"It is always a good idea to track how far we still have to go to create a truly dynamic business culture. It is usually a good idea to assess “our current culture” before committing to the journey to what we want to become. Businesses can fail to get a fair and accurate assessment of their organisational health of their business because they fail to measure the right things. They fail to assess what “causes” business “performance”." Some of the questions we ask include…………………
What are the critical factors which, if left to evolve, will put the business at serious risk in the immediate future?
What current non-performing business processes” will negatively impact upon customer retention and growth?
How would your customers describe the positive and the negative aspects of your business culture?
Given a magic wand – what two factors currently hurting your business would you fix immediately?
Benefits of Cultural Analysis
The organisation can assess how it is perceived by staff and by external customers.
The organisation can identify areas in the business where it is most at risk of alienating customers and suppliers.
From the analysis, the organisation can tailor strategies to develop a totally customer-centric focus.
Most organisations fail to have a clear and tangible understanding of their culture and its impact on performance and the bottom line.
Our analysis highlights what is important.
Understand that shaping a positive culture “causes” an improvement in business performance.
Culture does not evolve by default – it needs a positive kick-start
Identifies those cultural and HR strategies that add value to deliver to results.
Focus upon how “resources” can be dispersed to create immediate and lasting effect.
Highlights the Leadership & Management behaviours most likely to lead to an improvement in the business.
Enables the business to translate Vision and Values to KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
Provides a benchmark to asses “how are we doing” in comparison to the industry norm and “best practice”
Establishes a ‘cultural strategy’ which can be incorporated into the Business Plan.
In acquisition or merger activity enables the management of several businesses to assess the cultural differences which may hinder a successful acquisition.
In a post-acquisition situation can highlight where there are barriers to true integration and the formation of one business entity focus.
Bring the teams of several businesses together to understand how their “culture and behaviour” can both help and hinder the running of the new organisation.
As an exercise with a client we ran through the following. The project was part of an exercise in “taking a good look in the mirror” with the client. This was an awareness raising session to develop the momentum for change. We are only highlighting some humorous elements of the exercise as well as some serious questions. This is a very small partial analysis. If you would like a serious interpretation of your culture contact us through our enquiry form.
Questions
Senior Management
Staff
Customers
For fun - how would you describe the image of the business as an animal?
A caged tiger
A slow moving bear
An aging racehorse
A dinosaur
A large elephant moving very slowly with little direction
Something slow moving
An indifferent cat
A well meaning donkey
For fun- how would you describe the business as a move or film?
An epoch of some length - or in many parts
Out of Africa - good dialogue but no vision
The Ten Commandents - do as you are told
A black and white or silent film -
Maybe a "Carry on film..."
Where do you think you are most at risk with your current customers?
Failing to respond quickly enough
Not having a robust process for processing new business
Failing to work together with our intermediaries
Most conflict exists between new business and the operations people - one part of the organisation does not know what the other is doing
To slow and bureaucratic
Response times are very slow
The Call centre is slow in responding to basic enquiries
If you could do one thing to "fix" customers relations - what would it be?
Train everybody to take the customer serioulsy - they pay our salaries!
Move away from fragmented initiatives and develop a company wide approach to customer service
Please phone us when you say you will
Do not make promises that you cannot deliver
What are our major customer facing problems?
Ensuring that all staff are customer facing in attitude
Winning the support of the sales people to operational problems
Make sure the organisation knows what the left and right hand are doing
Being one company rather than different departments
The company is not interested after it has made a sale
The sales people blame the slow processing of the company for failing to deal with claims fast enough
How well are customer complaints handled?
We know these could be radically improved
We are still waiting for a system to be designed to deal with these issues
We don't know - lots of promises but few deliverables
In operations we are measured on our performance - other parts of the business are not
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