Culture is one of the most important factors for business growth, employee engagement and belonging, and building your brand.

We believe that the essential element to instill corporate philosophy successfully lies with each employee having a clear understanding of his or her own values. This is why our process begins by helping employees draw out, clarify and validate their own values. Only when this is complete can we begin a genuine dialogue about how their organization's values are related to their own values. And when employees have the space and freedom to make their own connections with company values, their affinity for the organization grows as does their willingness to demonstrate organizational values in how they do their work.

We believe that successfully instilling culture to be the key factor for creating healthy and sustainable organizations.

We offer a full range of services that include defining or clarifying your corporate culture, developing the strategy and plans for instilling your values throughout the company, designing and facilitating workshops and other experiences that spark mindset shifts and empower behavior change, and measuring the effectiveness of the initiative. We also have extensive experience helping leaders instill corporate culture globally and in multiple languages.

Situation

A Japan-based global business services client decided to restructure its corporate philosophy to reflect its expanded global customer base and workforce. Doubtful that a traditional top-down approach would not be successful, our client wanted to take an approach that would give employees a greater sense of individual ownership of the new culture.

Solution

Together with the client, we co-created a concrete, robust vision of the initiative's output, tailored methodologies and frameworks for the initiative, and designed the process for instilling the client's culture. During the dozens of workshops held over a period of several months, we empowered the client's own project team members to facilitate workshops that centered on using a variety of dialogue tools. Project team members facilitated dialogue about the their corporate purpose, strategic goals and employees' individual values. The workshop participants also exchanged candid opinions on how corporate philosophy had been communicated previously and how what changes in corporate communications they would like to see implemented in the future. The workshops concluded with an action planning session.

Results

The project members synthesized a comprehensive proposal new company culture based on the workshop outputs and submitted it to the company's leadership team, who agreed to adopt it. During the subsequent rollout phases, many workshop participants volunteered to play the role of corporate cutlure ambassabors to help instill the new culture across the entire organization.

Situation

In its effort to evolve its newly formed group of medical and life science companies into a leading company, our client set out to establish a single global brand. Creating the brand required, in part, synthesizing a consolidated value proposition as well as organizational values from thousands of employees across three continents and five discrete businesses that range from biotech to medical devices. The group company’s senior leadership insisted that the essence of the new brand be defined by employees and not outside consultants.

Solution

PFC partnered with the client’s US-based advertising agency to co-design and co-facilitate an inclusive, interactive and culturally appropriate approach for collaborating with employees on sharing their insights and synthesizing them into a unified global brand. Additionally, PFC used its trilingual capabilities as well as its expertise in cross-cultural facilitation and process consulting to ensure the US- and Japan-based global project team met its milestones and goals during the yearlong project.

During the internal rollout of the project, PFC designed and facilitated a cascade of executive seminars and workshops to help employees spread out across three continents understand, internalize and begin to embody the new corporate values at the foundation of its culture. PFC also provided the client’s change agents with the resources needed to facilitate sessions on their own.

Results

Our client’s board of directors approved the new group company brand based on their evaluation that the project deliverables met their criteria for high quality, global applicability and evidence that the brand ideas were borne from and endorsed by employees around the world. As a result, 88% of more than 1,100 people who participated in the first wave of workshops to instill the new brand and culture reported that they personally support the initiative.