Transforming Culture at the Speed of Light: Go Digital

This article was originally published by Training Magazine. See link below for full article. 

Culture isn’t only the most popular word in the world (named the 2014 “word of the year” by Merriam-Webster), it’s one of the most powerful words in business today. Culture change and culture transformation are on the agenda of many organizations today as a top business priority. Key to the culture management skill set are two core competencies:

1. The ability to accelerate the change process and speed it up
2. The ability to engage the masses in the change effort

Some would argue that it takes years to change culture. Consider these results from our own studies, with feedback from more than 40,000 professionals in a variety of industries and job titles: Almost half say it takes several years to change culture, while the other half say it can be done in as little as several months. Practitioners like us have learned that culture can change quickly and boost results rapidly, if approached the right way.

Why try and accelerate culture change? Our answer is simple: Because you can. And when you do, it brings impact directly to the bottom line. One retailer we worked with tried everything it could think of—10 different strategic initiatives, in fact—to improve a drop in same-store sales. After all of these failed, it decided to try “working on the culture.” It implemented the simple tools that we teach in our work in 50 pilot stores. An increase of same-store sales below 2 percent meant a “no-go”; between 2 and 4 percent meant “study further”; more than 4 percent meant a “go” decision to implement enterprise-wide to its 1,000 stores. Within five weeks, it saw an 8 percent increase in same-store sales and customer count. It wasn’t just a few of the pilot stores that produced these results—85 percent of all test locations were delivering these numbers. The retailer’s response: Stop the pilot and get this into the stores as soon as possible.

The solution, in this case, was not a new product, new displays, or new people. Rather, it was a new way of thinking that a more focused store culture brought to the front-line associates doing the selling. The ability to accelerate culture change is not an option; it’s a requirement to stay competitive in today’s challenging market conditions.

Read full article at Training Magazine  – “Transforming Culture at the Speed of Light: Go Digital”