For an organizational culture to thrive, people must recognize behaviors — both their own and others’ — that align or deviate from the values. To ensure this, values need to be tied to specific, clear behavioral agreements. Encouraging the right behaviors and curbing the wrong ones depends on fostering the skills and courage to give and receive forthright, caring and constructive feedback.
Role models — formal and informal leaders — also play a critical role in shaping culture. Leaders’ actions influence others through social learning mechanism ⁶ and help pass on cultural norms.
Sunly: STEP II – bringing culture from paper to reality
One of the key initiatives for cultural integration at Sunly was training employees on feedback skills. After the summer workshops, it became clear that giving and receiving constructive feedback is crucial to acting on agreed-upon behavioral agreements. However, it was also an area that needed improvement across the organization.
To make giving and receiving feedback more convenient and rooted in the culture, we ran training sessions for nearly all Sunly employees, focusing on practical role-play exercises that enhanced the skillset, toolset, and mindset needed to deal with the topic of feedback.
Following the establishment of values, Sunly designed a values card game to help teams across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland engage with these in a meaningful way. The game encouraged discussions around real-life scenarios, allowing teams to explore how Sunly’s values could be practically applied in their day-to-day work.
Sunly also initiated leadership training programs aimed at developing both leadership skills and a shared understanding of leadership quality across the organization. These programs fostered networking across different regions and raised awareness about the critical role leaders play in shaping organizational culture.
Embedding the desired culture in Sunly does not end with these activities, it is rather the beginning of a journey. The renewed values were the first signal to Sunly that, along with the ambitious internal vision, the external image and image of the company must also take a leap forward. Together, we conducted an in-depth analysis of Sunly’s current and desired image, which was used as input for a creative agency to revamp the company’s brand identity.