[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No, that’s just my m lunch.

[COBY]: Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. And let’s get started with a question. How do we get and sustain buy in for organizational culture transformation?

[JAMES]: really my answer is going to I mean so many times it depends, but this time it depends really on your authority level. so I want to talk a little bit about like, so if you’re an executive, like a coo, or VP of Ops, you may have the budget and authority to actually start implementing cultural transformations yourself without any additional approvals. But even in this case, you’re still going to have to generate buy in for the change itself. And I would suggest starting with actually the rest of your executive team, especially in ops, cultural transformation that you implement are going to have a ripple effect through a lot of different departments. So having other executives, other leaders bought into the importance of the change, how you know the old way is good, but this new way is better, is going to make a big difference in how we generate buy in and sustain buy in throughout the rest of the organization. Now if you’re a mid level manager, mid level leader or director, you’re going to have to generate buy in both up to the C Suite and down to the rest of the team, the people who will be experiencing the change. from the C Suite’s perspective, you really need to communicate and focus, how you generate buy in based on the priorities that they’ve set. Right? So you, as a director or as a mid level leader, you should have a pretty good idea of what the priorities your C suite, has set forth for the company for this quarter, for this year, whatever framework we’re looking at, and it’s really important, you have to tailor your message to make sure that you’re speaking to the needs of the people you’re communicating with. So in with the C Suite it’s all about how is this cultural transformation going to help the company to achieve the priorities that they’ve already set. Whether their priorities are, I don’t know, internal growth and stability, it would be through things like improved recruitment, and retention. Whether, if it’s external growth, maybe it’s through greater customer, service and customer acquisition. But really whatever those priorities are, you need to sell them on how this change is going to help the company achieve X, Y or Z. Now if you are The CEO or owner yourself. You probably don’t need to generate buy in from the perspective of getting permission to do something, but you absolutely need to generate buy in for how this change is actually going to help make things better for the people who will be experiencing the change. We know change is messy and it always creates new challenges as we try to do new things. And if your only communication is really how this change is going to help you, the business owner, or help the business become more profitable, be more competitive, make the company more money, you are setting yourself up for failure. And I, can’t stress that enough because we’ve seen what happens when owners try to do something new and sell it to their teams as the company’s gonna make more money. Well, nobody cares if it means that they are going to have more work, more stress and none of the benefits of or payoff from the change. You are not going to be able to generate and sustain buy in for what you’re trying to do. So make sure that you’re communicating to your team how this is actually going to be good for them, how this is going to help them in their role, be more efficient and it’ll make their lives easier. It will improve the, the work environment. How tie it specifically to their benefit. Because if you only focus on yourself, the simple fact is they don’t care or don’t care as much.

[COBY]: Absolutely. And I think that again, it’s very important for people to know that the difficulty, the awkwardness, the frustrations that naturally come with any kind of organizational change is not for someone else’s benefit. It’s not for people, it’s not for benefit that’s beyond them. They have to toil so someone else can make more money or someone else’s life is easier. It really does need to be tied to them. And I think that a good kind of like you know, messaging kind of, whether you’re, whether you’re, you know, in a position as an executive or as a director or as a CEO or owner. Is the idea of whatever you’re doing, realizing that you might need to articulate this whole thing as old was good, but new is better is kind of that running theme that you want to make sure that you’re not dismissing stuff that you know, was working, that people were comfortable with everything like that, that you’re just saying that that you know, that was fine. But we, but we can do, we can be so much better or it can be so much better, much better for us if we go through the efforts of this change and we have to make sure that any strategies that we’re doing are not just the nice to have case or social good case too. Right. Because a lot of it’s going to be about persuading people to accept not just the change, but also the difficulties that come with organizational transformation. Right. So the strategies that we’re going to recommend, that we’re going to provide you and recommend are really going to be counter to the normal methods of just saying, well, things will be better. You know, we want things to just, you know, have a nicer kind of environment that people work in. We really need to tie this to addressing major issues and how we do that is that whomever you’re trying to persuade and sustain, get into staying, buying from, you have to make them see that the cost of doing nothing, the cost of avoiding the change is too great, it’s too expensive, it’s too stressful. Because if you’re just using the nice to have or social good, that’s not going to move the needle. You have to make it clear the doing nothing costs too much.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And that’s a really good point. I mean really, when we’re talking about generating buy in, we’re talking about communication. Whatever form that takes and whatever the specific type of communication that you’re engaging in has to be tailored to your audience. Right. We need to communicate with people in the way that they will understand and receive it. I mean we know this from a marketing perspective and we do it quite well. Right. We create target, demographics and avatars, to understand the thought patterns and the priorities of the people who we will be marketing to. Marketing is a communication effort. We can take that same level of expertise and understanding and start to tailor our messages to the people that we need to generate buy in with. If that is the C suite, you need to understand what their priorities are, what’s top of mind for them. If it’s the employees, you need to understand what their priorities are, what’s top of mind for them, and tailor your message appropriately. Because there are very clear financial benefits to cultural transformations. There are also very clear personal benefits from a work life balance, from a quality of life perspective with, in the workplace to cultural transformations. Just make sure that you’re communicating the right benefit to the right person.

