The senior management team probably had a lot of fun drawing this up. No doubt the management consultant who facilitated the session(s) made a pretty penny. I hear the going rate is £1000 a day. The resulting wall chart is titled Our Shared Culture". There is rather too much writing for the chart to be read from a wall but in any case I can't imagine anyone willingly decorating their office with it. At the top it says "Shared by everyone" and here is the cleaver bit each letter in the word SHARED is used to form the first letter in a word that represents how people are expected to behave. So S is for Supporting, H is for Honest and A is for Accountable and so on. Under each of these new words is a description of the type of behaviour that is expected.

It sounds a bit Blue Peterish but I have been involved in drawing up similar charts for the front of a business plan or a power point presentation for a staff conference. The exercise of drawing it up is useful in getting the senior management team to be clear about what they mean by the organisations values and what this means for how they expect people to behave. As long as the exercise doesn't extend beyond the morning coffee break and those involved don't think that producing a chart will change the culture of an organisation.

What's the betting even members of the senior management team won't remember what the E in SHARED stands for by the Christmas team meal? Staff are pretty immune to this type of communication compared to the sophisticated advertising they are bombarded with from the media .In any case culture change has gone out of vogue in the current harsh financial climate. Not that there isn't a lot of change happening at work, no, it just that culture change would mean getting the staff involved in drawing up the values and agreeing how people should behave and that would require a lot of conferences and workshops that we can no longer afford.

Culture change was about changing the way people behaved through changing their thinking so for example focusing on customer care. Now we don't really care what people think as long as they do what needs to be done. Changes are imposed rather than negotiated because it's quicker, there is no alternative and if we asked staff they would tell us they didn't like it and would prefer not to do it. This is usually expressed as" we are standing on a burning platform" so we have no time for discuss we must act and "turkeys don't vote for Christmas" so there is little point in wasting time learning of your objections. All this is very short sighted because change which has no buy from staff and is not better for customers is not going to work in the long term. But the long term is not the problem at the moment.

Blair McPherson author of People Management in a harsh financial climate and Equipping managers for an uncertain future both published by Russell House http://www.blairmcpherson.co.uk/