Yonder launches design approach for organisational culture

Redesigning organisational culture to optimise performance is important to attract and retain staff – but it is also tough to know where to start. A new approach and tool from Yonder aims to help companies get to grips with their unique challenges, and design a bespoke organisational culture transformation.

Company culture encompasses everything that makes a company unique. This includes the values, behaviours and how things are done daily and overall to create a company environment. This also consists of any benefits offered to employees like working from home or company events. Increasingly, this centrality to a business’ performance has also seen a glut of research tie culture to a firm’s ability to recruit new talent, integrate M&A targets, or adapt to the latest market challenges.

UK businesses are prioritising company culture transformations to help drive results, due to these findings. Seven-in-ten UK CEOs made culture a key priority at their firm in the last three years, hoping it could help boost employee engagement and productivity. But as leaders have found transforming any aspect of their firm, redesigning something already ingrained into an organisation is easier said than done.

To help firms optimise organisational culture, Yonder Consulting has launched Culture Magnet: an evidence-based consultancy approach designed to optimise organisational culture as a strategic business driver.  

Michelle Traylor, a partner at Yonder Consulting, explained, “Culture has the power to be an enabler of success for an organisation, from the inside out. It can easily be the difference between the success and failure of a company strategy. An authentic culture which is nurtured and enabled is a key driver and an asset to any business. Ignored or forced and it easily becomes a detractor and a ticking time bomb. Culture Magnet shines an honest and actionable spotlight on the cultural dynamics of an organisation, enabling clients to pinpoint where their culture can evolve to drive better results for everyone.”

Illustrating the importance of this intervention, Yonder interviewed a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 adults in the UK, asking what they thought were the most important factors for choosing or quitting a job. A 74% majority said they would leave a company if the culture wasn’t right, while 78% identified positive company culture as a top pull factor for joining an organisation.

To help clients ensure they offer a top organisational culture, a release from Yonder billed Culture Magnet as “going beyond surface-level data collection to find out whether the culture an organisation currently has is the culture they need to succeed in the future” – helping companies to determine the gap between a company's vision and current reality.  

The platform first helps defines opportunities for creating cultural change by honestly answering critical questions with real and multifaceted data. This includes questions relating to how aligned employees are to a firm’s strategy; how distinctive its employee experience and employer brand is; and how they measure up against other market standards.

Culture Magnet can then help provide a approachwork to design an improved company culture, tailored to the specific challenges and opportunities open to a company. The approach allows organisations to co-create their culture strategy using unparalleled insights from innovative data collection and science techniques. The resulting insight builds an environment where engaged employees shape exciting initiatives they can embrace and run with. 

Manfred Abraham, CEO of Yonder Consulting, added, “You just need to read the business pages or scan social media to see how damaging a poor company culture can be, and the pace of these headlines seems to be increasing. We are seeing a societal shift where organisational culture is now a headline priority directly impacting on customer experience and stakeholder relations, as well as the continued war for talent.   
Launched in 2020, Yonder boasts teams in London, New York and Hong Kong – as well as a recently launched Singapore operation – working alongside clients to helping them to adjust and respond to change as it happens. The consultancy offers services in brand and business strategy, insight-led innovation and state-of-the-art data capture.