Culture evolution

Harnessing the power of culture to drive sustainable success and deliver on your strategy

Thriving in change: the power of culture

Culture is the backbone of an organisation and provides a frame for all employees in their day-to-day work. As recognised by many leaders, culture is also one of the critical topics to get right when going through organisational changes. In fact, 65% of leaders feel that culture is even more important than strategy or the operating model when it comes to enabling the long-term success of their business, and a whole 80% of them believe that their organisation’s culture will have to evolve in the next five years for their company to sustain in the market.

When aligned with the company strategy and its operating model, culture is the glue that holds a company together no matter which challenges they are facing and without requiring command and control to overcome any challenges.

However, whether culture transformation succeeds ultimately also depends on the ability of its leaders to transform and role model the right behaviours. If leaders are aware of their own values and behaviour, and the resulting impact on others, this can serve as a catalyst for cultural evolution and transformation. Yet, many leaders struggle to address culture topics due to the intangible nature of it.

Any culture transformation starts with pinpointing where you want to go as an organisation and which behaviour and ways of working this requires from every employee.

Key challenges in your journey

Some of the issues your organisation might face in its journey are ultimately rooted in culture and require different behaviours displayed daily from the work floor to the board room:

Are you undergoing a change in strategy, your target operating model or driving a cultural change and need assistance in bringing your employees along on the journey?
Are you in a major transformation (e.g. new (agile, hybrid) ways of working, become more customer centric, major finance S4 transformation) that needs the benefit of cultural energy to accelerate and sustain results?
Is your organisation’s culture at risk of undermining your business performance?

Do you need to reconsider your employee value proposition to stay attractive for talents in the market?
Does your current culture create behavioural risk or compliance issues?
Is your organisation going through a transaction where you’ll be merging two different cultures?
Is your culture and leadership team creating an environment where people feel safe and have the feeling they belong to a community?

Our approach for sustainable change

At PwC, we base our Culture Evolution approach on the extensive expertise of PwC’s Katzenbach Center: our culture research centre with 30+ years of experience of advising leaders and organisations on their most pressing culture topics.

We provide you with adequate methodologies, tools and industry best-practices to co-create a culture evolution journey for your organisation to achieve your strategic agenda. We build on your unique cultural strengths to accelerate change and enable the execution of your purpose and strategy.

Throughout the implementation, we enable you to be in the driver-seat to deliver sustainable culture change. The methodology provides you with a data-driven approach to culture evolution. Allowing you to measure your cultural strengths and weaknesses and monitor improvements over time.

Interventions are tailored and used in an experience driven approach where we roll-out, learn and iterate in every cycle. This allows for a flexible set-up, playing-into organisational needs throughout the transformation.

How can we support you on your journey?

We provide end-to-end offerings to assess your current culture, determine the needed critical few behaviours to evolve that culture, design tailored interventions, roll-out culture pilots and implementation programmes and measure impact. Depending on your needs and where you stand in your journey, we can support across your entire programme or through targeted offerings.

Culture assessment

We help you to assess your existing culture in concrete, specific and objective terms, either through interviews with senior leaders, surveys (PwC’s Culture Thumbprint) or focus groups. We identify, analyse and understand your root-causes for current organisational challenges (e.g. internal collaboration, taking sound decisions), the cultural traits of your organisation, including strengths and areas requiring enhancement, as well as potential risks for the future if not tackled.

Any culture transformation starts with pinpointing where you want to go as an organisation and which behaviour and ways of working this requires from every employee. We use our Culture Thumbprint diagnostic as well as other methods like interviews and focus groups to map your cultural profile.

Learn more

Culture definition: co-create your future culture

We define together your ambition for the to-be culture. This can start by looking at or supporting you in defining your purpose incl. vision and mission.
What does good look like? For example, having a customer centric culture, in line with your strategy and operating model, where all decisions are taken with the customer in mind and everyone in the organisation knows their contribution and impact on the end-customer.

We help you then to create a shared understanding of what this requires from the behaviours of employees. Which 3-5 behaviours* will be critical to enable the organisational change and create a ripple effect? Next to this we help you to understand what’s preventing your employees from showing the desired behaviours today. Once the aspirations and ambitions are clear, we translate this to how you will work with the organisation to reach this new state.

^{* Why focus on behaviour? It's the most tangible manifestation of your organisational culture. Your organisation is moulded by several key behaviours that, when shared among employees, form a distinct pattern. These behaviours are pivotal in shaping the environment and ethos of your workplace, making them central to any effective cultural transformation.}

Step 1 – Pilot: test and experiment new behaviours

We run together culture pilots in targeted teams so people can experience the new reality in their business as usual. For example, implementing agile methodologies like kanban boards and daily stand ups to create more transparency and efficiency in teams, accompanied by a coach to support employees with immediate feedback and amendment of methodologies where needed.

Ensuring a safe environment in which it is easy to experiment, and learnings can be taken quickly is one of the keys for a successful pilot phase.

Step 2 – Scale: create momentum for your culture evolution

We help you ensure the change sticks by embedding formal and informal enabling mechanisms. Informal approaches are used to build emotional commitment and pride (e.g. networks, peer interactions, exemplary motivational leaders) in doing things differently, and deploying formal mechanisms (e.g. performance management, policies and processes, office space) to reinforce and sustain the desired 'critical few' behaviour changes.

Keeping up the moment is essential in this step. Sharing and celebrating success as well as measuring it through relevant KPIs (e.g. employee and customer NPS, process efficiency, incident reports) can help your development towards the desired culture.

A partnership for a lasting culture evolution

Understanding which traits of your culture are supporting or hindering the execution of your strategy and cultural aspiration.
Leveraging the Culture Thumbprint, making your culture evolution tangible and visible, and provide you with data driven insights helping you to take informed decisions.
Tailoring and co-creating your culture evolution journey that aligns with your long-term objectives, paving the way for sustained growth and success.

Providing professional support and expertise for the implementation of the critical few behaviours, applying a mixture of tried and tested methods in combination with tailored interventions to create a ripple effect in the organisation and gain momentum for the change.
Aligning different stakeholder groups e.g. executives, divisions, countries behind a shared vision/purpose and behaviours.
Generating quick learnings through piloting, measuring and only scaling impactful interventions.