How can employees change their company’s engrained culture from within? SYPartners’ principal Joshua-Michéle Ross believes the deepest of corporate cultural transformations can start from even the tiniest, simplest steps.
At Fast Company’s 2017 Innovation Festival, Ross and Andy Chern, a strategy director at the leadership consultancy, pushed attendees to tackle the pain points stifling the cultures at their companies: the lack of agency and speedy decision-making at large-scale organizations; the tribalism that can often occur when disparate parts of the org don’t collaborate; the hesitancy to mess with the status quo.
Often, these can feel like daunting challenges that only C-level executives are empowered to address, but SYPartners, which has advised a wide range of brands from American Express to Starbucks, has found that bottom-up transformation can be just as potent as top-down corporate initiatives. Ross and Chern recommend that employees look to enact what they call “rituals,” small and tangible improvements to one’s workplace, which, when repeated over and over, will ideally become part of a company culture’s muscle memory. “It’s about redesigning the way people interact,” Ross says, “from an atomic level.”