How to Transform Your Organizational Culture and Your Online Community

An organization's culture has a profound impact on its performance and success. As the digital landscape evolves, aligning internal culture with online presence is key for growth and engagement.

This article provides actionable steps to transform organizational culture and extend its positive influence into the digital realm.

Recognizing the Importance of Organizational Culture

Organizational culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that characterize how employees think, feel, and act within a company. It is the sum of many elements – some tangible, like policies and physical office environment, and others intangible, like unspoken norms and unconscious biases.

Culture is shaped over time by a company's history, successes and crises, leadership style, employee demographics, HR systems, and more. It becomes ingrained in "the way things are done around here."

While culture often develops organically, leaders today recognize the strategic imperative to intentionally define and manage it. Studies conclusively show that organizations with clearly defined and widely shared cultural values experience higher growth, innovation, and employee engagement.

For example, companies with strong cultures see revenue growth rates 4x higher than those with weak cultures. And Glassdoor data shows that corporate culture is a key driver behind employee satisfaction and retention.

Given culture's proven link to measurable business results, transforming culture has become a top priority for many leaders. But this requires first understanding the current state of organizational culture, its pain points, and opportunities.

The Current State of Organizational Culture

Recent research paints a concerning picture of the status quo of organizational culture today:

• 92% of executives believe a strong organizational culture is important or very important for business success. However, only 28% feel they understand their company's culture well.
• Just 19% of executives feel they have the “right culture” to drive growth, innovation, and desired performance outcomes.
• 70% of the variance in employee engagement across organizations can be directly attributed to leadership style and leaders' commitment to culture. Disengaged employees exhibit more stress, conflicts, and turnover.

These statistics reveal a startling gap. While most executives conceptually recognize culture's significance, far fewer feel equipped to accurately assess their culture or make meaningful improvements.

Many established companies find their cultures have organically – and often accidentally – formed over decades without clear intention or design. The current cultural traits may be misaligned with business goals, slow to change, or inconsistent across functions or geographies. With competing priorities, culture often gets deprioritized or neglected altogether.

But sidelining culture transformation can be perilous. Organizational culture shapes countless aspects of performance, from employee productivity and retention to customer satisfaction and brand perception.

Leaders who invest time to intentionally define and align cultural values will be rewarded with engaged employees, satisfied customers, and accelerated growth. While culture change takes time, the payoff can be immense.

Best Practices for Driving Impactful Culture Change

How can leaders drive intentional, lasting company-wide culture change? Transforming culture requires long-term commitment, alignment at all levels, and specific steps:

Clearly Define Core Values and Expected Behaviors

• Start by distilling a small set of core values, for example: integrity, transparency, and customer centricity that embody desired cultural traits.
• Conduct interviews, focus groups, and surveys to solicit input from employees across the organization. Look for common themes.
• Narrow down to 3-5 priority values that underpin the culture you aim to build. Avoid generic values - make them unique and meaningful.
• For each value, define 2-3 specific, observable behaviors that exemplify it in action day-to-day. For example, "integrity" might translate to "admitting mistakes quickly and taking ownership".
• Widely socialize defined cultural values and behaviors. Include them in training programs, communications, and performance systems to drive adoption.

Secure Visible Commitment From Leadership

• The CEO and executive team must visibly own, champion, and role model culture change for it to cascade through the organization. Lip service is not enough.
• Leadership commitment should include regular communications reinforcing culture's importance, leading by example daily, linking culture to strategy and performance, allocating resources, and supporting culture change initiatives across all levels.
• Executive committees, management meetings, and Board sessions should include culture as a standing agenda item to emphasize its priority and hold leaders accountable.

Align Culture With Systems and Accountability Mechanisms

• Update policies, performance systems, training programs, and internal communications to reinforce and reward desired cultural values and behaviors.
• For example, update performance reviews to include culture-related competencies. Train managers on coaching to cultural values.
• Hold leaders formally accountable for enabling and role-modeling cultural change on their teams through performance metrics, compensation, and rewards. Recognize those modeling desired behaviors.

