Is it possible to re-engineer a sick company culture

Is it possible to re-engineer a sick company cultureIs it possible to re-engineer a sick company cultureA healthy company culture can be a draw to an employee choosing a place to work. Its also essential to how a workplace functions Harvard Business Review recently wrote that culture influences how people spoke up or if they didnt.A bad culture can make the news for example, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank recently promised to improve his companys culture after a Wall Street Journal articlechronicled strip-club visits and inappropriate treatment of women at the company. But what happens when a once-happy workplace culture becomes negative?C-Space is a Boston-based company with several international offices that works directly with consumers to co-create new products for brands like Heinz, Bank of America, and Samsung. When things went wrong with their company culture, reports Quartz at Work, they decided to audit it, coming out on the other side with a series of slogans to live and w ork by. And when that went wrong? They went back to the drawing board and did it again, proving that culture is continuously in flux.Starting out as a smaller startup called Promise, they were acquired by an advertising firm Omnicom in 2012, and then merged with another company, becoming C-Space. Thats when things started to feel wrong. By the end of 2015, 30% of the staff had left, and just 56% said they felt proud to work there.Design for livingThe first four set of slogans that the culture committee employees from different areas and levels of the company came up with includedOnly accept awesome.Ive got this.On the surface, the meaning was clear. Only accept awesome meant to do your best work, and accept only the best from your coworkers. Ive got this meant taking ownership of a task or project.Yet, after about a year, employees began to embrace the mantras a little too much to the point that they became corrupted. Only accept awesome had created a new culture of overwork. Ive got this led to tasks going to the wrong people as over-eager employees wanted to be seen performing well.Do-overThe culture had changed, but not for the better. So C-Spaces culture committee brainstormed two more slogansOpen up and listen.Tell it like it is.While two sentences cant change a group of people, they did reportedly help. If anything, the C-Space experiment shows how delicate company culture is, and how difficult it is to engineer a group of people working together. Perhaps the best solution is not changing course completely, but the Japanese workplace concept of kaizen, which means, simply, continuous improvement.