Are your systems and practices ready for a return to work?
In my last post, I shared how many are revisiting the practices that make them feel good and ridding themselves or re-engineering those that de-energise, create angst or encourage the wrong behaviour.
This same thinking can be applied in an organisational context. Our systems and practices drive behaviour and are a key lever for culture alignment in the workplace. Most importantly, as we navigate through the next phase of COVID-19, and start to think about how we bring people back from the virtual world of work to the physical, the way we set up our practices, and what we choose to emphasise sends messages to people about what we value.
Sometimes, when designing, refreshing and implementing our systems we do not place the same rigour as we would if designing, commissioning and reviewing a new IT platform or Finance System. This means we often end up with wasted effort, workarounds and shortcuts, or at worst case – poor and possible illegal use of valuable resources as illustrated in our framework below.
This model provides a simple 4×4 to evaluate the essence of the strength of your systems design against your implementation effort and the impact these practices are having on your culture. It then provides the opportunity to evaluate those practices to keep, those to refresh your implementation strategies, those to re-design and re-implement and those to remove or stomp out.
McKinsey Beyond Performance 2.0 cites that you can double your success of change leadership through equal application of hard and soft elements. As leaders, now is the time to be sure your systems and practices are enabling the environment for the culture you want to nurture and encourage, enabling people to thrive at work.
Consider:
What are the top five critical systems or practices in use in your organisation today?
What behaviour should they drive?
What behaviour do they actually drive?
What impact are they having on your culture?
What is the opportunity to refresh and refocus this practice?
Written by Rosemarie Dentesano.
My latest whitepaper on “A Systems Approach to Culture Alignment’ is available at www.p2psolutions.com.au
Working at the intersection of strategy and culture, Rosemarie collaborates with organisations to create pragmatic culture solutions that work.
She sees her role to provide expert input while mentoring leaders as they drive culture change within their team. Rosemarie is passionate about building an organisation’s capabilities and promoting cultures that thrive.
If you would like to learn more, please contact Rosemarie on
+61 417 354 117 rosemarie@p2psolutions.com.au linkedin.com/in/rosemariedentesano
