Our Culture Assessment Can Tell You What to Stop Doing

November 29, 2022
November 29, 2022 Maddie Grant

Organizations suck at stopping doing things.

We have data that illustrates this – one of the first culture patterns we spotted in the aggregate data from our culture assessment is called “heavy agility.” In short, cultures value moving forward and maintaining quality, but they don’t value fixing things that are broken or stopping things that are no longer providing value.

I feel like we all know this. We never stop doing stuff! And it’s holding us back.

The good news is, our culture assessment does more than tell you that you have this pattern—it shows you OTHER patterns that will help you figure out what you need to stop doing.

For example, for one organization, our culture assessment revealed two key patterns related to transparency and collaboration.

  • On the transparency side, they saw that they have no problem sharing information, but they tend to wait until people ask for it rather than being proactive, and that slows them down.
  • On collaboration, they’re good at helping each other out individually, but they don’t pay attention to how groups (like departments) collaborate, and opportunities are missed.
  • When they connected the dots between these two patterns, it hit them….
  • they are having WAYYYY too many meetings. Doh!
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Between all staff meetings, department update meetings, department planning meetings, sub team meetings, 1-1 meetings, etc., they realized no one had time to be proactive in their communication. So they did a formal audit of their meetings and found a number of them that could be permanently cancelled. They also started sharing more information asynchronously through Teams that could be made visible organization-wide, which addressed the silo issue in addition to helping them be more proactive.

Before they saw their culture patterns, they couldn’t see the forest from the trees. Each individual meeting made sense by itself. But the collective impact was slowing them down and causing them to miss opportunities. That’s what our culture assessment can do for you.

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Learn more about it here.

 


Photo by lilzidesigns

Maddie Grant

Maddie Grant, CAE, is an expert culture designer and digital strategist who focuses on helping organizations unlock the power in their culture and navigate culture change. She has specific expertise in digital transformation and generational differences in the workplace. She has explored the language of workplace culture for several years through her books, co-authored with her partner in business and life Jamie Notter, including Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World (2011), the Amazon category best-seller When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business (2015), the Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement (2019), and Culture Change Made Easy, coming out in Fall 2023.