1. Rid the Organization of an Inconsistent Culture to Improve Employee Engagement
Don’t let a confusing culture leave your employees in disarray.
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2. Our understanding of the problem
Executives looking to ensure their corporate culture is aligned with the organization’s policies, practices, and programs.
Executives at an organization that suffers from low employee engagement or disengagement.
HR representatives looking to support their executives in improving the organization’s culture.
Understand the benefits of an aligned, consistent corporate culture and its impact on employee engagement.
Leverage the benefits and minimize the roadblocks of the dominant culture.
Reinforce the culture and eliminate inconsistencies by tweaking organization-wide processes and programs.
Department heads of a department that suffers from low employee engagement or disengagement.
Anyone trying to gain further knowledge on corporate cultures and subcultures within organizations.
Address the subcultures within the organization to ensure they support and do not harm the dominant culture.
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3. Executive summary SAMPLE
Corporate culture is the sum of behaviors, beliefs, values, attitudes, and the ways things get done at an organization.
Culture is one of the top drivers of employee engagement, which drives key business metrics.
Many organizational cultures are unhealthy because they do not have a dominant culture with which to align decisions, practices, policies, and processes.
31% of corporate cultures are unhealthy, leading to high levels of disengagement (Source: McLean & Company; N=28,513).
Whether or not an organization has intentionally created a culture, a culture exists.
Those unintentional cultures that are organically grown often have incongruent policies, practices, and programs. There is no dominant culture for leaders to consciously align decisions with, because the culture is undefined and unintentional.
The first step in improving your organization’s corporate culture is to diagnose it – determine your culture type – and then evaluate which policies, practices, and programs are misaligned with the dominant culture.
McLean & Company works with four culture types, adapted from Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s Competing Values Approach, and although your organization likely doesn’t fit completely into one of them, most organizations have a dominant type.
Depending on your organization’s dominant culture, you can make tweaks to better align policies, processes, and programs with that culture. This will increase engagement.
This solution set doesn’t walk you through how to revamp your culture, but it is a starting point. It will help you diagnose your organization’s culture, identify inconsistencies, and then recommend some quick wins to align and reinforce your dominant culture.
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4. Guided Implementation
McLean & Company offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
Guided Implementation
“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”
DIY Toolkit
“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”
Workshop
“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”
Consulting
“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options
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5. Use McLean’s Model to Remove an Inconsistent Culture and Improve Employee Engagement
Plan to address the Dominant Culture
Plan to Manage Subcultures
Communicate and Plan to Measure Success
Competitive
Innovative
Traditional
Cooperative
Cultures
Adapted from Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s Competing Values Approach
Identify your Corporate Culture
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6. Sample Slides
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7. Employee engagement, currently a hot topic in the world of HR, is driven by corporate culture
Culture has the second greatest impact on employee engagement…
…and employee engagement drives performance, retention, and creativity.
Engaged employees are 2.59x more likely to be A performers than C performers. (McLean & Company; N=4,046)
Engaged employees are 6.20x more likely to agree they are committed to the organization. (McLean & Company; N=23,728)
Engaged employees are 2.18x more likely to agree they are not afraid to try new things in their job. (McLean & Company; N=21,660)
No wonder…
Monitoring engagement more than once a year has been implemented by 20% of respondents in McLean & Company’s HR Trends and Priorities Survey, and was the most impactful employee engagement trend.
Source: McLean & Company, 2015; N=481
If you get culture right, it provides a foundation for high engagement that can sustain your workforce through good times and bad.
– Christopher Rice, President & CEO, BlessingWhite
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8. Start to improve employee engagement by first identifying your organization’s dominant culture
Diagnosing your organization's culture allows you to be aware of likely challenges and minimize the challenges that cause disengagement.
Here’s how this blueprint will help:
Diagnose your organization’s dominant culture.
Leverage the benefits and minimize the roadblocks of your organization’s dominant culture.
Reinforce the culture and eliminate inconsistencies by tweaking organization-wide processes and programs.
Address the subcultures within your organization to ensure they support and do not harm the dominant culture.
Use this blueprint to help you monitor, maintain, and reinforce your organization’s dominant culture.
This blueprint isn’t going to teach you how to change your organization’s culture type.
…Culture creation is a continuous effort. You can never check these steps off your list and say ‘our culture’s done’. Organizations with high-performance cultures continuously monitor results…
– Christopher Rice, President & CEO, BlessingWhite
Changing culture is not an easy step-by-step process. It involves multiple stakeholders and a lot of time. It can take many years to successfully change an organization’s culture. This doesn’t mean it can’t be done; use this blueprint as a starting point.
Corporate culture is a bit like a bonsai tree. It can be steadfast and strong, but it requires deliberate nurturing to grow in a particular way.
One bad chop can also kill the culture you’ve worked for years to create.
– Derek Irvine, V.P., Globoforce
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9. For each culture, some levers are better to pull than others; look to the drivers of engagement to figure out which
McLean & Company’s Engagement Program Methodology identifies ten engagement drivers (areas that influence an organization’s employee engagement).
In addition to engagement, these drivers
impact one another to some degree.
Each of these drivers are levers that
organizations can pull to reinforce
their culture.
Depending on whether your organization’s culture is Competitive, Innovative, Cooperative, or Traditional, some engagement drivers will impact your employee engagement more than others.
As well as walking through the benefits and challenges of each culture type, the following four sections address which engagement drivers (or levers) to pull for your culture and give sample engagement initiatives as a starting point.
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10. McLean & Company Helps HR Professionals To:
Empower management to apply HR best practices
Develop effective talent acquisition & retention strategies
Build a high performance culture
Maintain a progressive set of HR policies & procedures
Demonstrate the business impact of HR
Stay abreast of HR trends & technologies 
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"Now, more than ever, HR leaders need to help their organizations maximize the value of their people. McLean & Company offers the tools, diagnostics and programs to drive measurable results."
– Jennifer Rozon, Vice President, McLean & Company
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