Building a resilient organisational culture - preparing for more challenging times

While headlines may be indicating that the UK is going to avoid a recession, it is increasingly clear that we will be facing harder economic times ahead, so it’s a good time to brace your business for the storm. 
Many businesses will take necessary financial measures by postponing discretionary spending and slowing down investment and recruitment, but an often-overlooked factor is organisational culture and whether this will be a help or hindrance to your business during challenging times. 

Revisit your business’ purpose

Spending more than usual time clarifying your organisational purpose and ensuring people in your organisation buy in will be worth your time. Being clear about how connected you are to your organisation’s purpose is vital for you as a leader, and will help your staff to ask the same questions: why am I here? How is this relevant to me? A great example is how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella brought to life MS’s commitment to helping others with empathy, with his personal struggle to help his son who lives with a disability. Beyond their deeply authentic personal stories, using symbols and rituals – both known as culture artefacts – can be very effective. Other than carefully selected symbols, rituals can help your business prepare for changing times. The typical one is how you recognise and celebrate success, but perhaps more relevant is how you “celebrate” failures, the ones you learn from. Some businesses have introduced “f**k-up sessions”, a psychologically safe forum to share unsuccessful initiatives and celebrate the learning the organisation gained from them.

Enhance your agility

Increasing your reactivity and response speed has the potential to help you identify cost-saving opportunities and act on them quickly. What can you actually do to enhance your agility? A good place to start is revisiting your decision-making process. Can you cut unnecessary admin? Or unproductive iterations? Can you use empowerment more than before? This one is counterintuitive: you would think that in tough times, you need more control, not less. It is not dissimilar to the dilemma of a beginner downhill skier: the more you are afraid, the more you lean back, and this is the exact opposite of the action that will help you - leaning forward. More sensible empowerment leads to faster and more localised decisions. Yes, you are losing some control, but you can balance it with two things: empower select people trusted by their peers (you can use the Organisational Network Analytics Framework to find this out). Second, empowerment should come with transparency. Do what you think makes sense, but keep it visible and embrace it if you are challenged. 

Innovation

How you challenge old ways of doing things or delivering client value is another safe bet. There are policy and structural changes that can help you do this in a fast and agile way. One unsurprising element is examining your Diversity, Equity and Inclusion standards. It may not be realistic to make your teams more diverse if you face a hiring freeze, but you may be able to use your current diversity better. Make sure you have policies that ensure different perspectives will be heard. A practical example? A client applied a policy of speaking up. They start all meetings by asking all participants to share what they expect from the meeting. They finish it by asking all to summarise what they take away and what they will do. It is no rocket science, but it is powerful when implemented with consistency. 

Rethinking your client focus 

This can be another rewarding practice. A simple question at the end of all direct client interactions, “What could we do better or differently next time?” may help if responses are collected and analysed systematically. A more disciplined post-client transaction feedback culture can help, too. Allowing time and expecting a simple 15–20-minute recap and “what can we learn here” discussion does the trick.

Fairness and employee wellbeing

No matter how agile and innovative you are, there will be tough times. If you are running a marathon, it is naive to assume that even with training and nutrition, it will be an easy walk. So you have to prepare for pain – and there are mechanisms to ease the pain when it happens. One such foreseeable pain is your staff being overstretched and overworked. Do you have physical and mental health policies and, more importantly, managers who are prepared to show empathy and care? The other pain is potentially losing good people. How transparent and dignified are your redundancy processes? How do you support redundant staff when the worst happens? How do you minimise the damage to the people who stay? There is no silver bullet solution to any of these, but a cultural factor that can help is integrity and genuine leader communication. For example, actually measuring the perceived fairness and support received by employees is a much better approach than assuming you are doing things right. With advanced diagnostic tools like Employee Preference Analytics, you can not only look at present perceptions but also make sensible predictions about how employee preferences might change in adverse circumstances. 

In summary, dealing with your organisational culture efficiently contributes to your business resilience. The key lesson to learn is the uncompromising need to focus. Focusing on delivering 1-3 priorities well is much better than building a holistic model that captures all relevant factors but fails to deliver change relatively fast. You can get lost in the details quickly, and complexity-related frustrations take any remaining appetite away. If you decide to change one or two things, think thoroughly about your bets. 

Should you need advice on how to boost your cultural resilience, please visit our People Advisory Services or contact Zsolt Szelecki.