How to Measure Culture Change Without Killing It

Jasper Johns 0-9

From 2014 to 2018, I led Innovation & Engagement for Global Quality at a global pharmaceutical group. In this period of time, a radically new approach was taken to improve manufacturing quality across 3 continents and several plants employing 10,000 people. At the heart of this approach: engagement of the employee community, evolution of its collective identity and its collaboration at work. The results have been amazing, I wrote (blog, articles, books) and spoke (conferences, podcasts) about this experience on several occasions.

In the course of this transformation, we have imagined and implemented ways to measure our cultural evolution, without going against it. I shared them in a 2016 article which has since become one of the most read articles on my blog. As the interest continues to this day, here is an update, with some additional elements and clarifications.

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For someone who’s never been a huge fan of numbers, the topic of measurement has kept me surprisingly busy lately and – to my bigger surprise – interested.

My work (my passion) is to support business and organizational transformation, through social and digital initiatives that mobilize internal or external stakeholders. Corporate activism is a very powerful lever for change. Engaging people at scale in a movement, triggered by a cause, for them to collectively create the change, produces much deeper and more sustainable change than any other transformation approach.

I speak from [10 years] experience: "change management", as we usually think of it, doesn't hold a candle to it.

This work is about individuals and communities, perceptions, social dynamics, storytelling, relations... not much about numbers, one might think. But it is also done for a business and organizational performance objective: no one seeks transformation for the sake of transformation itself. Financial or quality performance is monitored to death through zillions of numbers, but how do you assess the effectiveness of culture change efforts? And, as importantly while you strive to evolve behaviors towards individual empowerment and purpose-driven collective action, how do you establish indicators that reinforce the culture you try to establish? When indicators are often perceived as imposed from above, conducive of competition... how do you NOT generate a fundamental contradiction, likely to nullify the desired cultural change - or even to trigger additional cynicism and disengagement?

The problem(s) with measurement

In a classic article for the Journal for Strategic Performance Measurement, Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers explain that behaviors – “commitment, focus, teamwork, learning, quality”(...), people paying “attention to those things that contribute to performance (...) are never produced by measurement. They are performance capabilities that emerge as people feel connected to their work and to each other. They are capacities that emerge as colleagues develop a shared sense of what they hope to create together (...). Each of these qualities and behaviors (...) is a choice that people make”. However, “measurement is critical” and the authors provide some insightful perspectives on design criteria for measure processes.

New measurement principles, from a field experience

A global vaccine producer, the company I worked with began in mid-2014 a vast effort to change the way it worked - starting with Quality. The need for change had become evident from a manufacturing quality perspective, as quality was cyclical and unsatisfactory. Despite the allocation of significant resources, quality was simply not improving. A prescriptive, top-down, controlling and risk-averse work culture had become an obstacle to achieving quality individual and collective work. As a result of courageous acknowledgement and leadership, a profound change was initiated: the mobilisation of many volunteers supported by the hierarchy, in a movement led by a common and co-developed purpose, making full use of the possibilities offered by the internal (digital) social network. From within the system, it was obvious that things were changing. Behavior was changing. New successes were being celebrated. But in order to steer with finesse, and to silence the critics (there are some...), it was important to measure and monitor our progress. To do this, we proceeded according to the following principles.

1. Culture change can’t avoid metrics

“If culture improves, performance will improve” is not enough. Culture change efforts, especially in large, global, traditional companies can be costly: they’re often coaching intensive.  The organization needs indicators that are specific to this investment and that reflect how effective the effort is. From the beginning of our culture change efforts, success metrics were clearly defined.

2. Prescription kills empowerment

As soon as metrics are issued, they turn into objectives, even if they’re not intended this way. Decided by the top and linked to rewards, they generate unhealthy behaviors that reinforce the very culture we want to change. The solution we found to avoid this pitfall was threefold:

• Co-build the indicators. Our indicators were designed by the Quality leadership team and subject to a wide consultation of all employees through our internal social network. “Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work” (Weathley & Rogers)

• No reward linked. Our culture change metrics were established for us to know if / when we’re successful. They were not connected to any reward system – only performance metrics are. It was stated clearly when the employee consultation was performed.

• Handling with care the volunteer-related metrics. In the beginning of the movement, reaching a big number of people throughout the organization was essential. Tracking the number of volunteers informed us on how successful we were. However, we refrained from disclosing the numbers. What we looked for were genuinely engaged employees, not massive numbers of voluntold.

3. Not just engagement... Culture metrics are connected to business imperatives

Engagement surveys are a popular way nowadays to assess how motivated employees are; they reflect key characteristics of the organization’s culture. But they don’t say much about the effectiveness of culture change efforts. Employees can be very engaged (“satisfied, committed”) and collectively ineffective. In our case, culture change metrics are closely tied to quality improvement metrics – because that’s where all started. Several manufacturing quality metrics that we believe are strongly influenced by our working culture (human error rate, repeat deviation rate, deviation closing timeliness...) are part of our culture performance dashboard.

4. No one-size-fits-all measurement

Culture change is never a generic objective; therefore measurement is distinct from one organization to another. Although all organizations today want to become more agile and nimble, better at innovation, etc., each of them is unique, with their own history, culture and challenges. The need for transformation meets a specific objective at a certain time. Therefore, its measure differs from one organization to another. What works for us may be different from what works elsewhere.

5. Good metrics are adaptive

Gapingvoid Art "Let's Measure Something"

As we made progress on some aspects of our culture, we felt we needed to assess new dimensions. One of the leading indicators in our initial metrics was the number of volunteers, i.e. employees who signed up to support our Opportunity. Once the momentum was reached (more than 3,400 people as of today! – almost half of the target industrial workforce), this indicator became less essential and we shifted our attention to another dimension: how much these volunteers are setting the organization in movement through concrete actions.

6. Competitive metrics kills collaboration

This point is so obvious, it’s almost embarrassing to state it again. But all indicators are usually split per site, function, business unit, department... triggering instant competition between them. This is precisely what we wanted to avoid. A significant part of the quality issues we need to solve comes precisely from the lack of cooperation between manufacturing sites, or between them and global functions. So, we’ve decided to have a global metric that would not be split – unlike all other indicators.

7. Meaningful metrics contribute to change

The most useful metrics do not only measure the progress of culture change, they contribute to making it happen. This year, as our change efforts shift from raising engagement to channeling the energy into action, we monitor the number of improvement initiatives generated across the organization. What matters more than their size is that the improvements have taken place, are reported and shared. The impact of this indicator is quite impressive: focus from problem-obsession to solution finding, more pride, optimism, replication of improvements across sites, time saving, and a virtuous circle of positivism.  This is culture change in action!

What about your organization? How do you monitor the effectiveness of culture change? I’d love to hear from your experience in the comment section. 

You can read this article in French here and see how I can help you and your organization here.