Reviving Our Company's Culture

More than ever, a company’s culture is an essential element of its performance. Well anchored, it’s a facilitator of daily life that makes it possible to direct people towards the good actions for the company. To better understand what the levers of a culture can be, I share below a quick overview of the culture analysis framework we’ve made last year with the management team. The objective was to develop people’s engagement, create an attractive environment and focus on team efficiency, through maturity and autonomy.

Our first impression was that over the years, there has been a loss of culture within the teams. The original vision, the original spirit, was a bit lost due to the quick growth of the company, natural turnover, and the many changes that have occurred in the organization over the years. We also truly believe that the culture is the foundation of autonomy and we needed to build an ecosystem to help the teams gain in maturity.

To deliver this analysis, we defined a list of levers that could help support our culture and designed a model to explore each of them further. Pretty simple, this model allowed us to have full insight and make the right decisions.

It is composed of a first essential part to align everyone on the same language describing the lever:

• The name of the Lever

• One related motto to well define the main idea behind it

• Its definition, based on concrete and short sentences

• And finally, the benefits we expect by acting on this lever

Then, it presents a second part to put the lever in our context:

• What do we perform well related to this lever?

• What should we improve or start doing?

• Our estimated level of progress on this lever?

Based on that, the model offers a last part allowing to define the improvement area:

• The action plan we have to take to improve our level on this lever

• The short-term ones and the medium ones

• The level of difficulty to improve this lever

Defining these levels of progress and difficulty has allowed us to prioritize these several levers to maximize the impact. To illustrate, without going into too much detail, here are some of the levers we analyzed and the benefits we could expect.

Group values and vision

Together around a common vision

• Get more adoption
• Engage people to result
• Drive actions based on the values/vision
• Remove doubts, get a refuge
• Recruitment based on these values

Autonomy & Accountability

Act for the company’s good

• More engagement by responsibilization
• Less inertia into the processes
• Better decisions

Management culture

People are our engine

• Grow with a cohesive and lined up management staff
• Dedicate time to fluidize flows and adjust the organization
• Have great relays

Transparency

Transparency across the group

• Right decisions based on information
• Develop belonging & remove frustrations
• Trust

Test and measurement culture

Test, measure and learn

• Analyze deliveries impacts
• Promote ambitious initiatives & risk-taking
• Decisions taking based on the fact
• Enable continuous improvement

Success celebration

Thank you

• Motivated teams
• Increase consideration between teams
• Pride about work done and company

Feedback culture

Feedback is a gift

• Contribute to a 360 communication

• Continuous (self) improvement

• Clarify points of view and statements

Prioritization framework

In addition, one of the main pain points we identified, was the backlog prioritization within and between the product teams. Even if all the product team’s objectives are aligned with the OKR principle, on a day to day basis, there are too many priorities to manage and it’s not an easy part to align the teams together. Some colleagues of mine started thinking about aligning the teams based on functional scenarios. The main ideas are:

• Define the main scenarios, cross products, allowing to reach the objectives at a company level (decrease the production time of XX by YY, …)

• Sort these scenarios by priority with executive management

• Put in a matrix all the product teams (in line) and the prioritized scenarios (in column)

• Define for each scenario, the weight for each product based on the impact on the team to deliver what is needed (on a scale from 0 to 3).

This work, that can seem pretty simple, allows seeing two important pieces of information: the contention of each product following the scenarios prioritization, and the total weight of each scenario. This helps to have a higher view and taking decision (prioritization, resources allocation, …) at a company level.

Feedback

Finally, to be able to drive our action plan based on facts, we put in place a feedback system. It allows us to measure the evolution based on the actions we’ve started. It’s an essential tool to quickly gather the feeling about the changes, follow the evolution over time, and adjust the action plan when needed.