Client Background

The company is a global industrial technology group headquartered in Italy, with a long-standing presence across international markets and a strong reputation for engineering, innovation and advanced manufacturing solutions. Its global operations bring together specialised expertise, technology and teams across different countries, while its India operations serve as an important part of the organisation’s regional presence, supporting customers and business operations in the Indian market. The combination of a global organisational culture and a local operating environment made it important to create a culture framework that was aligned with the larger organisation while being relevant and practical for the India team.

The Starting Point: Different Problems, A Common Pattern

The engagement with the client initially involved several different interventions across the organisation:

1. Our team was working with functional teams such as Accounts and Sales, where coordination and accountability were emerging challenges.
2. I was working with the Heads of Departments, where interdepartmental cooperation was not always strong and differences in perspectives and individual egos were affecting collaboration.
3. At the leadership level, I was also coaching the Managing Director, where one of the recurring challenges was that employees sometimes found it difficult to understand his expectations because communication was not always clear.

Although these appeared to be separate issues, working with different levels of the organisation revealed a common underlying problem.

The Bigger Challenge: Culture Was Not Clearly Defined

Across the different interventions, one theme kept emerging: There was no sufficiently clear and consistently implemented framework for how people were expected to work together. Without clearly articulated organisational values and behavioural expectations, employees were often left to interpret situations based on their own understanding.

This affected areas such as:

• Cross-functional collaboration
• Accountability
• Communication
• Leadership expectations
• Decision-making
• Interdepartmental relationships

The real challenge therefore wasn’t simply to fix individual behaviours. The organisation needed greater clarity around the culture it wanted to build, and a way to translate that culture into everyday behaviour.

From Individual Interventions to an Organisation-Wide Culture Project

This insight changed the nature of the engagement. Instead of continuing to address individual behavioural issues independently, we proposed a broader culture definition and implementation project.

The project involved three key questions:

1. What is the culture the client globally trying to build?
2. What aspects of that culture are relevant to the Indian organisation?
3. How do we translate the desired culture into behaviours that employees can actually understand and follow?

Understanding and Localising the Global Culture

The first stage was to understand the client’s global culture and values. We then examined how these principles translated into the Indian organisational context and identified where localisation or greater clarity would be useful.

The objective was not to create an entirely separate culture for the Indian organisation, but to ensure that the global values could be understood, interpreted and experienced meaningfully within the local workplace.

Crystallising the Vision, Values and Culture

The next stage involved working closely with the Managing Director to bring greater clarity to the organisation’s:

• Vision
• Values
• Cultural expectations
• Desired ways of working

This was an important shift from having values as broad organisational statements to defining what they should actually look like in practice. The focus was on creating clarity that could eventually be communicated consistently across the organisation.

Turning Values into Department-Level Ownership

Defining the culture at the leadership level was only the beginning. We conducted a further workshop with the HODs to explore: “What does this value look like within my department?”

Each HOD was encouraged to identify how the values could translate into their team’s everyday interactions, decisions and working practices. The HODs therefore moved from being recipients of the culture to becoming owners and carriers of it within their departments.

This created an important layer of accountability: culture was no longer something that HR or senior leadership alone was responsible for communicating.

Making Culture Visible Across the Organisation

We recognised that a workshop and a set of values would not be sufficient to create lasting recall. The next stage therefore focused on culture reinforcement across the physical workplace. Working closely with HR, we developed ideas for communicating the values and related behavioural themes throughout the office.

These included:

• Visual representations of the values
• Themed communication areas
• Weekly behavioural tips
• Quotes linked to different cultural themes
• Communication around common workplace challenges
• Regular reminders designed to keep the values visible and relevant

A designer then translated the concepts into artwork that could be displayed throughout the office.

The intention was to make the culture visible, memorable and part of the everyday environment, rather than something employees encountered only during training sessions.

Building Culture Into the Employee Lifecycle

The culture implementation journey is designed to extend beyond communication and reinforcement.

The next stage is to embed the same values into key employee processes, including:

1. Hiring: Using the organisational values as part of assessing cultural alignment during recruitment.
2. Induction: Introducing new employees to the organisation’s values and expected behaviours from the beginning of their journey.
3. Performance & Year-End Reviews: Connecting the values with performance conversations and assessment, so that how someone achieves results becomes part of the discussion – not just what they achieve.
4. Recognition: Using the values as a basis for recognising employees who demonstrate the desired culture in action.

10. The Impact

What began as multiple behavioural and leadership interventions evolved into a broader organisational culture implementation initiative.

The project created a pathway from:

Unclear expectations

→ Defined culture

→ Leadership alignment

→ HOD ownership

→ Visible communication

→ Ongoing reinforcement

→ Integration into employee processes

The fundamental shift was from trying to correct individual behaviours to creating a shared framework that could guide behaviour across the organisation.

The Bigger Learning

One of the key insights from the engagement was that behavioural problems within an organisation do not always originate with the individuals displaying them.

Sometimes, people are simply operating without a sufficiently clear understanding of: “How are we expected to work here?”

When expectations, values and behaviours are clearly defined – and consistently reinforced – employees have a stronger reference point for making decisions, collaborating with colleagues and understanding what the organisation expects from them.