Can you design a new team culture?
You can, but there are so few examples of how to design one. Here is an example with empirical evidence that I like to share from Stats New Zealand's Digital Business Services (DBS). It is how DBS transformed its culture and uplifted employee engagement from an NPS (Net Promoter Score) score of -14% in 2017 to 50% in February 2021.
Before getting ahead, we must accept that cultural transformation takes effort and time. It is a long game. As Simon Sinek described successful companies in The Infinite Game, you cannot treat this as a finite game.
It would help if you were prepared to either pivot or persevere with your planned actions. Experiment to find what works. It would be best if you let go of thinking you know everything. Learn to trust your people. Get regular feedback from people to help you navigate through the adaptive challenges. Lead them on the cultural transformation journey.
Here are the five steps to designing a new agile team culture I have undertaken.
Step 1: Diagnose your existing culture.
Step 2: Plan activities that promote the new cultural element you are targeting.
Step 3: Measure the outcome of your activities.
Step 4: When the going gets tough, decide to either pivot or persevere.
Step 5: Celebrate progress and success. Repeat Steps 2 to 5 again.
Step 1 – Diagnose your existing culture.
You cannot design a new culture when you do not know the existing one. In 2017, every staff member I spoke with had attributed the work environment as unhealthy, and the culture was the root cause. Culture is an elusive word and concept. People often used culture to blame many things when things did not work the way they should.
To improve team culture, you need to know the current one. Like all transformation programmes, you must show what the baseline is first. Otherwise, you are faking it. You must define culture so people can relate to it and use the same meaning and traits.
I used the model to diagnose culture from William Schneider's The Reengineering Alternative (1994). I have chosen Schneider's model because it is simpler for leaders and staff to understand the types of cultures in an organisation. Besides, it was one I had experience using when leading and managing teams before the Agile movement.
Schneider's Culture Model defines the four-basic type of cultures around corporate behaviours, traditions, leadership, and management approaches, together with its characteristics.
There are other cultural frameworks you can use. To learn more about using Schneider Culture Model for successful Agile Adoption, check out this LinkedIn article from Chandan Lal Patary. Michael Sahota's An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide inspired me to apply the Schneider Culture Model to a technology team long ago when every application development shop wanted to go Agile in the early 2010s.
From the culture survey in 2017, we found Digital Business Services had a primary 'Control' culture with a secondary 'Cultivation' culture. These two were in direct conflict, according to the model. Long story short, we decided we wanted an Agile culture to support the new DBS operating model introduced in 2016.
Step 2 – Plan activities that promote the new culture element you are targeting
To be Agile, DBS needed to shift to the model's left side. We need to expand on the 'Collaboration' culture and reduce the feeling of 'Control' or at least reduce the friction between the two dominating sub-cultures that had caused the tensions.
We started a DBS 2.0 Programme that explores new ways of working, process improvement, governance and people upskilling. Our activities targeted new elements we wanted to nurture and grow. Factors include affiliation, participation and interaction among team members, equality, diversity and partnership, purpose, creativity, simplifying processes and loosening policies. We created working groups focusing on business processes, governance, people skills, training, and technology tools in general.
For example, we held four town hall meetings with all staff in DBS to share our learning and experiment in 2018. We organised showcases, a community of practices, staff forums and even dabbled in Holacracy. This Holacracy did not work with existing organisational policies and financial delegation in government.
Step 3 – Measure the outcome of your activities
Next, convert the actions into measurable outcomes. These were not about the number of activities, workshops, or the team's delivery rate. We want to measure the belief of what our people see, hear, feel, and do with each other and with leadership after people have started these actions to promote an agile culture.
To do this, we decided to track our employee experience because the activities' outcome should encourage our employees to talk about and share their experience working at Digital Business Services with others. This premise was based on the Net Promoter Score to rate the likelihood that a customer would recommend a company product, product, or service to a friend, family member or colleague.
Every month, we asked in an anonymous and independent survey, 'How likely would you be to recommend DBS to a qualified friend or family member as a great place to work?' People score their experience using a scale of 0 to 10.
We also learned that we must educate people that the scale is qualitative, not quantitative. Each number stood for a particular emoticon of satisfaction to differentiate detractors, passives, and promoters.
Each survey had a question of the month for people to give feedback. The question relates to the actions we have undertaken. Leaders then determine the next course of action from the responses.
The monthly survey results and comments were shared with all staff members and published publicly on the company's Yammer page.
Step 4 – When the going gets tough, pivot or persevere
The hardest step. This step calls for a separate article by itself, which I shall write up soon.
The activities cannot be a checklist type of thing from leaders. Your people might have seen a similar exercise or programme before. The level of scepticism is always high when leaders talk about improving culture, staff engagement, or even performance.
To reduce scepticism, leaders must increase the trust between leadership and people. And trust between the people themselves. Leaders must keep doing what they say they will do. That is the secret ingredient to getting people's buy-in. In other words, leaders must start role model the new behaviours consistent with the new culture's attributes. You cannot pay lip service here.
After confirmation, feedback from Step 3 becomes a new action item for leaders and people. Sometime these actions would fail for many reasons. Rather than persevering, admit the failure and learn from it. Try something else and experiment with what works with your leaders and people.
The experiment takes time because your leaders and people have organisation priorities to deliver. These experiments are essential to work that requires regular follow-ups. Keep your experiment short and focused. Create a feedback loop for people to share these.
There are times when an idea is too far ahead of its time. The people are not ready, and the leaders are unprepared for the change—for example, remote working or flexible working for knowledge workers. Policies in government are the slowest to change and respond. It took a Covid-19 pandemic to make that happen instantly.
The key to Step 4 is regular communication with people. And communication might mean more listening, exploring possibilities and uncovering what is important for your leaders and people.
Step 5 – Celebrate your progress and repeat Steps 2 to 5.
If you have been to a game at the stadium, you start cheering for your team even when the score is zero. You cheer for progress no matter whether your team is behind or ahead.
It is the same with creating a new culture or transforming it. Change happens slowly. Never fast or overnight. Employee experience evolves to good slowly when trust increases. It took us six months to see a positive NPS score. You must keep cheering and encouraging your people. No matter how hard it is, it would help if you nudged both leaders and people forward.
Celebrate with the team when there is an uplift in your NPS score or overall central line. When the NPS score goes below your central line, be optimistic. Talk to people. Find out why and what your leaders and people should do or stop doing.
The evidence we saw was increasing NPS scores through the Employee Experience Monitor, which we ran monthly from April 2018. We had three central line uplifts from April 2018 to Feb 2021. The first was from -4% to 11%, then 18% and finally to 37.4%.
Conclusion
So, have we shifted our culture? The answer is a resounding YES. We ran a culture survey in December 2020, and based on the Schneider Culture Model, the result has shifted left.
Though the DBS 2.0 Programme has ended, sustaining a Culture is an ongoing socialisation process. Culture is susceptible to hidden forces at work in any organisation. The work to maintain the new norm is continuing. We still repeat Steps 2 to 5 above. We still need the right people to cherish and support the new values and top management to support the new norms.
Can you design a new team culture? Yes, you can. It is challenging work but possible.