Company Culture Change

A Fact-Based Approach

Of the many competing claims about the best way to improve productivity in an organization, very few have the backing of scientists. If your enterprise depends on people collaborating to produce work, two respected researchers say: “organizations need to develop team-centric policies and practices to support team processes. Instead, policies and practices are much more likely to focus on individual employees…” (source). To get the most output per input, focus on your biggest and most complicated budget item—people—and how they interact.

TeamTrainers shows you how, using our four-step process based on hard evidence from the scientific and business worlds.

1. Fix Your Meetings

We emphasize well-run meetings in part because change work starts in meetings. Clean up your meetings and you can have a large impact on productivity in and between gatherings. Unfortunately, all too many meetings accomplish nothing that an e-mail could not have done as effectively. Most waste huge amounts of time in attaining their results. Some actually harm the group in some way, by making people feel disrespected or worse. We eliminate those complaints with simple techniques anyone could use, taught to every team leader (and preferably every worker) using our Facilitating Effective Meetings class. This provides immediate benefits for the entire company and its employees, opening minds at all levels for the next step.

2. Build Buy-in for Change

You have a choice: Spend a lot of time building consensus before your decisions, or a lot of time building support afterward. The problem with the second, typical approach is, some people never buy in. Plus, no one feels as motivated as they would if they considered the decision "theirs." Once you have determined your enterprise-wide goals, we facilitate a bottom-up effort to craft how that change is achieved. We believe "decision by committee" not only works if done the right way, it produces superior results for everyone involved, with less friction than any other method.

3. Create Empowered Teams

Two of the most consistent findings in business research over decades are that workers who feel empowered are more engaged in their work, and structured teams outperform the type most organizations use today. Our unique team building method combines these two findings to create true, empowered teams throughout your organization. Not only does each group of workers do more with less, the teams coordinate better to give you higher efficiency across the enterprise. An added important benefit is that workers, managers, and customers are happier with the organization.

4. Design Company Policies that Reward Collaboration

Per the quote at the top of the page, most organizations talk about teamwork but reward individual performance. They should not be surprised, then, that people have their own agendas. By this stage of the change effort, everyone in the company will know which policies need to change. Team-based rewards, 360-degree feedback, self-management and other ideas that seem radical now become obvious choices when managers and workers are already experiencing the positive outcomes from structured teamwork.

Contact TeamTrainers right now to consider a radical yet scientifically proven route to company culture change.