Values Alignment

Culture Risk Assessment

Whether the objective is an ethical culture, or one that is more productive, innovative or efficient, every organization needs to know which segment of its employee population is most vulnerable to which kinds of fears and pressures, and what will be required to reduce those fears and relieve the pressure.

A Culture Risk Assessment can be instrumental in understanding the personal values that employees bring to work, their perception of the challenges in the current corporate culture, and which values are essential for the organization to be high performance.

Personal Values –

The personal values of employees are the fuel for change. Companies rarely assess the personal values of their employees. It’s much more common to tell the employees which core values they must follow. Yet, understanding what the employees are made of, and which values they bring to work is vital to understanding how they are impacted, both positively and negatively by what happens in the current culture.

In most major organizations with "knowledge" workers, employees embody values that demonstrate a strong sense of personal responsibility as well as a desire to be part of a work community with others who share similar values. Most employees want to be held accountable for their actions and not be micro-managed and supervised every moment of every day. For a successful ethics and compliance program, every employee must feel they have a personal responsibility for the integrity of the organization. Everyone must feel that his or her voice is being heard. This requires managers and leaders to admit they do not have all the answers, and invite employee participation.

There are strong correlations between ethical cultures and organizations that encourage innovation and creativity. Asking employees to take risks to report what they see and “do the right thing” cannot happen where innovation is inhibited.

Employees also want to feel that they can bring their values to work, that there is a shared vision that clarifies the intentions of the organization and gives employees a unifying purpose and direction. The shared values provide guidance in decision-making.

Current Culture –

For most employees who embody these personal values, there is heightened sensitivity to work environments that thwart their personal values. When does pressure to perform become debilitating fear? When does a tough boss become manipulative and exploitive and close any stated open-door policy? When do perceptions of bureaucracy and “firefighting” become so pervasive that employees feel not only that they cannot get their work done, but that there is no point in even raising their concerns?

Desired Culture

Leaders are often surprised at which behaviors and values employees feel are essential for the organization to be “high performance.” In most instances leadership has assumed that the workforce will be team focused and obsessed with customer satisfaction without assessing whether their employees a) embody those values, and b) even if they do, they are not precluded from bringing those values to work because of the challenges in the current culture.

Removing the Roadblocks

Leaders should not try to change their employees’ personal values to match a strategic goal, nor should they try to sell a set of stated core values to an unreceptive audience. In most instances, the employees’ values will be more than adequate to achieve the goals. The company only needs to allow that to happen by removing the barriers that get in their way. An organization that listens to employees’ issues, and then intervenes to address the values that the employees themselves say are essential to be high performance, will be able to tap into the high potential that the employees want to bring to work.

Doing this will build the trust and support needed to drive the strategy execution, and will provide the byproduct of an ethical culture that is willing to take action to ensure that rogue behavior will not be tolerated.

Tools

Culture Survey

The first stage of the Culture Risk Assessment is to survey the employees. One widely-used tool is the Culture Transformation Tools (CTT) developed by Richard Barrett & Associates www.valuescentre.com . The tool has been used by over 1,000 companies world-wide to gain insights as to the real or unstated values in the organization. While many organizations have used the tools for proactive culture change, David Gebler uses the CTT model in determining people-based risks in order to focus leadership on key behaviors that need attention in order to overcome fears and pressures.

Reporting Workshop

David Gebler has been trained and certified to analyze the data derived from the Culture Survey. The initial results from the survey are presented in a 1/2 day workshop for leadership. One outcome from the workshop is to determine specific areas of the organization that warrant a deeper analysis through focus groups and interviews. The Culture Survey will indicate areas of people-based risk that may be inhibiting the achievement of broader integrity goals.

Focus Groups, Interviews and Final Report

Based on the results of the Culture Survey a series of interviews and focus groups with representative employee and manager groups are conducted to explore the results more deeply. This process uncovers the underlying assumptions and rationales for the values selected, as well as reveals behavior-based stories and anecdotes that add depth to the analysis.

The results of the in-person work is presented in a Final Report to leadership. This Report includes recommendations for key learning objectives to be integrated into future training and communications. The Final Report will outline recommended learning objectives to reduce the identified integrity risks, if any, as well as lay out preliminary learning designs to address various audiences, from senior leadership, managers, to line employees.