Culture evolution - AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: People Perspective
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Culture evolution

Evaluate, incrementally evolve, and codify organizational culture with digital transformation aspirations, and best practices for agility, autonomy, clarity, and scalability.

Culture is the way things get done in an organization. To succeed in digital transformation, you’ll need to use your heritage and core values, while you incorporate new behaviors and mindsets that attract, retain, and empower a workforce that’s invested in continuously improving and innovating on behalf of your customers.

There is strong recognition, supported by evidence, that an organization’s culture is a powerful determinant of transformation success. The influence of culture is further magnified in cloud transformation where the extraordinary capability of cloud is limited only by how people interact with those capabilities. Culture and behavioral challenges are often cited as the most significant barrier to digital effectiveness.

Given the impact of culture on transformation velocity and value, applying dedicated expertise (such as Organizational Change Acceleration, or more traditionally referred to as Organizational Change Management) to evolving culture is recommended. “Culture” is an ambiguous term that is open to interpretation, and culture change efforts often struggle to produce tangible results. The only way to reasonably change or evolve culture is to decompose cultural characteristics into specific behaviors that can be observed and measured.

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Evolving culture and turning potential barriers into enablers requires establishing a good understanding of where you are. Begin by assessing your current culture construct and measurement systems. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • What are the cultural characteristics that your organization values?

  • How do you measure those characteristics?

  • How do you demonstrate what is important to your culture through communications, incentives, rewards, recognition, hiring, and promotions?

  • How do you demonstrate what is not tolerated nor prioritized in your culture through communications, role modelling, and performance consequences?

Next, define the cultural characteristics that will have the most impact on successful cloud transformation and determine where you may have potential barriers or gaps as compared to the current state. This is commonly referred to as a Change Impact Analysis. For more information, refer to AWS Prescriptive Guidance: AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and OCM Toolkit.

Note that each organization may have slightly different areas of focus due to differences in current state, desired business outcomes, and cloud transformation strategy and roadmap. Some common characteristics that are often identified as highly impactful in using cloud to drive business value include:

  • Customer focus.

  • Cross-functional collaboration.

  • Decision making (agility and empowerment).

  • Experimentation/failing fast.

  • Product centricity.

  • Agile methodology/practices.

  • Data fluency.

  • Budgeting practices/processes.

With a solid understanding of where you are currently and where you need to go, the next step is to assess your organization’s capability to evolve culture. Apply dedicated culture expertise to develop a change acceleration roadmap and implementation plan that aligns to your cloud transformation approach to ensure that the right cultural elements are in place at the right time.

Advance

Implement the change acceleration roadmap and prioritize cultural characteristics that will have the most impact on advancing cloud adoption by following a programmatic organizational change framework. It is important to recognize that, having started with an amorphous concept of culture and cultural characteristics, you will need to continually refine culture concepts into something that is tangible and actionable for the organization. To do this, evaluate each of your prioritized culture characteristics by considering:

  • How are these characteristics demonstrated by specific behaviors?

  • What behaviors would have the greatest impact?

  • How do we measure these behaviors?

  • How do we provide timely feedback on these behaviors?

Once characteristics are decomposed into new behaviors, it is necessary to:

  1. consider the goals for cloud adoption; and

  2. determine which stakeholder groups would have the most impact on those goals by demonstrating new behaviors.

As part of the culture change roadmap, begin a communications and enablement campaign. The goals of the campaign should be related to:

  • Increasing awareness of the importance of culture and cloud adoption.

  • Increasing understanding of cultural characteristics and behaviors that typically offer success in cloud adoption.

  • Setting expectations for measurement and feedback of new behaviors.

  • Obtaining commitment by leaders to demonstrate and drive new behaviors.

  • Supporting managers in understanding how certain cultural characteristics and behaviors that drive cloud success may be in direct conflict with those that drive on-premises success.

  • Increasing employee awareness that cloud transformation will naturally cause a cultural evolution, and to accept the shift, versus trying to resist it.

As part of the culture change communications and enablement plan, you should be proactive and intentional in:

  • recognizing and rewarding new behaviors; and

  • recognizing and redirecting behaviors that are anti-patterns to the desired cultural characteristics.

For example, are you praising and providing positive feedback for “experimenting, failing fast and iterating”, or are you inadvertently punishing those behaviors by asking harsh questions, stopping experimentation, or eliminating budget?

At this point, it’s particularly important that all leadership levels are consistent in demonstrating and recognizing new behaviors. If parts of the leadership hierarchy are consistently recognizing the “old way” of performing, the mixed signals to the organization will delay the evolution of culture.

Excel

Concurrent with implementing the change acceleration framework, begin aligning systemic talent management levers, such as acquisition, onboarding, learning and development, reward, and performance management. This is a matter of ensuring that the new behaviors are sufficiently incorporated into each of the talent management levers.

  • Talent acquisition — The new behaviors are clearly communicated in recruitment and are thoroughly assessed in selection/hiring (such as behavior-based interviews specifically addressing desired cultural characteristics).

  • Onboarding — The new behaviors are communicated as part of onboarding new hires.

  • Learning and development — Specific training programs are created to:

    • train new behaviors for all stakeholders; and

    • train leaders on how to model, recognize, and reinforce new behaviors.

  • Reward — Both informal reward/recognition programs and more formal compensation systems reflect the desired cultural characteristics.

  • Performance management — The performance management system includes the cultural characteristics whereby each individual has goals and feedback related to new behaviors.

At its foundation, evolving culture requires sensitive measurement and feedback systems that allow you to answer the following questions:

  • Is behavior changing over time in the right direction?

  • Are the predominant behavioral patterns in the organization consistent with the desired cultural characteristics and behaviors?

  • Can each individual describe and provide examples of the desired cultural characteristics and behaviors?

Once new behaviors are consistently demonstrated, talent management systems are aligned, and agile feedback and measurement systems are in place, the enterprise will have a self-sustaining evolution of culture. However, your cloud journey is not static, and as your cloud capabilities mature over time, the cultural characteristics that are important will also change over time.

For example, in the early stages of migrating to the cloud, fast decision making, breaking down organizational silos, and cross-functional collaboration may be the cultural characteristic with the highest priority. Further into the cloud adoption journey, innovation and new product development may be the business priority that requires cultural characteristics related to forming product teams and rapid experimentation. So, continue to evaluate your change acceleration roadmap against your cloud transformation plan to ensure that the right cultural elements are in place at the right time.