[COBY]: Yeah, yeah. So I think, so what I think we’re going to try and do with this episode, is I think we’re going to tend to, I think we’re going to address kind of three Big roadblocks towards cultural transformations. And then try and make sure that we tie everything back to getting and sustaining buy in, to those audiences as we talk about each of them. Because each of them are probably going to be very, very beneficial for just kind of have a conversation about and hear about for anybody involved in cultural transformations. But we also want to make sure that it’s relevant, you know, to the question of getting interesting buy in, but also making sure that anybody that falls into those three specific groups that you mentioned earlier have something to work with.

[JAMES]: Cool.

[COBY]: So the first roadblock for cultural transformation is something that most people probably don’t realize is as big of a problem as it is. And that is the fact that the biggest barrier to success with this sort of thing isn’t actually apathy, it’s the existence of performative solutions. Because people often think they have already solved the problem or they already have, they already have tools to solve the problem. So or so. So then, so then when you bring towards, you know, new ideas for actual more effective transformations or anything like that, the response you get, whether from a staff perspective or from like, you know, or from a higher level, like your supervised perspective is well, why would we invest in this again? Why would we go through this process again? Didn’t we already solve this problem? But so many, times when we’re talking about cultural transformations, we’ve picked a single easy to find, easy to measure, short term intervention that’s really nothing more than performative. And then we think that, you know, again, box checked, problem solved, company better. But really. And that’s probably the biggest barrier that far more than what most people think, which is apathy.

[JAMES]: And with performative, we’re really talking about those solutions that you put in place that merely act as a checklist or a tick box of things to do. There are solutions that. So I don’t want to go too hard on it, but sometimes recognition programs can be a very performative solution. Ah, just a tick box of. We’ve done, you know, we, we hold a annual, barbecue. We you know, do service awards once, a year. You know, you’re just, you’re going through and there’s some value to those things as part of a larger strateg strategy. But if the problem becomes, you know, wanting to do more and having people say, well we already have a recognition program in place. Why would we actually invest in making sure that our managers understand and know how to communicate recognition and appreciation to their teams? Right. So it’s the idea that There are these, solutions that are in place that are easy tick box measurements that we can say, yes, we have done this so that we can move on to something else rather than focusing on solutions that have more of a lasting and direct impact.

[COBY]: Yeah, and we see this sometimes when companies try and implement like gamification programs or like, you know, like, like, you know, like challenges and leaderboards for like, you know, in things like production or in call centers or stuff like that. It’s when they try and insert something that is very visible and from a very shallow understanding should, you know, make the appearance of an improvement. And again, like recognition programs that are really more set and forget it or these other kinds of like flavor of.

[JAMES]: The month engagement surveys fall into, in my mind, often fall into performative solutions. And it’s not the tool that is the, that takes it into that performative stage. It’s the intent behind how you use the tool.

[COBY]: It’s the strategy.

[JAMES]: It’s the strategy or lack thereof. Because we often see people wanting to do something around employee engagement. So they, you know, what do they do? They start googling and they find, hey, here’s an engagement survey. It’s you know, by this big, well known company. We’re just going to start surveying people and but if you’re collecting, anytime you’re collecting data, you need to actually report back to people and you need to use that data and you, they’re like, just surveying people isn’t enough. Understand? And anyways, I, I have ranted about engagement surveys many times in the past and I’m gonna try really hard to keep my mouth somewhat shut. But I do have to say that these surveys are excellent tools as part of a larger strategy, but we’re often focusing on the wrong metrics. Yeah, happiness is not an engagement metric.

