Cyber Security is the single most important challenge facing businesses and society today | Christiane Wuillamie OB

As a result, strategy execution is slow and often fails to deliver. It takes all functions, and all employees, working together to deliver strategic and business objectives successfully. The PYXIS approach and methodology help break down dysfunctional silo behavior and create focused alignment on enterprise strategic objectives.

The ecosystem mapping technology developed by PYXIS Culture Technologies visually maps the internal organizational enablers and blockers in delivering business results. By identifying the systemic blockages, management can use the PYXIS library of best practices to reduce these internal risks and improve productivity and performance. “The PYXIS software platform has a built-in scenario planning function for senior management to model the business impact of proposed organizational and culture changes on business outcomes,” explains Christiane. “You can then track the progress of initiatives against business metrics and show return on investments on improvements.”

According to Christiane, corporate culture is more than employee engagement or company values. These are important elements of culture, but many more causal factors interact to determine the strength or weakness of a company’s culture. These causal factors are internal policies, work processes, meeting dynamics, organization design, hiring and HR policies, peer pressure, management, and supervision.

Traditional employee surveys do not address these important causal factors. PYXIS uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative company information to build a visual map of the strengths and weaknesses of the current culture and how culture impacts business results.

PYXIS Culture Technologies differentiates itself from the traditional culture and performance improvement consulting firms in two important areas. “First, we combine over forty years of experience in studying, researching, and supporting senior leadership teams to understand how culture impacts performance,” adds Christiane. “In addition, we have deep operational experience in the transformation of technology departments, digital transformation, and business turnarounds.” Christiane adds, “We focus on culture as a business issue, not an HR issue. We also believe that internal people are the best to promote and sustain the culture, NOT consultants with off-the-shelf training programmes. To this end, our methodology is to operationalize culture and transfer skills to in-house teams.”

In one of PYXIS’ clients, a US Midwest electric utility company—with an already good safety record—began to realize that additional safety training classes were adding little if any, improvement in safety and productivity. Using PYXIS’s Safety Ecosystem Mapping methodology, they pinpointed several internal organizational elements that were unknowingly blocking improved employee safety. As a result, after working on these identified blockages, such as hiring and onboarding policies, supervisor development, and use of external contractors, for the first time in their history, they were able to deliver an entire year with no recordable safety accidents while also reducing the costs of unemployment insurance, improving productivity, speeding up resolution times, and possibly saving lives.

In another instance, with a global client in the FMCG industry, there was a significant disconnect between the Board and Senior management and the actual cybersecurity situation inside the company. “Our cyberculture map showed that lower-level employees, who really knew how bad cybersecurity was, were not able to speak up due to fear of retribution and senior management not listening to employee concerns,” says Christiane. In addition, several internal processes, such as Access Management and Asset Management proved to be significant risks.

At another client, they were able to show the negative impact on cybersecurity from weak governance policies and poor oversight of Third-Party partners. “In most cases, our unique culture mapping technology is able to show the risks of incomplete processes and policies that negatively impact cyber hygiene and a good speak-up culture,” she says.

The next phase in developing PYXIS’s revolutionary approach is to help businesses deliver on their ESG commitments by using their mapping technology to identify internal organizational factors that block the delivery of ESG progress. Too often, ESG objectives are addressed as separate issues, whereas in reality, they are interconnected and share many internal causal factors. “Our mapping approach can identify those causal factors that block or slow down the delivery of company ESG objectives,” says Christiane. “The PYXIS Culture Technologies approach to culture-as-an-ecosystem is based on the pioneering work of John R Childress, a recognized thought leader in culture and its impact on business results. His book, Culture Rules! is a must-read for understanding how the internal culture ecosystem impacts business results.