The first steps to Culture Change in Manufacturing
The pandemic crisis allows us to re-design our Manufacturing Culture to release human industry potential and value the essential role manufacturing plays in our society. Culture change begins at the top of our companies, with the CEO, CFO, CHR, who lead the steps to build the groundwork for a Cultural Change, which are: to define, align and create a roadmap, to assuring their factories are prepared for the next generation advancing into our industry.
Define the Adaptive Challenge
In any Cultural Change, the first step is to define and formulate adaptive-operational-technical challenges. Adaptive challenges demand diverse ways of thinking and working, while operational ones could use present know-how.
It is vital to have a business reason to change a company’s Culture, meaningful enough to demand a new frame of mind and working systems. If you do not identify and operate the adaptive challenge your company faces, it will be defying to shift your business culture.
You can think you count on strong leader’s units and top-tier stakeholders. However, you could be losing substantial value if not working across all business sections; the Culture or the mindset and ways of working might be focusing on silos per unit rather than looking to the whole organisation as a form to obtain more value. Forget silos-type-old practices and let others explore your points of view.
Undertake a significant adaptive challenge to modify your culture framework, beginning with each leader’s commitment; they will have confidence it would bring forth the Cultural shift necessary for the company to get to the next level of performance. Changing to an internal board of directors where they share their vision as a unit brings the best they have to share with senior colleagues.
Align the senior leadership team
You might find opposition to making changes at this stage, especially in old-established companies with long Culture pride, making things difficult. Using the term ‘Renovating the culture’ rather than changing it could be a much more appealing concept as it implies the need to maintain certain aspects of the Culture whilst changing others.
When leaders clearly explain the particular features to change the Culture and the ones they would maintain, it can make it easier for co-workers to accept changes and go for them. It is easier for senior employees to recognise the company’s Culture, whilst new-hired employees might decide to leave because they find managers not open to change, making it difficult to see in your Culture their expectation of an organisation.
Align senior teams for changing the Culture on one mindset, one behaviour, and one way of working that needs to shift; focusing on a few critical areas to change will enable the senior team to develop a way to feel confident and make a difference.
Build the Roadmap
Once the senior team alignment is set on the adaptive challenge and the Culture’s parts to change, it is time to build up a roadmap and appoint the next level of leaders. Highlight clarity of direction and plans to drive in participants considering everybody in this new challenge; make them sure they are a vital part of the team.
A new approach considers the building of a culture roadmap “from the future back.” This perspective, combined with new virtual collaboration tools, enables leaders to build actionable roadmaps that lay out the path to the renovating Culture they want to establish.
As Alan Kay, a pioneering computer scientist, states, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Further comments: Although the global pandemic is still affecting many industries, several leaders are virtually engaging all teams in a culture-change process. We can find many innovative technologies that could make it possible to build collaborative roadmaps. These remote meetings are vital to let leaders know of the expected shifts of Culture in the company.
Dave Food