Culture change initiatives try to replace an existing culture with a new one, and roughly 70% fail. Culture alignment starts from a different premise: it is not the type of culture you have that determines success, it is whether that culture is aligned across the company. We measure the values your people hold today through a Personal Core Values Survey, define the values your strategy requires, and converge on four to six acting core values. From there we align three things that make culture tangible: how the organization prioritizes decisions, communicates, and recognizes and rewards behavior. Organizations that align their business processes against a small, targeted set of core values see six times greater organizational performance.

CLA uses multiple data sources to build an accurate picture of what a culture actually is: surveys that measure values and behavioral norms, focus groups that surface the lived experience of employees, structured interviews with leaders, and analysis of engagement and performance data. Our Connected Culture Model provides the analytical framework for integrating these data sources into a clear diagnostic, identifying where culture is strong, where it’s misaligned, and where the highest-leverage opportunities for improvement lie.

Most mergers and acquisitions fail to realize their intended value, and the most common reason is cultural misalignment between the combined organizations, rather than financial or operational integration. CLA’s Culture Merge Map addresses post-merger integration directly and can be run before or after a transaction. We quantify the values of both organizations, identify the culture risks to mitigate and the commonalities to build on, and build an alignment plan that delivers a single culture and value set for the combined company, giving integration teams a clear view of where the two organizations fit and where they will collide.

Culture change requires commitment from an organization’s most senior leaders, and no outside firm can supply that. What we can do is help those leaders see the full set of factors that shape behavior: what the organization rewards, promotes, tolerates and measures, and how its compensation, performance and development practices either reinforce the culture they want or work against it. We then help them change those conditions, which is what makes the shift hold.

Most engagements open with a Connected Culture Audit, a brief review of your current values and culture health against the Connected Culture Model, which identifies strengths, gaps, and where investment will be most impactful. What we do next depends on what the audit uncovers. Through Culture Confirmation, we quantify the values your people hold against the values your strategy requires, and then produce an alignment plan. Through our Culture Blueprint, we translate confirmed values into a tactical plan for delivering culture consistently across onsite, hybrid and remote work. Through our Culture Alignment Assessment offering, we bring culture into hiring decisions, where candidates aligned to your core values are 20% more likely to be high performers and 27% more likely to stay. Through Onboarding and Reboarding, we integrate people into your culture when they join and periodically throughout their tenure. And our Connected Culture Leadership Workshop and Culture Cultivator sessions equip leaders and teams to deliver the culture day to day. It is a comprehensive suite of offerings that enable us to meet you where you are. You probably do not need all of it. The audit will tell us which parts matter most for your organization.