What is the Casualty Rate in Culture Change?

What is the Casualty Rate?

At this point I would like to say, “Here are the statistics on how many people you will lose.” Unfortunately, that is not possible. There are no lines on exit interviews that ask, “Did you leave because of the culture?”—although there should be. We have no way of accounting for the reason people leave, and for the most part, people will not tell you the honest truth anyway. Remember, people draw the majority of their self-esteem from their jobs. They will fight and protect this to the death.

There are a few things we can tell you, though, to help.

1. Culture change follows the rule of thirds. A third of your people will follow you with excitement and support the change, a third will resist it and a third will ride the fence to see who is winning and then make their decision.

2. No matter what size the company, the amount of resistance and the splits will be the same. We have studied companies with 200,000 employees to the 25,000-employee size and some with less than 100. In all cases the distribution of reaction was the same. (Our hypothesis was that the smaller the company the easier it would be to change the culture. That idea was wrong and also number three on our list.)

3. No matter what the size of your company, the culture change will be hard. Granted, the number of “converts” you have to make to your new service culture has a direct impact on the effort of the change, but it really does not affect the difficulty of the change. Problems will surface quicker in the smaller company, but the employee will stay longer and be more challenging. We tend to find the willingness to let someone go who does not fit the culture to be almost non-existent in the smaller companies. After all, you have been working with this person for quite some time and there is more of a family atmosphere in your company. How can you tell your “brother” that you have to let him go because he does not fit the new service culture? Tough!

Remember, there is something worse than an employee who quits and leaves the company - its an employee who quits, but does NOT leave the company. These are the ones you have to worry about.