Foundation of Human Skills >> Organisational Culture

"Culture encompasses the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of an organisation. Culture is how things get done in organisations. It is also a well-known fact that an organisation's culture shapes its learning orientation. It is therefore important to understand the cultural aspects of the organisation before planning any initiative in e-learning or knowledge management."

ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

The culture of an organisation is an amalgamation of the values and beliefs of the people in an organisation. It can be felt in the implicit rules and expectations of behaviour in an organisation where, even though the rules are not formally written down employees know what is expected of them. It is usually set by management whose decisions on policy usually set up the culture of the organisation. The organisational culture usually has values and beliefs that support the organisational goals.

Values and Beliefs which support Organisational Goals.

The culture of the organisation, if it is positive and helpful can help to motivate staff or at least prevent them from becoming dissatisfied. At IBM. the attitude of management to their employees is an attraction to prospective staff and would probably help maintain the staff that they have. If the climate does not satisfy the needs of staff, then it will probably become a demotivator, - that is that it would cause dissatisfaction and so people would become less inclined to want to work towards the organisational goals.

Things in an organisation which contribute to the culture or climate

  • the organisational structure of reporting and relationships

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  • company policy

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  • personnel practices

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  • work flow and work loads

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  • job design

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  • management and supervisory styles.
Things which can affect the organisational culture on an individual or personal level.
  • levels of trust

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  • risk taking

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  • stress

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  • fears and anxieties

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  • social interaction

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  • factions and politics
Organisational Goals

All organisations have goals.

These goals might be to make the most profit they can, or to gain the highest market share in their area of business or in the case of many community organisations, to provide an effective service to the community even if they do not make any money at all.

Managers are employed to ensure that the people who work in an organisation are working together to achieve the organisations goals.

What is this thing called organisational culture?

Conversations often refer to different organisations having different cultures. For the average person - "culture" may mean that they perceive the organisation they are involved with to be:
  • pushy, harsh and authoritarian

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  • very political with traps and pitfalls for people to fall into if they are not nimble and able to wheeler-deal and hold their own in a brawl

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  • rule and ritual bound

  • cold and separated

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  • brisk, dynamic, opportunistic

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  • exploitative, all take and no give

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  • caring and genuinely interested in people as people
People classify what they see as the characteristics of organisations. We construe and organisation culture. It is socially defined and experienced. The experience of the things we feel are displayed by the "culture and its practices" affect how we behave and respond to the organisations we work in.

Culture Control and Engineering

Managers seek to "change" the culture of the organisation. What they therefore try to do is shape the way that people behave, feel, contribute, interact, and perform as employees of the organisation. This is usually called leadership! They initiate the debates, set the imperatives and priorities. If the managers want to pursue quality improvement then meetings will be held, training will be done, banners will be waved - new imperatives are brought in to the business to be integrated by way of activities, expectations, values and sanctions into the culture of the business. This is business - the business must succeed in co-ordinated, highly charged ways.

New policies, methods and roles are introduced to shape behaviours, encourage, promote and require - to push certain expectations of performance in the business and thus to control.

Spoken of in other ways, culture in organisational terms is broadly the social/behavioural manifestation and experiencing of a whole range of issues such as:
  • the way work is organised and experienced

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  • how authority exercised and distributed

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  • how people are and feel rewarded, organised and controlled

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  • the values and work orientation of staff

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  • the degree of formalisation, standardisation and control through systems there is/should be

  • the value placed on planning, analysis, logic, fairness etc

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  • how much initiative, risk-taking, scope for individuality and expression is given

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  • rules and expectations about such things as informality in interpersonal relations, dress, personal eccentricity etc

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  • differential status

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  • emphasis given to rules, procedures, specifications of performance and results, team or individual working
Organisational Culture and Working Life

We are born into a culture; we take up employment in a culture. We might therefore argue that the culture of an organisation affects the type of people employed, their career aspirations, their educational backgrounds, and their status in society. The culture of the organisation may embrace them. It may reject them.

Visibility

Organisational culture may be visible
  • In the type of buildings, offices, shops of the organisation.
  • In the image projected in publicity and public relations in general. Think for example of the differences between a local authority, a computer manufacturer, and a merchant bank.
An organisation's culture may be imperceptible, taken for granted, assumed, a status quo that we live and participate in but do not question. Elements of the culture may be questioned where individual or group expectations do not correspond to the behaviour associated with the prevailing values of those who uphold "the culture".

An organisation may display elements of several "cultures" which may contradict each other, which may compete. We can even consider the characteristics of an anti-organisational or countervailing culture.

Classifying/Modelling Organisation Culture

To understand organisation cultures we can begin by describing types of organisation such as democratic, laissez-faire, participative etc. Such descriptions in a sense become representative "models" of organisations (abstractions). The model defines our assessment of elements, relationships, determinants and likely effects. Our model may enable us to predict events so that we act to steer our own behaviour and the behaviour of others.

Defining "models or frameworks" helps us to understand what the phenomena is, discuss it with others and identify what we might do to translate the model or parts of it into reality.


The Organizational Climate Assessment

The Organizational Climate Assessment is a powerful instrument, especially when provided organization-wide with specific departmental demographic separation and analysis. Each category has been designed to assess one of the key categories, which affect employee performance. This assessment should be administered anonymously company wide, broken out by departments of 6 or more people to protect the identities of respondents. Every precaution should be taken to insure confidentiality in order that respondents will feel comfortable sharing their true opinions and perspectives.
The objective of performing an employee climate assessment is to identify the key areas which are hindering production, reducing effectiveness and which might generate unexpected costs in the near future. The idea and approach is for the organization not to simply perform an academic exercise, simply because they 'do it at this time every year', but to critically examine themselves to see where the company and its employees might be finely tuned to generate higher levels of performance. Once identified, opportunities to strengthen existing approaches, which are working well, as well as select appropriate interventions for addressing the weakest areas, should be aggressively pursued for the maximum benefit of everyone.
This assessment is designed with the following assumptions in mind:

Fundamental care of the employee as an asset

Organizations are successful because of the quality of work employees perform. When employees are cared for, and the right environment is created where there are no barriers to performance, their true value to the organization can be fully realized.

