Assessing and Managing Organisational Culture

TITLE: Assessing and Managing Organisational Culture

What is Corporate Culture? In simple terms, organisational culture is "the way things work". Culture can perhaps be best understood as deeply felt values and assumptions that are shared across an organisation, which drive behaviours and performance levels. In general terms, corporate culture is the look, the feel, and the atmosphere of the organisation and the people within it. It is based on people’s perceptions and assumptions of how things get done within the organisation. A company’s culture is greatly influenced by the management team in the organisation as they set the policies, systems, practices and the examples for the organisation. However, all employees within an organisation contribute to an organisation’s culture. Why assess Corporate Culture? Organisations develop cultures whether they try to or not. Understanding company culture in today's business world can help move towards a vision - towards building an organisation that one would feel proud leaving behind. A Culture Audit is an assessment of the existing culture of your business – its strengths and weaknesses with respect business goals, objectives, people behaviour and expectations, and approach to work. Culture Audits measure such attributes as risk tolerance, degree of hierarchy, reward structure, collaboration, values, innovation vs. adaptation. An organisational culture assessment exercise often offers valuable insights. It is not unusual to find that there is a significant difference in the perceptions of the senior management and other employees on various culture dimensions. What the top management strives to be as an organisation and what values they hope to endorse, may be different from the values, beliefs, and norms expressed in actual practices and behaviour. Cultural assessment can enable a company to analyse the gap between the current and desired culture. Developing a picture of the ideal and then taking a realistic look at the gaps is vital information that can be used to design interventions to close the gaps and bring specific elements of culture into line. Having an assessment tool such as the one used by M\S\C can provide the Management with valuable objective measurement of existing culture. Executives are frequently analytical and quantitative in their orientation. Having data and an assessment tool to deliver a message may be the key to getting management to pay attention to and face the reality of what kind of culture really exists. The Culture Assessment Process M\S\C Cultural Assessment survey consists of a number of statements, depending upon factors like nature of business, the level of the participant in the organisation etc., describing all aspects of an organisation's culture. Participants from throughout the organisation are asked for their level of agreement on each statement. The statements are based on 45 to 48 crucial elements of an organisation's culture. These are termed as culture dimensions and cover the range of culture that extends from underlying beliefs and assumptions to explicit practices. Some examples of dimensions that are covered in the Survey are given in the table. Individual responses are kept in strict confidence. This helps obtain candid and honest responses. These culture dimensions could be narrowed down to around 7 to 10 Culture Groups. These Groupings can be used to profile the organisation. Some examples of the identified culture groups are given below.
Culture GROUPS	Culture DIMENSIONS
Creative Environment Employee Orientation Planned Operations Tradition & Values	Aggressiveness Concern for Image Confronting Conflict Innovation Ethics and Values Goal Clarity People Development Pressure and Stress Sociability
The Analysis The most important part of the survey is the analysis, which reflects the true picture of the perceptions of different people in the organisation and their expectations with regard to the identified culture dimensions or culture groups. This analysis is done through a software developed by in-house. The programme attempts to identify and eliminate inconsistencies in responses and extreme variations. The analysis can be done across the organisation, within a department, across various departments, across various locations, across various levels in the organisation, etc. The analysis also takes into consideration the feelings, suggestions and opinions of employees and key observations of the facilitators. What is judged through this study a. What the Top Management would like the company culture to be – the vision. b. Internal and External perception of what the existing culture is – reality check. c. Employees/ Customers/ Suppliers desire as to what the organisational culture should be in an ideal situation. d. Perception differences - the gaps. e. What needs to be done – the action plan. Based on these measures a number of analyses are possible. This may be a comparison of what the management wants vis-a-vis the actual situation, a comparison between Management desire and employee desire, comparison between different functional areas of the organisation etc. The final analysis is done based on the survey, our observations and one-on-one interactions with the participants. It gives the true picture with regards to the management vision of the organisation and the existing situation in terms of the identified culture dimensions and groups. This, then leads to a plan of action. Sample Analysis – An Example Given below is an example of the type of analysis that can be done. Analysis of differences – What Management wants against what the real situation is This analysis shows a comparison of the "Management Wants" and the real situation. In this example, it is evident that there is power struggle and manipulations within the organisation while the management would like to this completely cleared. Similarly, the employees feel that the organisation is not focused on the customer, while the management would like to see sharp customer focus. Such analysis leads to identification of the gap areas and the action plans, in consultation with the management of the company.