Abby Herriman is senior vice president of delivery and innovation at HighPoint Global.
Transforming an agency’s culture is a slow process. It begins with what might feel like tiny, quick-hit wins in isolated parts of the agency. Transformation builds on those quick-hit successes to create positive feelings of change that permeate the agency. While agency leaders must be committed to the change, making it happen is not a result of a top-down declaration, and it absolutely cannot come from a “compliance mentality,” where service providers feel they must change because they are told to. True agency transformation can only occur when team members believe that they are part of the change and that they are changing because it is the right thing to do.
Cultural transformation starts with a vision—an agencywide vision for citizen experience. This vision should be both aspirational and inspirational and has to be created by people from all parts of the agency, including —the representatives answering citizen calls in the contact center, those responding to queries online, the C-suite executives, and more. Having representation from all agency members plays a part in creating a common vision for citizen experience, establishes ownership and ensures that the vision will be able to be executed.
After a vision is created, agency members need to step back and take a look at current cultural values and assumptions under which it operates. Do those values and assumptions, including the use of language, tools, space, processes and habits, represent the new vision the agency is working toward? The vision and the actual work must be aligned for transformation to happen. If the processes the agency has been operating under no longer fit with the new vision and values, it’s time to establish new ones. Where processes cannot be changed (for a any number of reasons), the vision and values can be molded to fit different circumstances across an organization.
Once a vision is created, and values and assumptions supporting that vision are established, the agency should find a small place to test its new vision, values and assumptions. This includes — along with any new tools or processes it acquired along the way. Sometimes that small place is a single channel or a single process within the agency; every situation is unique. An ideal test involves a part of the agency that has the intrinsic energy to transform and is willing to embrace the new values associated with the overriding vision for the agency.
If the test with a small process or single channel is successful, the agency agencies should build momentum by repeating those small tests, celebrating their successes as it they achieves manageable goals and building momentum along the way. The continued success and gathered momentum will build confidence in agency members outside the testing ground, and it will allow those newly confident agency members to become influencers and spokespeople for the new vision, values and processes. Repeat and repeat, until all levels and segments of the agency have been transformed.
To be sure, the process outlined above is not a quick and easy process—nor is it for the faint of heart. But the benefits agencies gain when their culture is transformed are second to none. The citizen is finally at the heart of every mission; values are celebrated instead of treated as afterthoughts, and no one at the agency feels like a cog in a machine or a worker on an assembly line. Each agency member understands his or her task and the context of his or her role. Members understand why they matter to the agency, and more importantly, why they matter to citizens.
When an agency’s culture has truly transformed, citizens will notice. They may tell their friends and neighbors about the small changes they’ve witnessed—reduced time on hold at the contact center, more focused interactions, quicker problem resolution, more friendly staff and so forth.
Once citizens have experienced the results of transformation in one agency, they’ll begin to expect the same results from all agencies they deal with. The way transformed agencies spur changes in other agencies is called connection and it’s the topic of my next column.
