Hello, I'm Steven Mathur, and I'm a director at Prospect business improvement. Today we're going to look at how to transform your culture. So the first question I'm going to ask is, what do we actually mean by the term culture? We're going to look at why you might want or need to change it. How you can measure current culture and indeed, improved culture, how you can go about changing it, and perhaps most importantly, your culture change projects or how you can implement your very own culture change project. So the first question is, then what is a culture?

So a common way of describing it is is the way things are done around here? It's a set of collective values, beliefs, and assumptions that permeate the organization team City, any group of people. Another way of describing it is it's a set of accepted norms of behavior. So in lots of situations in your workplace, whether people are going into a meeting, going to their workplace getting changed, there'll be a whole set of norms that people will expect to be followed. And it's only when somebody doesn't follow one of those norms that it looks odd. And people start asking questions.

So culture is all of those things. It's when a group of people get together and the way they behave, what they do, set of values and beliefs. So why are we talking about it? Why does it matter? Well, it influences decisions. It determines priorities.

It affects people's behavior and the effect of crime Culture is quite stark and in fact, culture has been in the news quite a lot recently. So some examples here. A toxic and aggressive culture inside British banks that led to scandals such as mis selling will take a generation to change a report saves the water Deepwater Horizon forced culture change on oil and gas industry. Bank of England governor calls for change in banks culture. The lead lawyer for the public inquiry into neglect of hundreds of patients at Stafford hospital said a culture change is needed in the NHS in Wales. That last one you may not have heard about if you're not in the UK, but the National Health Service in Stafford hospital was severely criticized for the way that it treated its patients.

And this was put down to a problem with a culture. So as you can see from all that, headlines. culture has a massive effect on the way that we perform as an organization, and deliver to our customers, clients, and those that are stakeholders in our business. So those are all kind of negative reasons. If you like that you might want to do something about culture, because we don't want to have any of those things happen in our organization. But there's also positive goals too.

So we might decide we want a culture of continuous improvement where everybody's involved in coming up with ways to do things better. So you can imagine a culture of continuous improvement. Maybe a culture of care, where people care about each other, care about the product, care about the customers, and so on. A safety culture where everyone looks after each other, and looks out for each other. Make sure that they don't do anything risky or dangerous, that could cause an accident. a culture of putting the customer first or maybe a culture of innovation.

So all of these are types of culture that you as an organization might aspire to be, we want to be an organization like that. Another way of looking at culture is it essentially it's the sum of lots of behavior. So when you get one person, that's behavior, when you get two or more, you're starting to think about culture. So it's really a social phenomena that comes around because of groups of people or people behaving together. Now as we know, behavior can be tricky to understand. Just trying to understand one person's behavior can be hard enough, trying to understand the way that behavior works with lots of people can be even more difficult.

So what I want to do in this session is just to have a bit of underpinning knowledge around behavior and come at this through three different perspectives. Now, this is not a psychology course. But we are going to Refer to three different psychological perspectives to help us understand behavior. Most importantly, we then want to take those perspectives and use them to understand the way that culture happens in our business, and explain some of the behaviors we see, with a view to maybe influencing some of that and changing some of it. So the first of the three perspectives I'm going to talk to you about is behaviorism. behaviorism really focuses on positive and negative reinforcement.

And we're going to look at these a lot more detail in a moment. So just go through them very quickly. First. Something sometimes behaviorist principles also includes punishments. And again, we'll talk about that in a moment. Cognitive psychological approaches, really look at people's values, beliefs, and attitudes.

Essentially, what cognitive psychology does, he's tried to get inside the head and understand the thinking process behind what People are doing worse. behaviorism isn't really interested in what's going on inside somebody's head. They're more interested in the outputs the things that people are doing. Social Psychology incorporates quite a lot of things. But it includes looking at the way that people talk, stories they tell the narratives they use. I can also look at people's identities, and how they relate to each other.

So those are the three perspectives that we're going to talk about in more detail now. So the behaviorist perspective really is about finding the right stimulus to get the person to respond in the way you want to. So it's this stimulus response sort of equation that we're looking at. It is the way that we tend to train dogs or other animals. So by giving a dog a reward for sitting down and give it a biscuit every time we say set, it comes to associate the words set with a biscuit and of course the action goes along with it. So setting starts to become associated with that word.

