Organisational development

A Strong Culture for a Positive Performance Community

In increasingly complex and dynamic times, expertise is becoming a central foundation for a company’s performance. Often, companies lack adequate reflection tools and self-descriptions to understand the cultural basis on which this expertise is achieved or leveraged, making them susceptible to unconscious changes in this foundation.

However, if companies proactively engage with the performance foundation of „culture,“ they can methodically enhance their self-description and position themselves to actively maintain and expand the foundations of successful expertise.

The Story

ingenics AG is an established engineering service provider, particularly in the automotive sector. With a committed circle of partners, the company has managed to grow continuously over recent years through excellent services.

In a competitive market, ingenics grows above average and faced the challenge of maintaining the performance culture that had been established over the years.

The goal was to make the previously implicit culture of the core team more tangible for the existing workforce and new employees.

The starting point of the work was a cultural discussion that aimed to provide both a fixed and universally binding foundation and a broad translation of this cultural basis for all departments, locations, and regions. Specifically, the goal was to avoid a vague, compromise-driven vision statement. A tangible culture always has edges and contours; it is reliable and clear.

In a cascading process, a clear consensus of the cultural core was first established among the partners. This core was then expanded through interpretations and translations by employees in worldwide workshops led by the partners themselves. This approach made culture tangible and observable in everyday work. From hundreds of suggestions, an essence of around 60 action descriptions was agreed upon.

The core and the action descriptions formed the basis of the second stage. In this phase, various tools were developed to actively embed the theme of culture in the daily work of the entire workforce. This included everything from the hiring process and project kick-offs to situation-specific vision statements. This ensured that the debate about culture found its place not only in documents but also in daily practice. Additionally, the topic of „culture“ became a regular part of management meetings. The action descriptions found were lived as expressions of a solid value core and could be easily developed alongside the business. Thus, ingenics is capable of not only adequately reflecting and describing its performance foundation but also refining and expanding it.

Throughout the project, it was evident how valuable it is to address issues from a position of strength, enabling a company to approach the challenges of the coming years with greater stability and future resilience.