Defining and Driving an Organization Culture Transformation
By Cathy Hansell, Skytop Contributor / November 17th, 2021
Cathy Hansell, the Founder and President of Breakthrough Results, has over 35 years of leadership experience in safety, health, environmental (SHE), product and manufacturing quality experience, holding various senior-level roles at several international corporations including BASF, AlliedSignal, Honeywell International, American Standard, and Trane. Most recently as the Corporate VP of Safety and Occupational Health at American Standard/Trane, she led a strategy throughout 500+ manufacturing, sales, and service operations globally, to create a company-wide safety culture and drive for risk prevention and wellness. The breakthrough results of these efforts translated into a 90% reduction in incident rates, unprecedented insurance premium reductions, increases in business productivity and employee morale, prevention of 22,000 injuries and cost avoidance of $152 MM in seven years.
Cathy is a frequent guest speaker at business, safety (SHE), and academic conferences, councils, and symposia on such topics as safety culture, sustainability, financial investment assessments, leadership engagement, six sigma, and wellness. Cathy is currently a member of ASSP, CSSE, NSC and the NJ and American Bar Associations. Cathy is currently a member of the Corporate EH&S Management Roundtable, the NJ and American Bar Associations, ASSE, CSSE, and NSC. She is an affiliate with Yellow Dynos and Breakthrough Marketing Technologies. Cathy was previously the nominated US delegate to the EU-US Joint Conference on Occupational Health and Safety in Portugal, the International Sustainability Conference in the Canary Islands, and the Safety professional exchange with China. Cathy has co-sponsored and presented at sustainability symposia in London (2012), Guangzhou, China (2013), Rome (2014), Denmark (2014), Toronto (2015), and Naples, Italy (2018). Cathy is also an adjunct professor at the West Virginia University, College of Engineering. She is also the creator, executive producer and host of the Safety and Sustainability Breakthroughs Podcast show.
Cathy holds a BS in environmental science/wastewater engineering from Cook College; an MS in environmental toxicology from NYU Institute of Environmental Medicine (GSAS) and a JD in environmental law from Rutgers University Law School. Cathy is a certified Malcolm Baldrige examiner and instructor from Crosby, Deming and Juran Quality Institutes; a Total Quality Master, certified Six Sigma Belt and a certified CSR practitioner. She received the BCSP Certification as a Safety Management Specialist and ASSP Certification in Executive Safety Management. She was awarded the 2010 Woman of the Year in the Safety and Health Field from the National Association of Professional Women, and one of the Top 100 Women in Safety Engineering from the ASSP.
Combining Difficult Concepts
Combining two difficult concepts and issues of change and culture is certainly a challenging task, but one which is not new and does have an answer. The solution is based on proven business practices. The most effective change model will:
make the future state, or vision, very clear, positive and motivating,
outline a strategy and specific road map, to guide future programs, funding and behaviors,
provide systems, processes and tools which make following the road map easy, clear and desirable, and
drive and implement through a logical change model.
Defining and Driving an Organization Culture Transformation (Part 1) described the vision, mission and strategy. This part 2 describes the processes and systems needed to build and sustain a new culture, and a logical change model to facilitate and accelerate the transformation.
Systems, Processes and Tools to Make the Culture Transformation “Clear, Easy and Desirable”
To begin, it is important to fully understand your current sustainability culture, and why it is in that condition. Let’s be clear. We are seeking to understand the organizational culture and the degree to work which sustainability is a core value. As such we are terming it “sustainability culture”.
Although sustainability culture is an organizational responsibility which should be owned by all employees, all functions and at all levels, it will probably be the safety, health and environmental (SHE) function or a team, with SHE and operations, to initially take the lead role in assessing the current culture state and defining a possible new culture. In your initial discussions and research, seek out answers to the following issues and questions:
Define your overall company culture. What impact and influence does it have on your safety culture?
Define your current safety culture. Where are you in a safety culture journey; how is safety culture defined, led, managed, communicated and measured in your organization? Is the underlying purpose of the safety culture: human benefit, business cost reduction, business productivity gains or all three?