[COBY]: No, no. Well, and that’s just it. Like, I mean even when we go in and do some initial work with organizations to try and assess their workplace culture, assess the situation that they’re in, one of the things that we always kind of say we need to do a bit of data collection to figure out kind of what’s to the snapshot of what things are like today. And one of, and a big roadblock to us doing some of that initial work is like, well, we already collect information. Why would we pay you to collect information? Like, well that’s a fair point. But what are you, what’s the information that you’re collecting? What do you use it for? Where does it come from? Like, you know, what, what is the strategy? Behind it. And those tend to be tougher questions. But this is just it. They put in some standard set and forget it type of like employee surveys or just. Or just. Or just like demographic information that they know they’re supposed to be collecting it, so they do. But the act of collecting it is the performative solution. We can. We can tangibly see how much data that we have.

[JAMES]: We have done an engagement survey this quarter.

[COBY]: Yeah.

[JAMES]: Box checked.

[COBY]: Exactly. So then why would we need to do anything else? Is. Is that big roadblock? We do something. Whether that’s something is absolutely devoid of a strategy or just appears like it’s. It’s helpful. And then. So why would we do anything else? Even if, you know, even if you know m. You. You know, you have a bigger strategy can really help us. Why would we do something we’ve already invested in? It is such a big problem. So one thing that, so by identifying this problem, we want to make sure that we can provide you listening with. How do you. How do you get around this? How do you resolve this? How do you avoid this roadblock? And the biggest reason is I think that the response or the approach you have to take to it is kind of using a bit of a sickness versus symptom approach. Right. Like these are, you know, identifying, you know, the things that you might be addressing the problems that you are trying to address with these performative solutions. Like, again, if morale is low, implementing like, you know, like Pizza Fridays is addressing the symptom, not the sickness. And the kind of. The way that I. I’ve described it to clients, as I’ve said, you know, think about it like vehicle maintenance. What you’re doing with this, again, let’s say Pizza Friday is you’re turning up the radio to mask the sound of your brakes grinding.

[JAMES]: Right.

[COBY]: You have covered it up.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: And you’ve done something. And the idea is. But the fact is that you’re still paying for this problem despite the fact that you don’t hear the grinding anymore.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: Right. Or it’s almost like whenever we, we survey employees, they tell us they’re unhappy, so we just stop surveying them. Right. Like, I mean, there’s that.

[JAMES]: I remember hearing that one. And yeah, it’s hard to keep a straight face in some conversations. And so I’ve got a bad poker face. I need. Really need to work on that.

[COBY]: Yes. Luckily, sometimes those happen. Not when we’re in person. Most of those tend to happen over.

[JAMES]: Virtually so early engagements.

[COBY]: Yeah. A little easier to cover it up. But. But the thing Too is that. But so part of what you have to realize too is you have to try and help the audience. You know. So if you’re executive or director or whomever and you’re trying to you know, persuade your audience then you know, using the symptom versus sickness approach to try and separate the two. One of the ways that we often find it helpful to do that is we have something that we call labor value loss statistics and we actually have a podcast episode from last season. It’s so season two, episode four, about the cost of doing nothing about your workplace culture where we identify you know we tie problematic workplace culture issues directly to an employee to loss of employees annual salary. Like sort of for example poor communication strategies in your workplace can cost 21% of the average employee’s annual salary in you know, in loss of productivity, in you know, things being missed, in mistakes and those kinds of things. Yes, burnout and related absences and loss of productivity from burnout can, can become, can cost as close to 25% of the average employee salary and a incivility in your workplace can cost about 26 of an average employee salary. So these three problems, again poor communication, burnout and incivility are the sickness. And you have to realize that you, you have to, you have to, you have to treat the sickness if you actually want to start to see, to move beyond performance solutions and actually make a difference. So using that type of addressing the sickness kind of business case focus. The cost of doing nothing is too high. We are already losing 21% of the annual employee salary because of how bad our internal comms are. That type of information can help move past this performative solution roadblock and actually help you get to the sickness, not just chasing the symptoms.