Respect for the dignity of the employee and the sensitivities of human beings

Humans have fundamental needs for safety and security, affiliation and acceptance, involvement as well as self-actualization. The extent to which these and other human needs are fulfilled lead to higher levels of commitment, initiative and performance. Organizations, which include an emphasis on fulfilling the needs of their employees to some extent, will enjoy a more productive and stable workforce.

Full understanding of the realities of business

This assessment is written with full realization of the realities of business, and not an unrealistic utopian view of an idealized work environment. The factors emphasized and measured in this assessment are the important levers to optimizing employee workplace performance, not just creating an environment where everyone feels better.

Embracing optimization and improvement

An irrefutable trend in business today, continuous improvement and increasing levels of efficiency are a way of life, and these factors are given appropriate emphasis in this assessment because they represent an ever present dynamic with which every employee must deal.

Keys to motivation and commitment

Rather than only identifying potential problem areas to be avoided, this assessment focuses on areas where human behavior can be leveraged more positively to create employees with higher levels of motivation and commitment

Organisational Values

The values of an organisation are used to indicate the type of conduct:

  • Required by employees when carrying out the operations of the organisation

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  • That customers can expect from the organisation
Organisational values often cover the following areas:
  • Compliance with legislation

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  • Employment of staff

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  • Customer service

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  • Receiving gifts from suppliers and customers

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  • Giving gifts to customers

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  • Discrimination in the workplace

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  • Employee integrity

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  • Employee privacy

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  • Quality standards of products and services
Example:

Some of the values that might be set for a Customer Contact Centre include:
  • Employees will act with honesty and integrity when dealing with customers, suppliers, government agencies and fellow employees. At all times employees will endeavour to act in such a way that others are treated with respect and dignity.


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  • Employees will never directly or indirectly engage in theft, fraud or embezzlement. No employee will participate in fraudulent or deceptive activities towards the organisation, customers, suppliers or any other party with whom the organisation has business dealings.


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  • Company policy prohibits unlawful discrimination against employees or customers based on their race, gender, religious or ethnic background.


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  • The organisation will observe all laws and regulations governing business activity.
When organisations set values, they do so based on the ethics that they hold to be important.

A Why consider a climate survey?

The reasons in favour of climate surveys.
  • The CEO wants a measure of climate upon taking over the reigns of the organisation.


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  • The CEO wants to find out what climate issues are interfering with organisational progress.


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  • The CEO wants to improve performance - is aware that climate influences or is influenced by: job performance, job satisfaction, involvement, commitment, org structure and rules, leadership style, citizenship behaviour, innovation, competence, rewards, intention to quit, stress etc.


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  • The CEO acts on the valuing human capital, and recognises climate components related to development, learning, innovation etc


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  • Climate is easier to operationalise than culture. Climate precedes culture. Without appropriate climate, desired culture will not happen.


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  • Climate is wonderful metaphor because everyone understands it. Climate can assist changes at organisational or individual level
  • Climate is an honest concept that has not been manufactured to cause something to happen, as have nearly all other organisational change options. Climate allows description of something that already exists. It also allows description of what is wanted, and is readily operationalised.


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  • Org climate can empower or disempower.


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  • Climate facilitates organisational alignment.
Reasons that prompt HR to consider a climate survey
  • · HR have sensed a need to have hard climate data to report to the executive

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  • · HR wish to monitor the impact of other organisational change processes

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  • · HR wish to measure the impact of environmental changes


    • Reasons that may delay a decision to undertake a climate survey

  • · Things are a bit bad just now
  • · Didn't help last time
  • · May encourage unreasonable expectations by employees

    Making climate measurements useful
  • · There are processes to improve data quality and quantity
  • · Involvement of and ownership by employees
  • · Secure psychological safety
Moving from climate survey tostrategic climate.

There is a further process that takes climate measurement, and uses it as part of Deltapoint's Strategic Climate Planning and Management system.
  • Use strategic direction of organisation

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  • Develop scenarios and flags
  • Design ideal org. climate for those scenarios
  • Find difference between current climate and target climate
  • Set project to align climate(s)
  • Do it
  • Measure it
  • Learn from it
  • Adjust strategic direction and loop again etc.
    Even mere surveys can work better.
  • Organisational surveys such as climate, family friendly awareness, sexual discrimination, drug issues, job satisfaction, intention to quit and so on, are generally not well received when done in-house.
  • Questionnaires are easily biased to get the answers expected.
  • Staff fear abuse of data collected in-house.
  • The participant expects some improvement out of them, but that rarely happen.
  • A flawed questionnaire + insincere respondents = bad data.
Surveys conducted by appropriately skilled external consultant typically pull higher participation rates and better sincerity levels. Issues of confidentiality, trust, and credibility of researchers are important to those being surveyed, and the external consultant can better guarantee anonymity of results.

In a specific example, one climate survey conducted in-house suffered 6% missing data, and the missing data was scattered so that 92% of questions were not answered by everyone. There were widespread pattern responses that indicated insincere participation. Quantity and quality of data were poor. The follow-up survey, also measuring climate, but conducted by Deltapoint, returned .06% missing data, no unusable questions, and no detectable insincerity. In addition to reports being more meaningful, the inherent 'empowerment' of individuals during the process encouraged ownership of the solutions that they themselves created as part of the final report.

Climate can be a powerful organisational development tool when used