Culture Transformation

StoryAnalytics Master Rick Stone on Transforming Your Organization:

A brand becomes tangible and real only when its essence and promise are delivered as an experience to a customer. While brand positioning work always drives marketing, it is perhaps even more critical that it be intentionally enculturated inside your organization. Essential to the vitality of your brand are employee orientation, training, internal brand marketing, and revitalization tools, all of which must be employed within a well-designed organizational development and internal communications scheme.

The objective of this work is to provide you a comprehensive program to assure that your brand is alive, vital, tangible, and producing measurable results. IDEAS’ Enculturation™ system assures that your employee and guest experience is aligned with the market messages. The elements of the Enculturation program include creating a culture map of the drivers and character of the organizational culture. Then we develop a comprehensive Toolkit scope and budget to activate the brand attributes in every operation based on a core brand story. Next we produce the Toolkit. Then, after the toolkit is produced we train the organization in the deployment and effective use of the Toolkit. And finally our team is heavily involved in Quality Assurance audits and program adjustments.

IDEAS uses a dramatically different approach to this “internal brand marketing” process. Most staff members are inevitably hungry for as much “information” as they can get in order to understand what the customer is being told in the market. By learning the “tribal myths and legends” that constitute the core culture we create tools that use the organization’s own stories to recruit, orient new hires, and to communicate the qualities and key structure of the brand to veteran staff members. An Enculturation Toolkit is a portfolio of media, print, facilitator-led workshops, and other components custom created to communicate how employees fulfill the promise of your brand from the philosophical to the operational. The Toolkit is rolled-out in synchronization with the brand marketing effort. We favor the power of “oral tradition”– the use of teaching stories. Although this is the primary way culture is passed on in most organizations, it almost exclusively takes the form of face-to-face encounters. By skillfully crafting reliable and repeatable media and instructional tools, we can efficiently and effectively harness the power of your organizational stories. Your people are the vehicle for delivering the brand promise to your guests. Once they understand the brand, the next step is for them to internalize the message and live it.

This process has worked for clients in Healthcare, Hospitality, Department of Defense and Fortune 500.