[JAMES]: Yeah, I ah really like the incivility stat. I like the language around incivility. I’m glad that there’s more conversations happening about incivility in the workplace because it’s not just about conflict or it’s not like always the overt stuff. Incivility can take many forms and it’s a nice, it’s a terrible thing but it’s a nice way of in my mind it’s a better way of getting to the heart of it because when people are. Incivility comes from people feeling like they aren’t valued, people feeling like they are people being dissatisfied in the, in their job. Right. We talk about job satisfaction or dissatisfaction a lot because it impacts everything else that you will do if People are actively upset with the factors of their workplace with the, you know, their manager is inconsistent and they have no job security and the wages are garbage and they, there are no wellness supports and all of these other pieces that are, it leads people, it makes people upset, it makes them quicker to be took to anger, it makes them become frustrated and burnt out and all of these other problems. And it creates that incivility in the workplace which has a direct cost on your bottom line.

[COBY]: Yeah. And that’s just it. So like you know, inserting the stat like again, incivility can cost about 26% of the average employee’s annual salary per employee involved in this workplace. So that’s multiple employees. That’s multiple 26%. Right. Is, you know, is a, is a problem that you are already paying for. You are paying for this problem despite the fact that maybe the survey you’re doing or the pizza Friday or the, whatever the performance solution that you’ve probably already invested in, you’re not hearing the grinding of your brakes anymore maybe. But doesn’t mean that the problem still isn’t persistent, that you’re still not paying for it. And this is why moving aside or setting aside at least temporarily, the performative solutions, to actually hear the sound of your brakes grinding, turning the radio down so you can actually hear the sound is something that is essential if you actually want to stop chasing the symptoms and start addressing the sickness head on.

[JAMES]: And I do just honest the lot. One thing that I do want to make clear is that we don’t recommend clients throw out like don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. Right. We’re not going to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong. Right. Right. Because on all any of these strategies in and of themselves are not bad, but they have to be connected to a larger purpose. Because if you’re just implementing, I won’t call them a strategy. If you’re implementing solutions without a strategy, then it’s just taking shots in the dark. Right. We need to understand what’s happening and then tailor our actions and our solutions to actually address what we want to address. That’s how we craft a strategy.

[COBY]: Yeah. Yeah. So often this idea of using things like the statistics around labor value loss is, is a helpful business case to present when you’re, when you’re pushing the idea up. So if you’re executive or director, mid level leader, getting the message up there, using that kind of business case, and again maybe even using the stop chasing symptoms, start addressing sicknesses kind of approach can Be a helpful way to start getting that buy in, for the needed change. Whereas the employees probably don’t need as much, persuasion because they’re probably experiencing it being performative, it being something they have to do that doesn’t really make a difference. So almost like listening to them and having their concerns about something that’s performative be validated. That’s probably going to be a big way that for the CEO or owner or whomever or executive, anybody trying to, trying to push it down to the employees, how you can help maintain buy in from them. It’s probably just going to be by listening to them and hearing their concerns, but also knowing what’s working and what’s not. Like you say, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t just stop everything. Just find, have the, gather the data, collect the intelligence you need to know what’s working and what’s not so you can actually, again, head on, address the sickness.

[JAMES]: And I do want to say generating buy in up or generate. Making sure that your, your leadership, your executive, your CEO is bought in is not just about getting permission.

[COBY]: Right.

[JAMES]: Because what they need to buy into is the commitment to follow through with this. Because the biggest problem I’ve seen with getting employees to actually buy into any new change is not the value of the change itself. They. It’s pretty easy to articulate how, you know, addressing a lot of workplace factors are going to make their work environment better. It’s that we’ve broke so often, we’ve broken trust. Right. We try, we try put a solution in place. It doesn’t work. So we toss it. And if if gets to a point where employees feel like this is just another flavor of the month, you know, we’re going to do this for a little while. I can just ignore it, for the next three months and we’ll be back to the way things always were. If you do not have the commitment from your executive, from your CEO to follow through, then that is very likely how the challenge that you’re going to experience in trying to get employees bought in. Yeah, I mean, I can think about a specific client that we’ve been working with where man, having the CEO, like understand and really become the champion of this project has just fundamentally changed the conversations with employees. Right. It becomes a part of the organization’s DNA. And I mean, they’re taking time out of their schedule to show up at each session and reinforce, the importance in person to make sure that employees know that there is a clear commitment from the organization and from themselves that this is not a you know, flash in the pan. This is now the new way we are going to do things. And the, the results, the buy in and the participation is wonderful. From our perspective, it’s fantastic because people are really connecting to it. But I have to give credit where credit’s due. It’s the CEO gets it and they have made it a priority and them championing it has made the difference in buy in.

