Frequently asked questions | Walking the Talk

What if this is our first time doing work on culture?

If your organisation is at this point, you’ll need to focus on getting buy-in for this investment. Take the time to clearly define your business imperative, identifying how people must behave differently in order to achieve it, and identifying what values and beliefs will underpin it. This work can be achieved through facilitated sessions with the executive team.

How can we implement our values?

We use the BE-DO-HAVE model to help translate values into tangible behaviours, decisions, priorities, and systems. Our assessment process looks carefully at your organisation’s values hierarchy and provides practical ideas for implementing, measuring and aligning values into action.

How do we align culture with strategy?

When your organisation has defined strategies that represent a change from the past, it’s a good time to focus on culture. Our Culture Transformation System defines your behavioural and strategy needs, delivering the changes required to support these. Without this, performance is at risk.

We have good diagnostics, but the implementation is unclear.

There are many great assessment tools on the market, but not so many good implementation plans. Walking the Talk will help you extract relevant data, in order to build the best culture plan for your objectives. We also have experience working with Barretts, Human Synergistic, Hewitts Engagement, Great Place to Work, and other known tools.

We've already used multiple consultants and/or frameworks:

Different consultants have different ways of working with values, behaviours and culture, and individual business units will develop their own approaches too. The Walking the Talk Culture Transformation System is content-neutral, so that you can use it to integrate existing initiatives and not reinvent the wheel. Our priority is training your leaders and culture champions on how to implement and use the process consistently.

How can we link culture to our branding work?

If your goal is to explicitly demonstrate how culture is the internal expression of brand values, and how behaviour with customers aligns to the brand promise, your culture work will be led by a close-knit alliance between Marketing and HR. Brand data should be included in the assessment data used for culture planning and branding initiatives should be linked to culture initiatives.

How can we link this work to established leadership curriculum?

Leadership development is one of the most powerful levers available to build the culture you want. Current leadership programmes should already be contributing to your target culture. Your culture assessment will provide feedback on leadership programme effectiveness, so it can then become more closely aligned to the culture priorities.

We've had lots of communication, now what?

'Talk’ is the easy part, but it’s achieving the ‘walk’ that's the primary contribution of our Culture Transformation System. If you've done lots of communication of values or cultural goals, you’ve already lifted the bar and delivering on the ‘walk’ becomes all the more important.

What if we're already measuring engagement?

Work on culture goes to the heart of many frustrations employees have in their working life: slow decision-making, politics, bureaucracy, people not keeping their word, or ideas not being valued. By looking at the values, beliefs and behaviours that are the norm in the company, our culture process will uncover the root cause of these characteristics. Work on culture is the long-term fix for high engagement.

How do we engage the senior team?

In our experience, you can make a start on culture management without full engagement of the senior team. Our Culture Leader's Programmes are a good place to start if you don’t have full executive engagement yet. They show you how to calculate the business benefits of an investment in culture, so that you can convey these to senior executives.

How can we link local culture to head office's chosen direction?

If your global or national organisation has already communicated a set of values that may not be linked to a programme, we can help these come alive. The Walking the Talk methodology takes into account global influences. We measure their impact in our Culture Assessment, so you can consider their contribution as you move through the Culture Planning Process.

Frequently asked Questions.

Do you have a question about transforming your company's corporate culture?

Below are some of the most common questions we get asked about culture change. If you have a different question don't hesitate to contact us.

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