We believe that meaningful and lasting change in organizations comes from empowering your people to initiate and own change, not from forcing people to comply with one-way, top-down initiatives. Success depends on adopting a high-involvement mindset and executing on inclusive strategies and tactics that empower people while ensuring they have access to the support they need along the way.

We offer customized solutions centered around four approaches, and each is tailored to help you achieve your cultural change goals through designed interactions with leaders across organizations, enablement and training for your people to implement the culture change, and improvement and alignment of business processes to reinforce and reflect a new culture.

Cascade Approach

Auto parts manufacturer
In order to avoid people feeling forced to change, we focused on helping employees foster a deep sense of ownership through engaging activities and dialogue-based communication. Starting with training for all executives, our client defined a vision and plan to create a company with a culture of transparency, open debate and dialogue. Company leaders incorporated a communication cascade to share the vision and plan with managers and general employees, while simultaneously analyzing and optimizing work processes and systems to make the desired culture change a reality.

Business Process Improvement Approach

Automobile manufacturer
We focused on improving key business processes to create large-scale change. One example involved empowering dozens of cross-functional team members and on-site change agents to work together in a new way that embodied the desired culture of cross-functional teamwork and timely decision-making. With our support, the cross-functional teams collaborated to design and propose improvements such as cost reduction plans. The proposals were reviewed by the team’s line management using a faster, more streamlined process. Teams and their managers experienced the business and relationship benefits of the new approach, and ultimately enabled the new culture to take root.

Dialogue & Enablement Approach

Major business services provider
We conducted ongoing measures to create and establish a new culture through dialogue sessions with top management and comprehensive training programs that brought together the top management of each facility. A cohort of change ambassadors volunteered to learn the skills and mindset needed for them to accelerate and instill the change company-wide on their own.

Awareness Training Approach

Major retailer
We co-created a change program for all retail stores managers to learn the mindset and skills necessary to lead corporate culture change, while also involving frontline employees' and incorporating their ideas and perspectives. As part of the program implementation, we monitored and measured changes in various aspects of retail store operations. Stores that conducted the training program showed marked improvement compared with stores that did not conduct the training.

Situation

Our client, famous for being the first major Japanese cosmetics company on the world stage, made a strategic decision to evolve into a truly global company. As part of building its global vision, company leaders realized they would not be able to achieve the company vision without eliminating its top-down, silo-based corporate culture. So, they set out on a three-year journey to do just that.

Solutions

PFC began by surveying the employees through a variety of interviews in order to assess the state of the organization. Using a series of workshops with the client’s leaders, we co-created a culture change strategy and plan specific to the client’s business. We recognized that dramatic change would not be possible quickly. So our plan and subsequent support spanned five years. This allowed our client to build a forum where discussions about how to overcome current organizational constraints could take place. The outputs of those conversations helped to identify the most important issues to address and develop ways to tackle them. By taking a facilitative and inclusive approach through this process – and by equipping people with facilitation skills – employees became empowered to problem-solve more independently and with teams.

Results

Making broad use of internal facilitators was a key factor in reducing employees’ dissatisfaction from rigid top-down management culture and processes. In addition, younger and mid-career employees started to contribute their ideas to solving on-the-job issues more frequently. That, in turn, enabled career mobility and a culture that helped accelerate progress for achieving the client’s strategic vision.