You know that things are not quite right in the way that you’re getting things done in your organisation. Perhaps your employee survey revealed a level of frustration or discomfort with the way you are working together, or perhaps you can just sense it. Simple tasks feel like hard work, decisions are not joined up, repetition is rife! General day-to-day life feels a bit like wading through treacle.

So, it’s time to talk about culture change; to consider how people are behaving and why that behaviour might be clogging up your business. But where do you start?

You could get your senior leaders together to work out the culture you need and how people need to behave in order to live that culture. Then you can ‘roll out’ the new culture to the organisation in the hope that everyone else will jump on the bandwagon and change the way they behave.

Or, you could involve the whole organisation in agreeing that there is a need to do things differently, in defining what culture they want to be part of building and working in and deciding what they personally need to do in order to create that culture.

Co–creation is simply about driving culture change from the bottom up. Involving employees through multiple channels – social media, interactive workshops, team meetings – so they can work together to agree how they want to ‘get things done’. Then sharing that with the senior team for rubber stamping and for making it really clear what will be required from them – in the way they lead, in the decisions they make and in the processes and systems they invest in, in order to enable the culture that’s required.

Un-enlightened executives may nervously worry that giving ‘power to the people’ will result in a terrifying cultural anarchy with all kinds of weird and wonderful employee demands about working conditions and entitlements. Enlightened executives will trust that their people are generally sane and sensible and frankly just want to come to work to do the best they can in a working culture that makes them feel good and feel valued. And, importantly, enables them to get their job done as effectively and easily as possible. Let’s face it, who wants to wade through treacle every day?!

We work with organisations to involve their people in creating the right culture for them to get things done.

To find out more about our co-creation and culture work, get in touch!