Does Your Company Need a Culture Consultant?

Company culture, once regarded as a “soft” secondary topic compared to the more concrete business areas, now dominates industry headlines and boardroom conversations. Consequently, an increasing number of CEOs recognize the significance of and want to prioritize their culture, though many misunderstand how to achieve this goal effectively.

The Real Definition of Company Culture

Some leaders try to strengthen their culture with employee-pleasing perks like ping-pong tables, pizza parties, and bringing pets to work, but this trend has proved ineffective. Workers like the fringe benefits, but these feel-good measures don’t create organizational culture or even alter it. Learn the difference between values and behaviors here:

Many CEOs make an effort to strengthen their culture by carefully crafting and prominently displaying a set of company values to inspire employees. Others beef up benefits packages and reimagine workspaces to improve their culture. But even with all these enhancements in place, a company’s culture can be mediocre or even poor. An organization’s authentic culture is rooted in commonly held values and principles reflected in its staff’s everyday conduct. The culture is healthy if the overall behavior patterns align with the CEO’s vision and help the business and the people who work there to succeed.

Why You Might Need a Culture Consultant

If you’re considering hiring a culture consultant, it’s because you’ve acknowledged that your company’s culture needs improvement. Perhaps you’re seeing significant problems and are experiencing a dysfunctional workplace. But it’s much more likely that you can’t quite put a finger on what’s out of balance. You simply believe that your current culture, while satisfactory, could be better. It can be challenging to detect subtle disruptive behavioral patterns, but the signs of an insufficient culture usually show up in four key areas:

When one or more of these symptoms are prevalent, companies start to deteriorate. These weak points can negatively impact normal operations and render a business incapable of weathering emergencies. If you can relate to any of these problems and understand that they directly connect to your company’s culture, you’re probably looking for solutions. The best recourse for most organizations is to engage outside expertise to improve their culture. People not directly affiliated with an organization offer fresh eyes and an objective perspective. They have no personal agenda, political stake, or role barriers and can make unbiased recommendations for culture improvement. For many leaders, the logical step to finding external assistance is looking for a culture consultant.

What Does a Culture Consultant Do?

The field of culture consulting emerged as business leaders began to recognize the importance of company culture and their need for help in this vital area. A consultant’s role is to assist companies in cultivating the kind of culture that will help them achieve their financial, strategic, and organizational goals. Consultants specializing in this work must be skilled at identifying a clear cultural direction and plan for their clients. To do this, most culture consultants will:

  • Analyze your current culture and pain points
  • Perform data analysis to assess how your culture could help your business run more effectively
  • Use formal assessments, interviews, and focus groups to solicit employee feedback about the current culture
  • Recommend changes that will improve the culture

Types of Culture Consultants

A culture consultancy can be comprised of one person, a small group, or a large team. The length of engagement and fees for service vary with the needs of their clients. Typically, consultants are prepared to propose a scope of work that runs approximately three months. Culture consultant pricing is based on geography, company size, and the length of the project.