Home Depot\'s Blueprint for Culture Change Start

HOME DEPOT'S BLUEPRINT FOR CULTURE CHANGE

Start reading Harvard Business Review (HBR) article: Charan, R. (2006). Home Depot's Blueprint Culture Change. Harvard Business Review, April, Vol 84 Issue 4 p. 60-70. Assignment Expectations (Content) Based HBR article Charan (2006),pages paper

Home depot's blueprint for culture change

Steps the team took to make the change

The Home depot team undertook four main steps to ensure that the company changed its mechanisms are metrics, processes, programs, and structures. Metrics involved describing the company values and making it clear what each person would be accountable for Charan, 2006.

This way each employee and manager would understand their role within the company and work as a team. Metrics also provided measurement data in areas that had never been measured before. The data revealed some discrepancies towards the company's held beliefs. Employee performance reviews were not standardized. Using the metric system the team implemented a standardized performance process that was quantitative. This metric reduced the over 150 evaluation forms to only three electronic records. Processes were introduced for integrating the new formed culture into the organization. When Nardelli took over he introduced a Monday morning conference call, in which all the top executives provided individual reports of the previous week. This change ensured that managers were held accountable for the promises they make and it also created a culture of cooperation. To ensure that employees knew what was happening, the team introduced a Monday afternoon broadcast to all the 1,800 stores. This broadcast was meant to eliminate the memos that employees never read. Processes are vital for embedding rigor and analysis in any change event.

Programs are used for building the necessary support for the culture change. Implementing changes requires the team to provide support to the employees. This support would enable them to understand what is happening, and why it has to happen. To provide this support courses were introduced for store managers. At these courses, the managers were challenged and asked what they would do if they were in charge of the company. In this manner majority of them came to understand the reasons for the changes and they embraced the changes. To ensure that employees are committed to this culture change, the team has continued providing an array of leadership programs. A structure is necessary in creating the required framework for the new culture Stanford, 2011.

The team established that the company needed to have a centralized purchasing. To ensure this was possible presidents and vice presidents of the regional division got together in order to agree on how centralized purchasing would occur. After this, they went a step further to create the necessary team and assign employees their new roles. This demonstrates the structure that the company needed to ensure that it achieved centralized purchasing.

The change at Home depot was all about cultural changes in the way business was conducted. The change was considered successful because of the way it was implemented. The team identified the people affected by the changes and helped them in defining the problem and the design of the solution. The team also used concrete data which everyone could access. Change is a step process, and the team discovered this that is why they implemented the changes in projects. The team also created interlocking dependencies in various parts of the company, which ensured that all parties had a mutual interest to sustain the change.

Tools used for culture change

Two of the tools that Home depot used are data templates and Monday morning conference calls. The data templates provided concrete information that was accessible by all employees, and they indicated the performance of the stores. The templates also provided data that was used to perform quarterly reviews. This reviews ensured that managers were accountable. The data templates also provided employees with a deeper understanding of what how the company was performing. Providing these data opened up the eyes of the managers and they saw the truth and not just what they believed. Once this data was availed to the managers they realized the need for changing to ensure their stores are competing with Lowe's.