The commitment of top managers and their function as model examples are critical success factors when launching the cultural transformation. During the phases of awareness and understanding of the culture, the emphasis should be on communication of the new values through various media such as posters, articles, and haptic elements. The objective is to make the values and the related target behavior as well as its necessity understandable to employees. Unless each and every employee understands the benefits and what is expected of him/her, the successful execution of the organizational transformation will not be possible.

75% of all transformation projects fail due to a lack of communication and involvement of the employees.

During the phases involvement and ownership, the organizational anchoring of the values is especially critical for success, i.e., the clarification of the question as to what the values mean in daily work for the organization, the team, and the individual employees. It is important at this time to model and document the values and related target behavior to people‘s own working environments or organizational units and their daily work. Successful and simple exercises document actual “commitments“ in accordance with the principle “stop with ...“, “begin with ...“, and “continuation of ...“ or as individual statement of awareness.

„I live the values of qualitative patient care by always listening attentively whenever a patient is talking.“ (quote from a health care employee, anonymous)

An exercise of this type gives employees and managers the opportunity to become involved proactively and consciously with the topic and to reflect on the values in their relationship to daily work.

Along with the measures for individual anchoring, the incorporation of the canon of values into the organization‘s infrastructure is indispensable. Examples of successful implementations utilize the integration of the company‘s business processes, i.e., business reviews, supervisory board meetings, projects, and others, as well as the anchoring in all of the HR instruments and processes such as personnel selection, employee integration, training and development measures, performance management, target agreements. A recommended approach here is to utilize the values as the foundation for company-specific competence models, describing personal and social competencies. The ­modeling of the values in the HR processes throughout the employment cycle from hiring to departure from the company plays a decisive role because this determines the internal and external employer image for the staff. But only the integration of the values into the totality of all of the company processes can produce a holistic image of the corporate culture.