Developing the organizational culture at Sunly – a renewable energy company

At its worst, culture is reduced to corporate slogans on a billboard which are joked about in the coffee corner. At its best, culture is intentionally shaped to support organizational success – it’s consciously in focus, aligned with business objectives, developed in response to changing contexts, and expressed in people’s daily actions. 

Sunly: the challenge 

Sunly, a renewable energy company, had grown and expanded beyond the Baltic States into Poland. To continue progressing as a cohesive group, Sunly recognized the need to better understand and integrate the local organizational cultures. This began our journey toward cultural integration, which started in the summer of 2023 and continues to this day. 

To begin with, what exactly is organizational culture? It can be described as a “red thread” that runs through an organization, a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that guides behavior ¹. In simple terms, culture defines “how things are done around here.” The written and unwritten rules stemming from culture influence what is encouraged or discouraged within the group. When an organization’s culture aligns with personal values and aspirations, it provides meaning, direction, and strength to achieve common goals, contributing to the overall success of the organization ²,³.

Culture is key to successfully implementing change ⁴ both for startups and established businesses. The topic becomes especially crucial during mergers and acquisitions, where cultural differences (both organizational and national) add complexity to the process ⁵.

Sunly: STEP I – mapping and building a common future culture

Sunly’s cross-company summer days were the important starting point for cultural integration. Before the event, we gathered input from Sunly leaders in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Estonia to understand their local perspectives on culture. With these insights, we began focusing on building a coherent future culture for Sunly as a group.

We established concrete behavioral agreements around three key areas on how: 

1. the work gets done 
2. they communicate and collaborate (both internally and with customers/partners)
3. they ensure individual and organizational development in the future 

Based on these agreements, we later formulated Sunly’s values. In addition to being a platform for discussion on values, the summer days workshops also provided an opportunity for international teams to network and integrate. 

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. 

In any organization, culture exists—whether it is actively managed or not. However, a culture that evolves passively may steer the organization off course and hinder progress toward its business goals. Conversely, a culture that is well-defined on paper but not lived out in practice can also be a significant barrier to achieving business goals or desired change. Without a shared understanding of the importance, the right skills, systems and structures or role models⁷, even the best-intentioned values may not take root. Sunly’s proactive approach to developing organizational culture is a strong positive example of the thoughtful and consistent effort that this important topic requires.

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