Introduction
This month we’re focusing on culture: the WHAT, the WHY and point you to the HOW. We’re EXcited to bring you this newsletter and if you find it useful, do share it with your networks.
What is organisational culture?
If you Google this, you'll get as many different definitions as you have the time to read. Not only that, but it can also be described from numerous different viewpoints, such as from: behavioural, values-based, environmental, psychological, strategic, and more.
We have defined our Eight dimensions of culture: Values Alignment, Leadership & Trust, Collaboration & Teamwork, Psychological Safety & Inclusion, Recognition & Feedback, Managers, Change & Innovation, Workload & Wellbeing.
Our most workable definition of culture is: It’s the way we do things around here. We think the ‘do’ needs to be ‘DO’. Less talk, more DO.
Why is it important?
A strong organisational culture isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a powerful driver of both employee engagement and business success. When employees feel connected to the purpose and the values, they’re more motivated, collaborative, and innovative.
A healthy culture builds trust, attracts top talent, and reduces turnover by creating an environment where people genuinely want to contribute. This sense of belonging and purpose translates into higher productivity, better customer experiences, and, ultimately, a stronger bottom line. Simply put, culture shapes how people work and how well the organisation performs.
High-performance culture
To impact upon the bottom line, you don’t just need a strong culture, you need a high-performance culture. We term this as: everyone working to their full potential.
This sounds pretty obvious, right? But we see and hear so many examples of high-performance culture being approached as a top-down initiative for leaders only. It is about every single employee. How they are feeling. How they are performing. It's something everyone needs to buy into - there can be no hiding place.
It's not about bringing a handful of senior leaders into a training environment and then expecting employees to fall in line. Of course, it's important that senior leaders are on-board and role model but high-performance won't happen unless everyone is involved.
How to approach culture building
We’re often asked: should it be top-down, bottom-up, a mixture? Our response is: who does the work and who serves the customers? The answer, of course, is ‘your people’. So, a people-first approach is required. This means not only asking your people for their opinions but also involving them in the culture building.
Our framework for creating a high-performance culture is Empathise, Energise, Optimise:
- Empathise – understanding your people, making them feel involved and valued
- Energise – putting improvement initiatives in place… and swiftly
- Optimise - constantly fine-tuning to drive high-performance culture
Our culture offer
We work with organisations on our seven-stage process.
- Stage 1: The comms campaign - obtaining the understanding and buy-in from employees
- Stage 2: Culture Audit (corporate) - listening via focus groups, interviews, and spending time with employees
- Stage 3: Culture Audit (team and personal) - using mojo to understand team and individual data, including what drives them
- Stage 4: Instant impact - an immediate, wide-ranging activity to signal that things will, indeed, be changing for the better
- Stage 5: Purpose & Values - either creating, re-working, or evaluating these
- Stage 6: The Culture Playbook - The 'how-to' guide to embedding high-performance culture
- Stage 7: Creating a frictionless employee experience - continuing and fine-tuning activities from the Energise phase and introducing new activities which the Culture Audit points to being required
If you complete the above, then you’ll have a complete picture of your current culture and be able to swiftly make tens and tens of improvements. You can read more about our offer here.
Do get in touch if you’d like more information on how we can support you to create a people-first culture at pace and scale.
You can stay up-to-date with all things EX by following Brand Experiences on LinkedIn or via our website. You can also follow mojo on LinkedIn or via the website.