[COBY]: Absolutely. And that’s a really, really good point. Okay, so let’s move on.

[JAMES]: That’s why I made it.

[COBY]: Very helpful. Okay, so let’s move on to the second roadblock. And this is one that we probably hear the most often m which is people being too busy to be better. And this is just, it is that we’re too busy to improve, we’re too busy to implement this, this thing we, where we don’t have the time to be able to kind of add something new to our plate. And again that’s the reality in many, in many organizations. And the thing is that like we said in, in the, you know, I was talking about performative solutions. Sometimes the business case can be a helpful tool to address that roadblock. This roadblock doesn’t matter how good the business case is because it’s a matter of they’re too busy or they’re too stressed or there’s too much on their plate or they’re too burned out. So that’s the, that’s the, the thing that you have to address. You have to make the, this, this we’re too busy to be better kind of roadblock. The result is going to be about trying to find ways to reduce stress, increase efficiencies. Is going to be how that you do that because we work with a number of businesses that are faltering and are on or are on the precipice of collapse, you know, or getting close to it and they can’t slow down enough to kind of avoid the cliff. And part of, you know, and part of it is that because they just can’t add anything more on their plate because they’re just trying to keep their heads above water. And what’s tough is that is a, is a major issue. But it’s the, the idea though is that again, not doing anything, the cost is too great. So you have to figure out what is the thing that’s going to have the most, the most impact on them. And largely it’s going to be about how do we reduce the stress, create efficiencies how do we improve? How do we give them the intervention that will make a difference? Because we have to basically get things off people’s plates if we’re going to be able to actually not just get buy in and sustain buy in, but actually see the transformation through to its completion. And that is probably one. So this busy, sorry, too busy to be better is probably one of the most common problems that we see. It’s a major roadblock.

[JAMES]: It, and it’s. I, I like the analogy of the cliff because oftentimes and they, clients or potential clients will identify that they are running full tilt towards a cliff. Right. these problems aren’t getting better but they, they’re still headed in that same direction. They see the cliff coming, they’re running full tilt towards it. How do you know? Like this conversation is really hard to, for people to, not to understand but to wrestle with. Yeah, I think, and honestly where you need to go is if you are in fact feeling like you are too busy to change, you need to increase your capacity. It’s easy to say it, but it’s going to cost you time, energy and resources to do so. You can either continue to run full tilt towards the cliff and you know, your retention problems are going to get worse, your productivity is going to continue to be laggard, you’re going to continue, you’re going to reinforce a culture of complacency rather than innovation. Right. You’re going to continue to see the problems that have been plaguing your business until you actually make that effort to change. And sometimes that means bringing in outside help to take on some of these things off your plate, whether it’s outside health to take off some of the other pieces off your plate so that you can focus on this or bringing in outside help to focus on this so that you can continue to run the business the way that it needs to be run. There’s a lot, we’ve talked in the past that there are lots of different ways that you can do that. I mean obviously we’re a little bit biased because we do this work and absolutely you should hire us. We’re awesome. But, but that’s not the only solution, right? Realistically that, that’s not the only solution to achieving, to increasing your capacity. You need to find a solution that works for you, that might be fractional, expertise that you bring in for a short time, you know that, where you can offload some of these. So if you are responsible for marketing and HR and sales and everything Else bring in some experts to take stuff off your plate. Especially around mar. There’s lots of great ROI that you can achieve from accessing fractional, expertise or part time expertise or. Right. You’re probably not in a position where you’re going to be able to hire a VP of Cultural Transformation or V, or even a Chro, but you can access that skill set much cheaper by approaching it from a fractional standpoint. I’m just, I’m I know I’m kind of harping on that one piece, but it’s an easy way of increasing your internal capacity without significantly increasing your labor, costs.

[COBY]: Yeah, well, and the thing is, is that I think in, I think the sad reality is when it comes to this, too busy to be, to be better Roadblock. The truth is that addressing this problem does. Always requires a bigger upfront investment to get things started.

[JAMES]: It does.

[COBY]: There’s, there’s just no way around it because I mean you’ve, you have to increase your capacity and you have, and so you have to pay, pay for it. It’s unfortunate, but the reality is, is how much is your mental health worth?

