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Bringing a nuanced approach to making
culture work
Do you know how to align the permitted microcultures of your organization with your intended culture?
Organizational culture is nuanced and it requires a nuanced culture improvement plan.
A single top-down culture improvement strategy aimed at the macroculture level is difficult enough to implement. Coordinating an implementation strategy that is tailored to the specific needs of multiple microcultures requires an integrated approach that keeps each initiative moving forward in harmony with the others.
Our Nuance Culture Consulting™ service is designed to offer that coordination.
Do your policies support and inclusive culture of belonging?
Most policies and procedures based on templates or an 'industry best practice’ copied from from another organization.
When policies and procedures aren’t tailored to your culture and aren't created with an inclusive or equitable mindset they can become roadblocks to achieving culture improvement goals.
It can be difficult to identify:
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Inequity in policies
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Policy blocks to an inclusive culture of belonging.
Our policy audit and creation services can help you achieve inclusive equitable policies.
Developing the ability to foster inclusive cultures
Having a diverse workforce isn’t enough. Age, education, gender, nationality, religion, political view, and just about every way in which people differ from one another is an opportunity to expand your organization’s ability to view, adapt, respond, and navigate every aspect of its operations and interactions. But this can only happen when that diversity is fully included and incorporated into the company and have a voice in shaping its future.
Nuance Culture Consulting™
Our NUANCE Culture Development ProgramTM Fosters Inclusive Cultures of Belonging
Name your culture goals
We will work with your leadership, HR, and DEIB teams to identify and prioritize your culture goals using a combination of Collaborative Workshopping, Stakeholder Interviews, and Listening tours.
Understand your organizational culture
There are many culture models out there that you can use to understand your organization's culture. Some of these models are even useful.
But do they offer a complete picture of organizational culture?
Can you use them to measure the nuances of your culture?
We know culture. We understand that culture is a complex system that requires the ability to use multiple models concurrently to develop a NUANCE(D) understanding and approach to fostering inclusive cultures of belonging. Sure, we could use the models that are already out there, but they were never designed to be used together which makes them poorly suited to developing a detailed NUANCE(D) understanding of organizational cultures. That's why we have developed our own models and the methods to audit organizations to identify the culture qualities present in your organization.
We use our Social, Operational, and Ideological Culture Quality Audits to measure and understand your organization’s macro and microcultures as they exist today.
Assess employee experience
Our Social, Operational, and Ideological Culture Quality Audits also provide us with detailed insight into your employee’s culture experiences that we can use in conjunction with what we learn about your organization’s macro and micro cultures. Because the same audits that measure your organization’s macro and microcultures are able to provide us with your employees' culture experiences, the knowledge we gain is immediately actionable and aligned with the culture models used to understand your organization’s culture.
Narrowly focus initiatives
Fostering inclusive cultures of belonging requires an intentional and nuanced approach that targets the specific areas of need within your organization's culture that will achieve the most meaningful outcomes. Small, narrowly focused efforts can have outsized results if you know where they are most needed. Many consultants will offer broad-widely focused solutions. These can and do have a positive impact on organizational culture and employee culture experiences, but they are mostly surface level improvements that are easily lost as organizations grow and change. With the highly detailed data from our Social, Operational, and Ideological Culture Quality Audits we are able to work with your team to identify the misalignments between your intended and permitted cultures as well as the microcultures most out of alignment with your intended culture. Using this knowledge we can help you plan narrowly focused initiatives that have meaningful and measurable impacts on your organizational culture overall.
Communicate expectations and successes
In order to successfully foster an inclusive culture of belonging you need to be communicating with your workforce. Maintaining communications with your workforce includes communicating:
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The kind of Culture you intend to foster
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An acknowledgement of the culture you currently have
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The efforts you plan to undertake to foster your intended culture
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The ways in which you will hold yourselves accountable
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What you expect from them
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What they can expect from you
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The success you have along the way
Evaluate outcomes
Regular evaluation of your progress is essential to achieving your intended culture. An annual deployment of the Social, Operational, and Ideological Culture Quality Audits is one of the best ways to measure and track your outcomes. Tracking our progress and outcomes allows us to reevaluate and shift our narrowly focused initiatives when needed and as success in other areas allow.
The Expertise You Need
When You Need It
CULTURE
PLANNING
DEI Policy Audits
Policy Development
Mission, Values, Goals Development
Listening Tours
Executive Roundtables
Organizational and Career Mapping
Inclusion Policy Development
Goal Setting
Culture Initiative Planning and Implementation
Improved Cultures: Stories of Success
Culture detox
A national organization was alerted to a branch location where the culture was severely out of alignment with organizational culture at large. The local manager had several harassment and discrimination complaints against him, but beyond that he had fostered a culture where his team also felt comfortable expressing toxic behaviors.
The misalignments were identified, culture training was conducted, and ongoing conversations along with 'safe to ask permissions' were implemented.
Over the course of a year, the team began communicating more effectively, inappropriate and harmful language slowly gave way to healthier dialog. The result was an office that shifted from being an unwelcoming place for women, LGBTQ+ community members, and liberal leaning employees to one where it was possible for members of those groups to show up as their whole and authentic selves.
Moving from a disciplinary mindset to a development mindset
Our CEO & Founder worked with a leadership team that was experiencing high turnover due to both voluntary and involuntary departures.
In working with the leadership, she observed that all the employees that had left or been terminated had multiple disciplinary actions in their files. In reviewing each of the records it was clear that while each employee was informed of their poor performance, failure, or breach of policy, the causes were never discussed, and performance improvement plans were never implemented. In short, the employees were never given the opportunity or tools to improve.
After working with leadership to develop the skills to effectively work with employees to identify root causes, provide tools and actions that would lead to improved performance and compliance; employee retention rose while overall team performance improved.