High Performance Cultures
In high performance cultures, the environment ensures teams are aligned behind a common goal and behaviours. Building a high-performing culture that is aligned with strategy is key to building organisational sustainability and long-term success.
Failing to build an organisational culture aligned with strategy can build in a range of risks, such as:
- Misaligned priorities, where employees focus on tasks and behaviours that are not conducive to achieving the organisation’s goals, resulting in wasted resources and efforts.
- Employees resisting the changes necessary for implementing key strategic initiatives, potentially derailing them.
- Disengagement and a lack of productivity because employees are not connected to the organisation’s purpose or goals.
- Inconsistent decision-making that may prioritise short-term gains over long-term strategic objectives, leading to inconsistent and potentially detrimental decisions.
- Difficulty in attracting and retaining talent that aligns with the organisation’s values and aspirations.
- Diminished organisational agility, impeding the organisation’s ability to adapt and remain competitive in changing market conditions.
- Weakened brand and reputation because of inconsistencies between the organisation’s stated values and its actual culture can damage its brand and reputation.
TMS has extensive experience designing and delivering cultural transformation programs that drive sustainable and measurable change. With in-house organisational psychologists, we draw on best practice theories in human dynamics and social neuroscience to evaluate the current environment, build leadership capability and effectively manage change.
TMS’ Approach to Culture
Building on years of experience and leveraging tried and tested theories, TMS has developed the Organisations as Adaptive Systems model to inform how we evaluate an organisation’s needs in relation to building the right culture for their strategy. TMS brings a deep, holistic insight into how organisations operate, the organisational levers at play, and how to leverage numerous enablers to align culture with strategy. By adopting a helicopter view of the various organisational elements at play for each organisation in its unique context, TMS supports leaders to design and develop integrated, high-impact culture transformation solutions that enable strategic, tactical and operational alignment.
Organisations as Adaptive Systems
Within the organisational system, TMS conceptualises culture specifically as collective behaviour that influences, and is influenced by, climate, underlying belief systems, and values. Organisational performance is a direct outcome of what people in an organisation do, not of how they feel. Because behaviour is observable, it is measurable. This means we can isolate and measure how culture directly impacts performance.
Why Measure Culture?
- It enables you to align your culture in an evidence-based way that will support your strategic direction and achievement of business goals
- To create a clearly visible link between your organisation’s culture and performance
- So you can actively manage behaviours as a central part of your strategic narrative and accelerate execution
- To gain clarity over the ‘Culture Gap’ in your organisation and what the levers are to close this gap
- To have a clear and agreed definition of the culture your organisation needs, so you can diagnose where you are today and then track your progress towards closing the Culture Gap and accelerating performance.
TMS applies a structured process for the ongoing, evidence-based monitoring and management of culture using the Culture15® measurement platform. The process of continuous improvement and development of an organisation’s culture follows four key steps: Define; Diagnose, Develop, and Track.
Measuring Culture with Culture15®
TMS are Australia’s only licensed partner of Culture15® and are specialists in the application of the platform, having pioneered its use in Australia. The Culture15® platform offers an integrated, AI-driven and cloud-based measurement and analytics tool that presents an organisation’s key culture metrics in one dashboard. It is a diagnostic tool that enables organisations to quantify and track culture change, much like any other organisational metric. Culture15® measures fifteen key culture behaviours, providing detailed insights on current culture, how it compares to the desired future culture, and how the collective behaviours of the workforce tangibly equate to living an organisation’s values.
Culture15® offers:
- A tested system with an international track record
- Integrated Sentiment Scores that evaluate trust and the Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
- Visual, Simple and Practical Metrics
- Mixed Response Options – Likert scale and open-ended
- Clear Performance Measures – a bottom-up approach in which data can be segmented and filtered by multiple organisational levels
- Survey Accessibility and Confidentiality
- Activity Tracking
- Return on Investment – the tool is designed to be used in-house without the necessity for additional accreditation
- Robust cyber security and data integrity
- Continuous development and improvement of the platform using AI
TMS’ Approach to Culture Development and Transformation
At the heart of culture transformation is a change in mindset and behaviours. Based on our comprehensive experience in change management, we know that organisation’s do not adapt to change, people do. To achieve collective change, culture transformation initiatives must support behavioural change at the individual level.
TMS works with organisations to ensure that the appropriate practices are implemented to support people in navigating the impacts of culture change, developing their resilience, and embedding new habits so they don’t inadvertently revert to ‘old behaviours’.
We believe that culture must be leader-led and work closely with leaders to enhance their capability and engagement in leading culture conversations. To do this we support leaders to drive inclusive and engaging culture conversations across their organisation that focus on:
- Understanding the context for culture change
- Challenging assumptions about culture and the organisation more broadly (assumptions drive expectations which drive behaviour)
- Agreeing on anchor behaviours and what is practically required for organisational success
- Changing mindsets, building resilience, and creating openness to new ways of working
Building culture capability involves effectively leveraging a range of organisational levers through key enabling activities such as those outlined in the TMS High Performing Cultures Framework.
KEEN TO HEAR MORE?
Contact the TMS Consulting team for a complimentary and obligation-free consultation about how we can support a high performance culture in your organisation.