[COBY]: Right. Like these are some hard questions we have to be asking ourselves. Like, you know, you know what, you know, what would it be like to not have to spend four hours a day on just putting on employee fires or having your workday start right when you wake up and end right when you pass out from exhaustion? Right. What is it worth to again have this thing that keeps you up at night, you know, resolved or at least having the support to do it? Like what stress is. Stress is when we face a challenge, but we don’t feel we have the resources to battle it. When we feel that we don’t have the resources to battle it, that’s what really creates stress. And the answer to how do you avoid this, how do you reduce the stress around these problems? Is going to be you have to increase the resources that you have to address it. So the real question is, and this is something that if you’re thinking this to yourself or if you’re again executive or director or CEO or owner, the question is, what is this worth? What is your mental health worth? And that’s the questions that you may need to be asking yourself or may need to be asking those above you, because there’s no way around the fact that there’s going to be a larger upfront cost to this. but again, what’s it worth?

[JAMES]: Cost is probably the most common factor in the too busy to be better. But it’s not the only one that we’ve seen. And I’m thinking specifically about conversations we’ve had where you know, it hasn’t been about the cost because the, the company quite profitable. It’s more about the leaders lack of confidence in their own skills, and not wanting, not feeling like they can pass over control to somebody else. Right. That a feeling of needing to grip the reins really tightly. Because my perspective was it more of a, I don’t feel confident that if I pass it on to somebody else it’s going to be done the way that I want or you know, and that’s, that’s a n. That’s a real fear. Right. That’s a realistic trap that many people fall into. It’s not an excuse for, It’s a reason for not doing things differently, but it’s not an excuse. Right. We have to understand that this fear or fear, of giving up control can be, we can hold on tight to the reins and continue to run towards that cliff. The only way we’re going to make a change is if we actually start to shift the direction that we’re headed. And that involves building some trust and making sure that the CEO, the leader, whomever is kind of holding those reins understands not only the value that will come from this but how it will actually help them. maybe not increase the amount of control that they have, but definitely increase the amount of accountability around what’s happening. Right. We need to look at putting accountability frameworks in place so that they feel confident in being able to pass over control. Because if you don’t have any structure around delegation, then yeah, you’re, you’re not going to know how, whether, how are you going to evaluate, whether or not somebody’s been successful. So all of that to say there are still strategies, resources aren’t the only piece, definitely the biggest one that we see. But that fear of giving up control, it tends to be another element that we see in the. Too busy to be better.

[COBY]: Yeah. And, and the last thing I want to say on that is, is that it’s not just at the, at the leadership level that this desire to not give up control or this too busy to be better or everything is, you know, like I have too much on my plate to move forward these initiatives, it happens at the employee level too. But part of it again is, is also making it clear when you’re trying to get into the same buy in from, from, from your, from everyday employees is that again, we’re doing things differently. It’s going to be, you know, it’s a bit awkward. We’re going to be giving up some, you know, some stuff by, by passing off to your coworkers or by bringing in other people. But it’s a matter of again, regardless of who you’re trying to get sustained buy in from what population you’re talking to. I really do think the question of how much is your mental health worth is something that I think should be kind of the fundamental thing, thing that you tie this, all your communications around is that yes, it’s going to be different, yes, it’s going to be awkward. Yes, we have to give up some stuff, some control. but how much is our long term mental health work I think does help kind of frame that a little bit better.

[JAMES]: Again, we’re tying it to the direct benefit that they will see rather than, you know, the benefit that the intent, the benefit that the company will get out of it. Right. Make sure that you’re targeting and tailoring your message to the, to the fears and priorities of the people you’re talking to.

[COBY]: Absolutely. Okay. So the third roadblock, cultural transformation, does connect nicely with the one with what we just talked about. The third one is the sticker shock of what it will take to make the, the transformation or to improve things. This stuff does cost money. This have often has again, let’s say the last one. Often there’s a bigger upfront investment when you’re trying to bring in increased capacity. Right. Having people that experts to help you through this stuff, requiring tools. Again, the long term commitment, all those things come with a cost. And the sticker shock of it can be a huge roadblock for people even when again they, they see the ship is sinking and they just, you know, they’re, they just are, they know it’s coming. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance that happens where they know it’s coming, they know they have to do it. But that, that sticker shock, the cost of it is just, is something that they just can’t swallow and they end up procrastinating and then the costs go up because the longer you wait, the more expensive it gets and the deeper the ship is sinking. But it is something that, you know, we just kind of have to accept that good help, good solutions are not cheap and you get what you pay for.