So eventually you don't even need to give the reward because the dog will sit just because it is the command is it's become now conditioned to sit every time it hears that word. There is a process of conditioning, through finding the right stimulus. Cognitive approaches are really all about saying, Well, how can I get inside the person's thinking? How can I influence their thinking? How can I influence their attitudes towards something key into their values and beliefs and really get to appeal to their head and heart. social psychologists tend to focus much more on the way that people talk to each other and create their own reality through those discussions.

So through narratives through stories, through talking, we tend to create Create the culture and not just report on it. It's quite interesting idea that through tool in your canteen or in your shop floor or in your face, when you hear that talk, people are not reporting on the culture, they're actually creating it. So through that process of talking about what they think is happening, actually starts to create the culture. So we've looked at three different approaches that we can use to understand behavior. And then obviously, later on, think about how we might change it. So when we're looking at behaviorist approach is really what we're trying to do is we're trying to think about how we reward the behavior that we want.

So from a behaviorist perspective, if you want to change people's behavior, you've got to reward the right things. And then another way of thinking about it would be to remove the rewards for behavior you don't want. That sounds obvious, why would we reward the things that we don't want? But often if you look at this closely, you find that as a business, you might be rewarding things that actually you don't want. So just to give you an example of this, quite recently, we did a workshop at the University of Lincoln with some food manufacturing people. And the question was, why do we have so many businesses that have cultures of firefighting, firefighting cultures, in other words, we keep reacting to things that are happening, never actually getting around to putting in proper processes to stop those things happening in the first place.

And we investigated that we talked about that for quite a while and we identified really, that we we actually reward people for firefighting behavior. So every time somebody pulls it out of the fire, we give them a great pass in the back and say, Well done, thanks for your efforts. But when people think about things beforehand and do stuff in a proactive way, and avoid problems in the first place, we just ignore them. So it could be that we're actually unwitting. rewarding the wrong behaviors. So that's worth thinking about what behaviors are we are we rewarding?

Now, this is fairly controversial, so punish behavior you cannot accept. So I'm not a big fan of punishment in terms of behaviorism. And indeed, the originator really a behaviorist, thinking one of the main proponents, BF Skinner, was very clear that actually punishment is not a good way to try and create the behavior you're looking for. But actually, in businesses, we do use punishment. So we might say, you know, we'll have to put somebody to a disciplinary process or even dismiss them for certain behaviors, which is, of course, he's understandable and maybe within the realms of what we can do but as a way to try and change and control behavior, generally considered to be not particularly effective, although sometimes necessary to ensure that you're compliant with the law. Some behaviorist, or behaviorism, pros and cons.

On the upside looking at things from a behaviorist perspective, it is quite intuitive. So it kind of makes sense. It's an easy concept to understand. And if you've got children, you may be used to the idea that, you know, if they behave well in the shop, you'll give them some sweets. Or maybe you have the same sort of thing yourself. Well, really, that's a behaviorist paradigm.

So you're used to that idea, rewarding people for the things that you want them to do. So we're familiar with it. It's something that we can get our head around. On. The downside though, just purely using this sort of behaviorist paradigm or perspective, is seen as limited for complex behaviors. So it's a little bit of a blunt instrument.

Well, the most important things though, is it's hard to isolate these specific stimuli for this specific desired response. So what happens then is you end up with a unintended consequences. So what do we mean by that? Well, if you say what right, I'm going to reward this behavior by providing some reward for somebody, what can often happen is the individual starts to gain the system in order to get the reward, or it drives the behavior that you didn't really expect. So a classic example of this would be the MIS selling in banks. So if you reward people for taking risks, then you have no surprise, you're going to get a lot of risk taking behavior, which actually had unintended consequences.

So have you very careful about how you use this type of reward stimulus type of approach. It also doesn't really have any interest in how people feel or what they think. So for me, most psychologists in this area when working with them on organizational change, sort of give me the response. Well, it's all right as far as it goes. So behaviorism is worth thinking about in terms of reward. But it's not the complete picture can also feel a bit insulting or manipulative at times, if you're on the wrong end of that, or if you're on the, the other end of that.

