Cultural Fit Factor
Published by SHRM – Society for Human Resource Management, September 2009
http://www.shrm.org/Publications/Books/Pages/CulturalFitFactor.aspx 

Praise for the Book

“In her book The Cultural Fit Factor, Lizz Pellet reveals how to use employment branding to convey the real culture of your organization and find people who really fit! This is the ultimate guide to finding the right fit for any professional experience!” — Marshall Goldsmith is the New York Times bestselling author of Succession: Are You Ready? and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – a WSJ #1 business book and Harold Longman Award winner for Business Book of the Year

“At Zappos, our culture is built on attracting and retaining employees whose personal values match our corporate core values, and weeding out those that, while talented, simply won’t mesh with our values. The Culture Fit Factor explains why this is so critical for organizations and provides practical tools for getting it done.” — Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com

“Lizz Pellet’s Cultural Fit Factor is a keeper: 2 closely aligned views of Branding magnetically suspending Talent Management between Attract and Repel.”– Gerry Crispin, Chief Navigator, CareerXroads

“The Cultural Fit Factor provides specific examples and justification for tending to the fitness of the company’s culture and creating the transparency that attracts the best fit in new hires while deliberately repelling those who won’t. Use this easily digested material as your guide not only for getting the right people into your organization but for keeping them energized and committed well into the future.” — Lauryn Franzoni, Vice President and Executive Director, ExecuNet

“A book ‘fit’ for strategic thinkers and innovative HR leaders in the 21st century.”– Peter Weddle, CEO WEDDLE’s Research & Publishing

“Lizz Pellet has written a cleverly-delivered, hands-on guide for an until-now intangible process. Can a business book be a page turner? YES! Do as she says and become a hero in your company.”– Dick Finnegan, President, Finnegan | Mackenzie, and author of Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad: Breakthrough Ideas for Keeping Your Best Workers

“The Cultural Fit Factor is a comprehensive book that captures all the essential elements of Employment Branding. And Pellet’s ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ style makes this a great read. It’s chock full of indispensable information for organizations that are just beginning an employment brand campaign, as well as for those that need to protect what they have already invested.” — Jeanne Sturges, Managing Editor, Executive Recruiter News and Recruiting Trends, Kennedy Information

Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change
©2000 P.J. Bouchard and Lizz Pellet, Produced by Five Star Publications, Inc.

It happens to you. It happens to everyone. In fact, in business, as everywhere else, it’s happening faster all the time.

Fast-paced change is imperative in today’s business environment, but organizational leaders are ill prepared to lead it and make it happen. You don’t think so?

Then why do 75 percent of all mergers, acquisitions and general corporate change initiatives fail within the first three years?

In the past ten years alone:

• More than half of all U.S. companies were restructured
• Several hundred thousand companies were “downsized”
• More than 100,000 firms were acquired and merged
  

  Change is Inevitable!

• Nearly a million organizations sought bankruptcy protection in order to continue operating
• More than 500,000 others outright failed

In Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change, P.J. Bouchard and Lizz Pellet build a convincing case that creating successful, sustainable change in an organization depends on a “congruent culture.” This would be a culture that lives up to the high-minded words of its vision and mission statements. This would be a culture in which employees have a voice in decision-making that affects them. This would be a culture that gets work done by following its formal policies and procedures rather than a culture that needs endless informal “workarounds” to get anything accomplished.

Culture is the lifeblood of an organization. It’s the sum total of the history, people, and procedures that define the organization and its work. Bouchard and Pellet show how incongruent cultures breed low morale and low productivity, resulting in a devastating impact on the bottom line.

Operating under the belief that a congruent culture is a healthy culture and that a healthy culture breeds success, Bouchard and Pellet describe the tools and techniques they use to measure cultural congruence.

They prescribe a cultural-assessment process, such as their own Cultural Due Diligence, to take the temperature of your organization before you undertake any major change initiative. This diagnosis can illuminate the path to aligning your organization’s culture so that it can successfully sustain change — especially a major shift such as a merger or acquisition.

It’s advice that no organization should ignore, because, as we all know… Shift Happens!

Appealing to the “Green”- Collar Trend
http://www.kennedyinfo.com/ProfessionalDevelopment/detail/20306

Defining the Employment Branding Process and Employee Value Proposition, three-part recorded training series
http://www.kennedyinfo.com/ProfessionalDevelopment/detail/20313

How to Build an Employment Brand, 3-part series
http://www.kennedyinfo.com/training/strategicplanning/detail/20137