[JAMES]: And I think this is a big contributing factor to why we see so many performative solutions. Yeah, right. Because as we said, performative solutions tend to be when you approach Something as a set it and forget it mentality we’ve done. We can buy this survey, once we can buy this tool, we can do this thing. And it will. It may not be the best thing that we can do, but it’s something that we can do and it’s a, let’s put it in place and hope for the best type of mentality. It’s like we’ve said, devoid of strategy. But strat, taking a strategic approach to things takes time, energy and resources. Buying a pre built solution and plugging it into your workplace tends to be cheaper. It also tends to be far less effective. Right. So yeah, the sticker shock is absolutely a, a major stumbling block and I think it, while it’s a huge barrier on its own, I think it’s a big contributing factor to some of the other barriers as well.

[COBY]: Absolutely. And really the only way to address the sticker shock side of it is to tie everything back to return on investment. Right. The ROI has to be there. And again, going back to when we talked about things like labor value loss stats, like again, the cost of incivility, the cost of poor communication, the cost of burnout related absences, all those things we talked about in season two, episode four of the podcast are great kind of points to, kind of help, you know, show you the cost of maintaining the course. And this is the whole point, right? Doing something has a price tag and we’re telling you it’s not going to be a small price tag but how you combat the sticker shock. A, large strategy is showing through things like the labor value lost stats, what it cost to do nothing because you are going to spend one of those two things. You’re either going to spend to work on the solution or you’re going to, are you going to spend for the problem to get worse? Money is getting spent one way or another and that ties people’s hands. So they have to make a decision. Either they choose to act or they choose to let the problems fester and get more expensive. It is an active choice and you can’t, you can’t avoid it.

[JAMES]: And that’s why I really like that, discussion around ROI and the cost of doing nothing because there are a lot of less tangible costs that don’t show up on a balance sheet that have a significant impact on our profitability. And you said it well that either way, once you’re presented with that information, you need to make a choice. Doing nothing is a choice. It’s not a good choice, but it’s A choice that you are free to make. I mean you’re, you can choose to continue to drive the, the to run towards that cliff and jump off. Would m. I recommend it?

[COBY]: No. Yeah.

[JAMES]: You’re free to choose it but you also have the choice to take a detour to do something different. Yep. It’s going to cost you. Yep. It’s going to be messy and Yep. It’s probably not going to work out 100% the first time. That’s why we iterate and that’s why we need long term commitment. Because when you’re talking about, especially cultural transformation, when you’re talking about working with people, people are messing and it, we’re not going to get everything right, right out of the gate recognizing that these things take, there are immediate ROI that we can achieve but your biggest ROI and the long term benefits that your company will see don’t come in the first month. Right. They come three, six, nine months out. Right. And so committing to change is vital.

[COBY]: Yeah, absolutely. And when we work on this stuff we always try to show tangible improvements. We always try and show yeah. How things are moving forward. We can’t show you the quick ROI in a month. We can show you signs of improvement that’s going to speak to the roi. So it’s not just like hold your breath, cross your fingers for six months. A good cultural transformation strategy has tangible measurements and analytics and data intelligence to show improved progression. So it’s not just a hope for the best. Right. But again those types of really focused committed strategies don’t come cheap. You can’t buy them in a box, you can’t buy them in software. But what you have to do is you, is if you are in the position as executive, a director, CEO, owner, you have to, you know, whom, whomever you’re making this desire to get and sustain, buy in from. You have to make the cost of doing nothing too great. You have to make the fact that we are making a choice and it’s an expensive choice either way. Yeah. But, but doing nothing is, is, is not really an option. It’s let, it’s letting the, the boat sink or it’s you know, or it’s investing in, in, in fixing it. Right. And if you want to, you know, and there are some ways that you can kind of start to get an idea about how much, how vulnerable you are to some of these things. We have some tools in our, in our Ocean suite of diagnostic tools that kind of assesses vulnerability. Helpful. But there are signs that you can actually use to kind of help make that where, you know, the cost, of doing nothing is too great a strategy. Because really what you have to do is you need to get your audience to a place where they can’t, where they understand, they can’t of, they can’t afford to not do the transformation. They can’t afford to not invest it, they can’t afford to not support it long term. That’s really where you have to get your audience too. If you really want to kind of again, get past the sticker shock roadblock.

