Culture development is a vital part of HR strategy. The starting point is to identify the Mission and Values but this must not be just a paper exercise.  They must be developed properly and must be ones that will drive the behaviour required. As a general rule "less is more".

The Mission should ideally be made up of the number of words that people can easily remember - typically no more than 15 words. For the Values - a maximum of 6 is best. Any more than that and they are unlikely to be easily remembered.

However, to ensure Mission & Values are a driver for the culture they must be woven into everything you do such as communication, recruitment, induction, training, appraisals............but the list goes on.

It is also important to constantly agree the key behaviours that everyone delivers. A good process to deliver this is for teams is "Teamship Rules" where teams agree the behaviours they are going to deliver to demonstrate the values in action.

Culture change does not happen overnight. It happens through hundreds of interventions - at all levels in the company.A good way of measuring culture change is to change some key language such as Staff to Associates, Team Members or Colleagues. This becomes a good litmus test for whether or not people have taken the changes on board depending on whether or notthey have adapted the "new" language.

It is also vital that culture development is not for it's own sake but responds to external challenges. A topical example of this is concerned with recession. Poor businesses use the recession as an excuse but in good times they do not give credit to the boom!! A good culture is one where employees face up to what is happening and respond accordingly. Once they have done this it can become a positive challenge.

With regard to recession, an example of managing the culture is to create a "Recession Charter".  In a previous recession at Harvester Restaurants (as Keith reminded me in my Guest Book) our recession charter was:

 "There is no recession - this is the way it is"

From this simple statement attitudes and culture changed. By viewing the current situation as something to manage, rather than something you couldn't affect, actions were created to rise to the challenge ......... and people enjoyed the challenge rather than descending into doom & gloom.