Every business has a corporate culture, but it's only recently that companies have started to see just how important this characteristic is for building competitive advantage. Culture – including diversity and inclusion – is one of the most powerful differentiators between strong and weak companies, with culture-conscious companies consistently outperforming their competitors. But while 94% of executives say a strong corporate culture is the key to business success, few actually know how to implement the kind of cultural change that pays dividends.

Building a strong and diverse corporate culture is challenging, and every company's leadership team will struggle to build the culture they want. Seventy percent of change initiatives fail, largely because of poor employee buy-in and uneven implementation.

With record-high unemployment in the wake of the global coronavirus pandemic, it might seem counterintuitive for companies to focus on boosting retention now when staving off unemployment is more pressing. But large companies like Amazon and Facebook have taken advantage of layoffs to recruit talent and are hiring aggressively during this pandemic, in some cases, poaching employees at smaller companies who are looking for the stability that comes with larger operations. Now is the time to think long-term. The U.S. economy will recover, and when it does, companies will want to have strategies in place that limit turnover, which is both costly and inefficient.

In my experience, the biggest stumbling block to successful culture change initiatives is an overreliance on lip-service-style communication from the top. Words alone don't effect change. Instead, to make the most credible, viable, and impactful culture change, companies need to adopt an attention-grabbing "grand cultural gesture" as a calling card.

A cultural calling card is a demonstrable practical change that can serve as a beacon around which to orient larger and broader cultural changes. A calling card stimulates bottom-up, employee-led cultural change by providing every employee with a shared cultural touchpoint they can use to understand and implement a company's cultural vision. All of these calling cards have four things in common: they need to be (1) clear, obvious, and enforceable; (2) shockingly counterintuitive so that they communicate a unique and provocative change; (3) aligned with a company's values and mission; and (4) big enough or significant enough to require a real commitment of time and resources, both from management and from employees.

These cultural calling cards define some of the most successful and powerful companies today:

Zappos created the policy, since adopted by Amazon, of paying employees to quit.
Bridgewater's founder Ray Dalio insists on firing employees for not criticizing their superiors.
The Ritz-Carlton is famous for its $2,000 rule, a policy stipulating that any and every employee is authorized to spend up to $2,000 to correct a customer issue.
Nike demonstrated its diversity culture when it supported American football quarterback and human rights campaigner Colin Kaepernick in 2019, and when it required 10,000 managers worldwide to undergo mandatory diversity training and unconscious bias awareness training in 2018.

For each of these companies, their cultural calling card is more than a flashy PR stunt; it's a clear statement about what values truly define the company culture and about how committed the company is to upholding those values in its daily operations.

For companies that can find their cultural calling card, the rewards are enormous. Companies with a clear and engaging culture enjoy superior employee retention and dramatically lower turnover compared to their peers. The simple truth is that culture conscious companies compete better for top talent. According to the Glassdoor's Corporate Culture & Mission Survey, more than half of respondents across four countries prioritized corporate culture over salary when evaluating job satisfaction. And nearly eight in 10 adults consider a company's mission and purpose as crucial in their job application process. And customers notice the cultural difference too. Nearly 63% of consumers globally want companies to stand for values other than profit.

But there's a huge disconnect between what employees and customers want and what many companies in fact provide. Just 19% of employees globally see a strong match between their employer's stated values and their day-to-day workplace culture. And companies like Volkswagen, Wells Fargo and Equifax have suffered massive financial losses simply because customers have perceived them as hypocritical and dishonest.

The problem that companies face is that there's no getting around putting real skin in the game. It's never enough for a company to release vision statements. Cultural values have to be won, and companies have to put more on the line: If you aren't making a move that raises eyebrows, you aren't showing that your cultural values have real meaning. To make cultural change a reality, you have to shift from verbal articulation of ideals to practical implementation of new organizational norms.

That means ditching the buzzwords and empty messaging, and instead making a statement that means something. A cultural calling card is that statement. While vision statements might define a cultural commitment, a cultural calling card demonstrates cultural commitment. And demonstrated cultural commitment is contagious. Adopting at least one counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful policy shows to employees that the company is willing to put its principles into practice. By doing so, companies can kickstart cultural change across all organizational levels.

Creating a thoughtful corporate culture is important for long-term success. To get the best employee engagement and to win the hearts of customers, companies need the credible cultural change that comes from the powerful cultural commitment of a calling card.

Marvin Ammori is an executive at Protocol Labs, a company focused on improving the internet and computing generally through decentralized web protocols such as IPFS and Filecoin. He also served as a technical consultant to HBO's "Silicon Valley." His views are his own.

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