Define the safety culture of the best companies in the world, including all of the above aspects. Consider benchmarking industry peers and competitors, as well as companies outside your own industry,
Identify the gaps in your current culture versus cultures of the best companies, and reasons for those gaps, and
Define a possible new vision and direction of a new safety culture, regardless of your current culture, values and norms in your organization.
Specific Questions That You Might Ask
The following questions may be asked to indicate the current state of the understanding, support and leadership for workplace safety (and health) by business leaders, business functions, safety and health (S&H) staff and employees. This information will be needed to answer the above issues and to assess the level of a unified sense of urgency for change. The answers are the “Brutal Facts”, as coined by J. Collins in Good to Great and the Social Sectors, or the reality of the current company culture, leadership and business situation, and the reasons why.
Is sustainability viewed and led as a business value by the organization?
Is it understood and accepted by the organization that sustainability is everyone’s responsibility?
Does the organization, including all functions, have clear and specific roles, responsibilities and ownership of sustainability?
Is a company “culture of discipline” and responsibility framework in place to reinforce the need to follow rules, make ethical decisions, value people and take actions to advance sustainability?
Is the drive towards safe, ethical or disciplined actions and decisions unimpeded by short term financial pressures?
Are systematic constraints, such as organizational blocks and paradigms, identified and removed, so that actions to drive sustainability actions are encouraged and rewarded?
Is the current sustainability processes preventative and proactive and embedded within the business processes?
Are both lagging and leading indicators collected and analyzed, using systematic approaches (like six sigma/lean tools), to yield helpful information for prevention of sustainability risks and accomplishment of new opportunities?
Does root cause analysis strive to seek process-based, systemic causes and barriers?
Is sustainability talent and resources in place at location and business levels?
Finding Best Practices and New Possibilities
Benchmarking other companies is an excellent and rapid way to learn in detail what the current best practices are, as well as mistakes and lessons learned. These learnings are crucial to develop the optimum vision and strategic road map for sustainability culture. There are many excellent companies to consider as sustainability culture benchmarking partners, including Schneider Electric, Orstead, Neste, Stantec, McCormick and Canadian National Railway. Valuable partners can be within or out of your business sector. Seek the best practices in sustainability culture, process and talent; leading metrics and the level of overall performance results achieved. Also, look internally within your own company for pockets of excellence.
In examining the organization culture and questions above, all 24 business processes must be included. The 24 processes are represented in the following five groupings:
Business planning, goals and performance metrics;
Operations and supporting functional groups;
HR-related areas: training and development; recognition, rewards, discipline
Communications: information flow, IT systems;
Governance: functional excellence, audits, risk and claims management
Gaps are identified, priority process improvements and training are established with clear results, action plans and timelines. The process owners of those target processes with business leaders and field or floor employees and supervisors are all engaged in the improvement efforts. Results are tracked with both leading and lagging indicators.
Application of a Change Model to Drive a Sustainability Culture
Implementation is done with a clear path…a logical change model. It is important to methodically follow all the steps. This will help to ensure that you by-pass common pitfalls. Often, creating new value requires significant change. There might be a temptation to quickly move ahead before the previous steps are complete or to skip steps entirely. As John Kotter has stated in Leading Change (1996), there are eight reasons why many change processes fail:
Allowing too much complacency
Failing to build a substantial coalition
Failing to clearly communicate the vision
Permitting roadblocks against the vision
Not planning and getting short-term wins
Declaring victory too soon
Not anchoring changes in corporate culture and processes
The change model, as outlined below, addresses these points and is an adaptation from John Kotter’s Eight-Stage Change Process with added change and leadership concepts from many business change leaders and experts, including Jim Collins, Jack Welch, Steve Farber, Stephen Covey, Srikanth Srinivas, Price Pritchett & Ron Pound, and Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.
The goal is not only to get the systems, processes and structures right for a new sustainability culture, but also to support all people through their individual culture transitions. So, as you work through the change model, consider ways to make it clear, easy and desirable for people to understand the change and to follow each step of the model. Make it clear so people understand the need for the culture change, what to do and why. Make it easy with available tools, processes, training and coaching. Make it desirable with reward and recognition which reinforce the desired behaviors and results, and which discourage undesirable behaviors and results.