Retain the Best Aspects of the Current Culture

• Objectively identify elements of your current culture that continue to serve the business, such as teamwork, entrepreneurial spirit, or customer empathy.
• Look for gaps where current culture is misaligned with strategy and business needs. Prioritize strengthening these gaps areas first.
• Seek balance between revolution and evolution - retain cultural strengths while transforming dysfunction.

Unify Branding With Cultural Messaging

• HR, Marketing and Communications teams should tightly align around consistent cultural branding and messaging for internal and external resonance.
• Employees should feel pride and belong to the cultural brand, while customers are drawn to do business based on cultural values conveyed through branding.
• Integrate desired cultural traits into brand identity - your culture should inform and breathe life into your brand.

Measure Progress Through Surveys and Observed Behaviors

• Establish a culture baseline through employee surveys. Regularly re-survey to quantify progress on cultural metrics.
• Track observable behaviors that signal culture change - actions speaking louder than words. Is leadership walking the talk?
• Monitor external indicators like Glassdoor ratings, customer satisfaction, and brand perception surveys to correlate culture with business outcomes.

Commit to the Long-Term

• Changing culture across a large organization will realistically take years of ongoing investment, discipline, and consistency. It cannot be a short-term initiative.
• Plan for a 3-5+ year transformation journey. Maintain commitment and patience even when progress feels slow. Culture change follows an S-curve - expect acceleration after an initial lag.

Invest Early and Sufficiently

• Devote resources early in the process for culture training programs, team-building initiatives, internal communications campaigns, and tools to reinforce change.
• Culture should have its own budget line item to emphasize priority and enable scaling required programming and infrastructure.

With concerted effort across these areas, leaders can drive company-wide culture change that energizes employees, delights customers, and accelerates business performance.

Bridging Internal Culture and External Online Community

A strong culture intrinsically shapes values-driven behavior. These values extend beyond office walls, influencing brand reputation and online community engagement.

Consider companies recognized for exceptional customer service like Zappos or Nordstrom. Their internal service-oriented cultures manifest externally through helpful, responsive online communities where customers seek advice and share experiences.

These communities, in turn, reinforce cultural values and attract new brand devotees through positive word-of-mouth.

But beware - the inverse holds true as well. Toxic cultures breed negative online interactions that detract from brand image. Without proper moderation aligned with cultural values, online communities easily become havens of toxicity.

Leaders should closely monitor online community sentiment to understand if desired cultural values translate digitally. They must continuously refine as needed. Ultimately, online communities offer opportunities to not just reflect, but strengthen organizational culture.

By fostering meaningful connections and learning, companies can leverage digital communities to role-model cultural behaviors at scale.

Key Takeaways

• A strong organizational culture intrinsically shapes values-driven employee and customer behaviors.
• These cultural values manifest externally, influencing brand reputation and online community engagement.
• Leaders must ensure proper moderation and reinforcement of cultural values within online communities.
• Digital communities present opportunities to reflect and strengthen organizational culture at scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it typically take to transform organizational culture?

Changing culture is a multi-year process depending on the company's size, existing culture, and depth of change required. Consistent commitment over an extended timeframe is critical.

How can we ensure our online community reflects our desired culture?

Closely moderate online interactions to align with cultural values. Train community managers on recognizing and addressing misalignment. Reinforce desired behaviors through active engagement.

What role should company executives play in culture transformation?

Visible commitment and modeling from the CEO and executive team is vital. They must champion culture change through words and actions for it to cascade through the organization.

Bottom Line

Transforming culture requires clearly defining desired behaviors, securing leadership commitment, investing for the long term, and extending cultural values digitally.

By taking an integrated approach, companies can boost employee engagement and better resonate with online communities. With consistent investment and commitment over time, organizations can build cultures that drive growth.