a large, global,
virtual team spread across time zones, with different perspectives because they come from different operating divisions? The small team, say, fewer than 10 people on the
same floor, are likely to already have a common culture. The complex global team
may not, and they are more likely to benefit from a framework of simple behavioral guidelines to help them form their own collaborative micro-culture.

Why Are You Collaborating to Achieve This Goal?

What exactly are the outcomes your collaboration is intended to achieve? Does the context have a potential impact on the development of collaborative culture across the organization or on the micro-culture applicable to each team? Is this team working together by choice, or have they been forced together by process? Is this collaborative effort planned or ad hoc, because that will have an impact on the support mechanism
and potentially even the technology tool use.

Where Is the Collaboration Taking Place?

Is this collaboration taking place in a single room, or is it technologically mediated
across the globe? Even if all the people are in one building, the corporate culture may
well mean that a virtual team thrown together to quickly achieve a specific goal will
work as an electronic team levering various collaboration technologies – the difference being, a global team would not be able to claim a meeting space as their "war room"
and fill it with computers and white boards!

When Is the Collaboration Taking Place?

Is this ad hoc collaboration, with a deadline? Or is it part of the standard execution of a major business process that will iterate again and again as part of your normal working practices? If you’re supporting a constant generation of tactical problem solving teams, then your collaborative culture will be different from that baked in to collaborative
business processes, but to Sam Marshall's point, you may have both within a single organization. The even more basic view of "when" is business hours: If this is a global team, will components of it in effect be collaborating 24/7 across time zones?

How Are You Enabling Collaboration?

Even this question does not talk exclusively to technology. How are you enabling
high-quality collaborative work through your cultural efforts? HR policy and procedure, guidelines and training provisions, communications and clarity of purpose? And yes,
what collaboration tools do you make available, from telephones and whiteboards to global deployments of SharePoint, Yammer and Jive (yes, all of them, plus more)?

In conclusion, I would reiterate that culture is more important than technology when looking to build high-performance, collaborative working environments. If you have
a good grasp of this “collaboration culture” then you can actually succeed, no matter
the technology. However, culture change to enable enhanced collaboration does
not have to comprise enterprise-level, complex and expensive change management programs.

You can collaborate effectively without the greatest technology platform of all time.
Some technologies will fit better with your existing culture, your existing ways of
working, and if you can implement a tool that complements your environment, then adoption should be higher and efficient collaboration may result.

As ever, we are all different and your mileage may vary.

SOURCE: CMSWire