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OUR CORE PROFESIONAL FOCUS

 

 

Organisational (Company) Culture

 

 

 

Organisational culture is based on the values, beliefs and behaviors practiced in an organisation. As such, it permeates all aspects of your organisation, influencing the possibilities of implementing your idea.

Successful coping with challenges does not happen without the right organisational culture. Shaping it, it's a long run, but this meta-level of 'human-ness' in business is at the core of our professional interest.

Can you identify one common element that can:

 

 

  • Decide if you can find and develop a more profitable strategy in your company.
  • Attract the best people, allow them to grow and at the same time, “push” away people that do not fit the team.
  • Help newly recruited people enter into responsibilities and stay in the company (onboarding).
  • Determine what interactions employees take in their workplace.
  • Affect employee engagement and their effectiveness.
  • Turn your company into one team.
  • Turn employees into company advocate and evangelists.
  • Reduce stress and help prevent conflict (and mitigates them if they occur).

 

What would it be?

 

Our answer is an organisational culture.

 

Definition

“Corporate culture / organisational culture / company culture – the values, beliefs, and behaviors practiced in an organisation. Formed over time because they are rewarded or punished (e.g. by formal or informal rules, rituals, and behaviours).”
(developed by Strategyzer)

The culture starts to be created immediately when people start to work together. The culture is always dynamic, and it changes day by day, just as the people who contribute to it are changing.
 
It shapes and changes with the passage of time because all its manifestations are rewarded and punished (by formal and informal rules, rituals, management reactions and colleagues etc.). Interestingly, and surprisingly a company culture is also shaped through a lack of reaction as well. Each company has its own unique culture.

WHY IS CULTURE SO IMPORTANT?

 

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" - Peter Drucker

 

 

Your company culture effectively determines what you can do with your business. Culture influences whether you will be able to implement e.g. a new more profitable business model. Have you heard the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast?

 

An effective, healthy culture acts like an immune system that defends companies against problems.

Human-Network
 

Is there a perfect organisational culture?

 

 

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Right culture - what does it even mean?

We often hear about "good" or "right" cultures, We prefer use the term healthy / unhealthy (desirable / undesirable) culture. Let’s try to ask ourselves whether there is any “good” universal culture, which can be introduced and always improves the company’s situation?

 

The answer is, unfortunately, that this is not possible. Every company on the path to greatness must find its own recipe for an organisational culture that will help it achieve success and allow people in a company to thrive (and we describe such a culture as healthy / desirable).

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Can culture be copied?

Each company is different and has (needs) its own culture. Let’s consider whether transferring Amazon’s culture to Apple would help Apple or rather cause a catastrophe? And yet Amazon’s culture allowed the company to achieve the position it has achieved.
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What the organisational culture is not

We observe some frequent misunderstandings around culture. Here are the top three:

  • the organisational culture is not your company mission – although the company mission can have a great impact on your company culture
  • the organisational culture is not a leadership – although your leadership will have a great impact on your company culture
  • the organisational culture is not your polices and procedures – although they will have a great impact on your company culture

Personal computers and companies have a lot in common!

developed by Witold Wiśniewski

 

CompanyCultureAsAHardwareIn your computer, you have a hard disk, processor, graphics card, RAM memory etc. You can choose the computer’s configuration to the tasks which you want to perform with it. It’s important to remember that the configuration of the computer will be very different depending on what you need it for; are you going to use it to send e-mails and write documents? Or do you need it as a graphic designer workstation, or to have a server hosting your company’s infrastructure? Regardless of what your hardware looks like and what tasks you want to achieve (goals), one more element is missing: software.
A computer with poor quality, unconfigured, or simple not right software will not work properly – there will be a lot of errors, blue screens, data will disappear, viruses will be caught, and so on. With the wrong software, you won’t be able to generate the value you need (you can have a great graphics card, but without a 3d program you will not generate a computer animation).

 

Think for a moment, of your organisation as a computer. Strategy is hardware. If you want to build a local company that performs typical services (a goal), your strategy (the way you do business, the elements which you need to have in your business to reach the goal) will be completely different to if you wanted to create a niche company providing premium value to premium customers. And yet, this could be another way in which you aspire to build a true mass market company. Compare this to your computer, when you decided for what purpose you needed it (a goal), and then you chose the right hardware configuration (the elements which you need to be able to fulfill the purpose). In different scenarios, a computer’s configuration will vary.

 

CompanyCultureAsSoftwareAn organisational culture is software. To be able to execute different strategies, you might need different cultures. Imagine how varied the culture is in a brain surgery unit, where one of the key values is accuracy, and there is little space for mistakes. Compare this to a key value of a creative agency (where accuracy and need for working flawlessly are not even considered). Depending on what your organisation is, or what it has to be, it must have an appropriate organisational culture, otherwise the ability to execute your strategy will be limited or even lost.

 

Again, when we apply this to your computer, you decided for what purpose you wanted to have a computer, you chose the right hardware, and then the software to complete what you needed. Without this process, you wouldn’t be able to use the computer for your chosen purpose/s.

 

The effectiveness of this metaphor in relation to reality is somewhat limited. You can buy the software, you can install it, and with a little bit of luck and effort, (e.g. regular updates) you can have it for years.

 

An organisational culture can’t be bought. You can try to build it, but this is a long process. You can’t completely control it either. Moreover, if you stop nurturing it, culture immediately evolves in its own way. If you don’t consciously approach the cultural aspect, culture will just happen. And it may be far away from what you really need.

WHERE TO START WORKING WITH CULTURE?

 

Don’t let your culture just happen

 

Let's start with defining common assumptions, which we call values. Values are the foundation of an organisational culture. It’s crucial to be able to not only define it, but also to decide how the values will be developed into the practice of the organisation, as well as how the values will be promoted amongst a team.

There are well established tools and processes to design and make an impact on company culture. If you would like to know more – please contact us.

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