So from a management perspective, it's quite an asymmetric power relationship there. In other words, the manager is the one who's thinking about how to design the right stimulus to get the response they want. So it kind of feels a bit manipulative. So let's talk for a few minutes about cognitive approaches and how that might be adapted or adopted in culture change projects. First thing is, then we're trying to appeal to reason we're trying to convince somebody or convince the workforce of the benefits of doing it this way, or changing what they do. So we'd really want to show the benefits to them, the benefits to the organization and obviously in relation to how they're going to see And the outcomes of that we might appeal to their values, especially if their values are aligned, or we might think they're aligned to business values.

And often they are, which is very useful. So things like making sure that people are safe. For instance, most people have a very clear value that they want to go home with one piece. So we can appeal to those values, to make sure that people do things safely. So organizational values, aligning with personal values is often the approach that cognitive change is adopting. We might want to change people's beliefs about things people's assumptions.

So that could be through education, or just through demonstrating that actually things are different or we might want to influence attitudes. So these are all cognitive approaches to culture change. Pros and Cons in the cognitive approach, while on the upside and it assumes an ability to Reason. So actually human beings are thinking machines, we do think we do reason. So it assumes that which is great. It looks for insight into thoughts and feelings, it doesn't treat the head, the brain like a black box that we don't know what's inside, it actually looks for that insight into those things.

As we mentioned, if you can align organizational values with individual values and beliefs, you've got something really quite powerful there. So that's great if you can do that. On the downsides of just cognitive approaches, it can be quite hard to measure, especially when you're trying to measure what people's current attitudes are to things. So really, what you're trying to measure there is what's going on in somebody's head. That's actually really quite difficult. And part of the problem with that is that people behave differently in different situations.

The brain is also treated like a sophisticated computer, and it's assumed that people will read In a logical way, and of course, the jury's still out on that, do people reasoned things out logically, or how much of our behavior is through emotion or habits or things like that? Finally, people stated attitudes are not always good indicators of behavior. So in other words, we all tend to say one thing, and at times do another. So we can sometimes have this disconnect between attitudes, and behavior. So that's cognitive. Let's look at social approaches now.

So if you want to change culture, through a social, psychological approach, you're really looking to influence the narrative. You're looking to change the story. You're looking to get people talking about this change in very positive ways. You want to create a buzz around the place, which is really about people talking about it. You might want to change the dynamics. So for instance, if you want to create a culture of continuous improvement Let's say where everybody gets involved in it, what you'd like is to change the way that people see my job as being just going and doing this thing.

And your job is being the continuous improvement manager, you look for the improvement, or you as the manager, look, after my safety, I just make sure I come to work, it's your job to do that. So you might want to change those dynamics. And in doing that, you might need to create a new identities. So I'm also somebody that's responsible for making sure that we do things safe. And I'm also somebody that's responsible for looking for new ways of doing things. So that's another part.

So social pros and cons. Pros, it recognize these the influence of the group, and it's most closely linked to cultural change. So think about what culture is it's a group of people behaving in a certain way. While Yes, social psychological approaches do sit well with that. It's also observable In that you can see or hear or observe the conversations people are having about what it's like to work here. So you start to listen to the stories that people tell, you know, only last week, I found this in the product or we say health and safety is the most important thing, but look at what happened there.

So you get to hear those sorts of conversations. And that starts to help you understand what the organization is really like, or what people think is on the downside. Analysis of those sorts of things is quite subjective. So once you can observe compensation, trying to understand what it really means is quite subjective. And of course, is open to interpretation. It also requires that managers accept that they have less control over what's happening.

It's quite an interesting one. So from a manager's perspective, if what's happening your culture being created by lots of people talking by the narrative in the stories, it kind of takes us as managers out of that to some degree. So that can be a bit of a challenge. Now, there are ways of overcoming that. But it can be a bit of a challenge for managers to understand and accept that. So a quick summary then, what is a culture when a culture can be described, as it's the way we do things around here?

It's a common set of values, assumptions and beliefs. Or in very simple terms, you could describe it as the sum of lots of individual behavior. There's lots of different ways of understanding behavior. We've talked about three behaviorism, which is all about making sure that we reward the right things, stimulus response, paradigm, cognitive psychology, which is all about trying to appeal to somebody's thinking processes, their reason, their values and beliefs and so on. And social approaches, which are really about trying to get people to tell different story, create a new narrative and create a buzz around the new culture you're trying to create.