5 Steps to Developing a Culture of Performance
Organisational culture is “the way things get done around here” and “how it feels to work here”. And it is a key driver of performance. After all, you can design the neatest process in the world, but when you add people, things get messy.
Creating Performance Cultures
Creating performance cultures is our business, and we’re proud of the culture we have created for the Harrison Network team, so when we recently won the Performance Culture 2024 Award from BECBC, I was delighted! But this is just the start. We want to help many more organisations develop the environment where their people thrive and their teams perform. And every day we are doing just that.
Hope, Heather and Nev with our BECBC Award for Performance Culture
We’ve helped thousands of people thrive through creating a more effective work environment. We’ve helped hundreds of teams perform better, and helped our clients become safer, more profitable, and more attractive places to work.
But what about you? How can you develop a culture of performance in your own organisation?
Here are five steps that we know work.
Step One: Strategic Clarity
Get clarity of your organisation’s purpose (your “why”) so that people understand why the organisation exists beyond just making money. Remember: profit and growth is an outcome, not a purpose.
Just today, I was in a shared workspace and saw a piece of paper with a team’s purpose written on it. The “purpose” felt transactional and uninspiring. There was nothing really genuine about it, nothing to inspire and resonate. It was just words.
When you’re coming up with your own purpose, make sure it gets to the heart of why the business exists. It’s hard to do, but well worth the effort.
The words, of course, aren’t enough on their own. You need to be clear on where you’re heading and how you plan to get there (strategy and tactics). These need to be communicated effectively so that everyone understands how their work connects to that purpose.
Last week I was with a lead team who are smashing this. You can actually see the change in each individual as they start to understand the goal and the unique part they play in reaching it. I can’t wait to see the impact of this as it spreads to the wider team, where they’ll spend time on it with their colleagues so that absolutely everyone in the business is bought-in.
Finally, strategic clarity includes defining and owning organisational values and behavioural principles. With these clearly outlined and communicated, everyone knows how to be with each other.
This needs to be more than the usual “be kind, respectful and passionate” – though these are, of course, important. But what other values are meaningful for your company specifically? This is about finding what’s important in what you do and why. And it’s making sure everything reflects that through language, behaviour, management example, and company-wide commitment.
This work is core to what a lead team should be doing: ensuring the whole team is bought-in to both the strategy and the values. Ensuring that they all clearly understand the expectations of them.
And, by the way, these should be living, breathing documents, not just posters on a wall or words on a piece of paper. Ask yourself: are your values adding value?
Step Two: Strong Relationships
In order to have living, breathing values, behaviours and strategy, you must be able to hear input from others. You need to be able to listen and hear, without judgement, and to hold each other accountable to them.
It’s not easy. To glean different perspectives and keep each other true, you’ll have to, at times, have some tough conversations. And you need to build relationships that you are able to test, stretch and support.
For some, building these kinds of relationships comes naturally. For others, not so much. That’s why developing the necessary skills and capabilities is essential.
Step Three: The Right Skills and Capabilities
Doing these leadership bits above helps engage and motivates people. But if your leaders don’t feel skilled or confident to do the people stuff as well as the technical part of their role, they probably won’t. After all, it’s easier to keep doing what you’ve always done.
So, ensure you develop the right people at the right time, and promote the right people into the right roles. Remember that team members shouldn’t necessarily be promoted into more people-focused roles because of their technical expertise, for example. That’s a whole different bag of skills.
Step Four: Employee Experience
The experience of your employees on the ground must match the rhetoric from the top. This is tough to do because we measure ourselves on our intentions, and others on what they do.
For example, I intend, as a leader, to lead a great culture. Do I always do this in practice? Or do I prioritise delivery and client needs over employee reward and recognition? I’ll let you judge (spoiler: I often get it wrong).
Ask your people “what does it really feel like to work here?” and you might get some surprising answers. Some of it might be hard to hear, but this feedback will help you prioritise changes and make people see that their opinions matter and their ideas count.
Also, remember that policies need to align with your values and behavioural principles, not work against them – what gets measured gets done!
Step Five: Measuring Success
Measuring a performance culture is hard. There is simply no single truth about how best to assess it.
We recommend combining qualitative and quantitative data. It’s helpful to gather data via surveys that ask about topics including employee engagement, collaboration, leadership and team performance. You can see an example of this in the below charts, which presents the results of such data collection over a 6-month period.
These graph shows the results of the same staff survey taken 6 months apart.
Questionnaires alone, though, are not enough. Include focus groups and interviews to understand the stories behind the data.
Ensuring you measure the right things is key too, and what this looks like will depend on what you’re trying to achieve in your organisation.
For instance, tracking safety incidents doesn’t necessarily reflect a safer or a less safe environment. Improvements in psychological safety could mean there appears to be more safety incidents, when in reality people are just reporting them more because they feel more supported and comfortable doing so. In the past, they may not have reported the same incidents because they felt there would be repercussions or that they’d be ignored.
It works the other way too. If reported safety incidents reduce, is it because things are actually safer, or is it because team members are afraid to speak out? So, measures can accidentally drive the opposite performance.
Keep Learning, Keep Listening
We know these steps work. We’ve implemented them in our own organization and even won an award for it (hurrah!).
That said, it’s not easy. I must remember that, as the leader of this business, heading up the culture IS the work for me. And I am still learning every day. The more I know, the more I realise I don’t!
Hopefully, by reading this, you’ve got a starting point for how to better lead your culture. I’d love to hear how you get on, especially if this has been helpful. You can find me on LinkedIn or drop me a message via our contact form.
Author: Lucy Harrison, Director
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