[JAMES]: Yeah, I just want to go back to, when you were talking about metrics, because let’s be serious. Sometimes, like, you may be listening to this and you may be tasked with implementing, a transformation yourself. And so how do you start to build metrics in. We’ll give you a little bit of the secret sauce. And it’s not, I mean when we say it, it’s kind of obvious. But really one thing that I would highly recommend. If you are responsible for this and you are preparing for a cultural transformation, you need to identify what it is that you are trying to change. Not just the, the symptoms of the change, but the sickness. Right? Create some, we, we love benchmarking activities. You need to start, you need to understand where you’re starting. So before you start messing with things, before you start implementing change, do a benchmarking activity to understand the current status of X, Y and Z, whatever it is that you are trying to change. Then you’re, what you’re able to do is over time, you’re able to do, to repeat that activity. You’re able to take snapshots in time to show that, you know, from where we started to three months into six months, into what, you know, maybe quarterly, whatever that frequency is, you’re able to show improvements over time. The funny thing is, and I, I warn clients about this because we’ve, I’ve seen it many times, is that do not be surprised that the, your scores actually dip after your initial benchmarking. Right? So you’ve do your benchmarking at the beginning and then you start messing with stuff. And the response on that benchmarking may actually be lower because people are actively going through the messy transition of the change. Carry on, push through. Because as you move forward, as you can continue to commit to the change, you will see those benefits and then you can take those benchmarking. however you determine to do the benchmarking activities, you can take that back to The C suite to the executive, to the whomever and show that doing something is a lot better than doing nothing.

[COBY]: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Okay, I think let’s do a little bit of a summary. I think this was a pretty good conversation. So the question was, how do we get and sustain buy in for organizational culture transformation? Well, largely it’s, we want to make sure that we’re addressing this question from a few different audiences, from executives, from directors, from CEOs, from owners, and even from, and even from an employee’s perspective. You have to kind of understand the audience that you’re trying in the position that you’re in, the audience you’re trying to speak to, who you’re trying to get in the same buy in from. And usually it’s going to be about, pushing it up to the top and making sure that you’re covering the bases of everyday employees. But one of the things you have to realize is that this type of approach that we’re going to suggest is counter to what the normal methods around change is, which is about nice to have and social good costs. The core of it is you have to make people see that the cost of doing nothing is too great. Now the roadblocks to this thing that we often run into are, can be really problematic. And the three of them that we identified were. The first is the existence of performative solutions. They become the biggest barrier because people already think they’re doing something, they’re already investing in it, they already have a solution in place, but they don’t really fully see the complexity of the problem. They think a simple, off the shelf or small investment piece is going to make the difference. But all it really does is just mask the problem, like turning up your radio to drown out the sound of your brakes grinding. You really have to look at what’s going to be the full strategy. And if it’s looking like it’s going to be an easy fix, you probably have to have the wrong tool.

[JAMES]: Fair.

[COBY]: The second roadblock is the problem of being too busy to be better. And this is about people being too overloaded, they’re being too much on their plate and they’re not able to carve out the necessary time, effort, to actually make the change. This usually requires bringing in some type of intervention to either help take off the operations off your plate so you can focus on the problematic areas, or it’s going to be about bringing in experts to help you with the problematic areas. Either way there’s going to be A significant, investment required of time, effort and energy. But the real questions you have to ask yourself is how much is your mental health worth? Because this type of running towards the cliff and being too busy to improve the environment or the culture, is it going to be a problem that’s just never going to get any cheaper, never going to get any easier? And the longer you wait, the bigger that investment is going to have to be? Which leads us to the third roadblock, which is, which is sticker shock with cultural transformations. This stuff is not expensive, this stuff is not easy, this stuff is not quick. But the only way that you’re going to actually improve the sticker shock, or address the sticker stock problem is to really tie everything back to the ROI and making sure that it’s clear the cost of doing nothing is too great. Because doing nothing and ah, ignoring the problem or delaying it or procrastinating is still an active choice and it’s an expensive choice. So if you want to address this problem, you have to make the ROI clear that there’s a cost to doing it and a cost to not do it. And likely the cost to not do it is going to end up being greater, especially in the long term. But you have to make that case because you have to move people into a position where they understand that they cannot afford to not do the transformation or ignore the problem anymore. All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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