Is Change Part of Your Company Culture?

One change management trend that is getting a lot of attention, and we are seeing in our own experience, is organizations working to establish change as part of their company culture.

Why is it important?

Incorporating change into your company culture allows organizations to be more collaborative and ensures they engage employees early in the change process. This helps employees feel a part of the solution versus the organization just telling employees what to do.

How do you do it?

Here are a few tactics that can help you start to incorporate change in your company culture.

Include change language into your organization’s competencies, mission, and vision statements. For example, use terms like always learning, adaptable, and collaborative to encourage employees to work together and give them permission to learn from their mistakes. This will inspire employees to think about new ways of doing things, bring new ideas to the table, and improve the way they work.

Evaluate and prioritize change plans to ensure the changes are in line with your organization’s long-term vision. This means conducting alignment sessions to confirm how everything fits together and builds a shared sense of purpose. With this action, you must also provide rewards systems designed to promote change agents and those evangelizing the new behaviors and mindsets. A shared sense of purpose combined with shared values becomes a culture.

Establish change learning activities for different change roles in your organization. Everyone does not have the innate ability to lead others through change or even understand the importance of change for growth. When organizations take time to teach leadership how to sponsor change, people managers how to lead through change, and employees how to understand and accept change, you will see less resistance and more acceptance and support.

Avaap can help your organization with its cultural change by providing change learning that ensures leaders and employees navigate change successfully. The Avaap Change Academy offers change workshops dedicated to building individual knowledge, skills, and ability in organizational change. The curriculum meets participants where they are by leveraging best practices and trending topics, all while delivering exceptional value through experiential learning to help navigate your individual change journey needs.