Organisational Culture - We’ve overcomplicated it.
This months guide from the team at Ascent People Insights will attempt to simplify organisational culture.
We get it. On the surface this could seem like an insurmountable task.
Research shows that this topic has steadily grown in popularity as the ‘catch-all’ for people performance over the past few decades. Over this time, researchers, HR practitioner and ‘gun-for-hire’ consultants have redefined it, reimagined it, increased its scope and diversified its meaning.
The result? Finding a simple way to describe it, then build a plan to improve it, feels more complicated than ever.
This guide will help you understand the value of Organisational Culture as a tool to leverage, while simplifying its definition so you can explain it clearly to others, and articulate your own Organisational Culture with ease.
Once we simplify the concept, we can build a practical plan to influence and improve it. We’ll introduce our favourite evidence-based model to help you do just that.
From the front-line to C-Suite, organisational culture has become one of the modern business worlds most talked about topics. A recent PwC (2021) survey of 3,200 C-Suite executives and board members found that 67% believed that culture is an important focus area for senior leaders. Over 66% believed that it was even more important than an organisation’s strategy or operating model. Many organizations have sought to ‘manage’, ‘shape’, or ‘change’ their culture in search of a competitive advantage, or as a remedy for poor performance or market pressures.
Despite the consensus that culture is one of the key factors that can contribute to an organisation’s success, it is often used as an ill-defined umbrella term for everything an organisation does that impacts its people. The temptation to use culture as a panacea for all an organisations needs is often reinforced by management consulting and human resource firms, who offer a broad range of definitions, models, and tools each more complex than the last. This can often lead to ‘culture change’ initiatives falling flat, as they try to overhaul too many aspects at once and fail to deliver strategic value.
To deliver meaningful change, organisations must untangle culture from other people-focused initiatives. While several definitions of culture exist in contemporary research, they all share the position that an organisation’s culture is the stable and shared values, beliefs, practices, attitudes, and assumptions that are held by members of the organisation.
Simply put, it’s the ‘way we do things around here’.
These shared values, beliefs, and practices are broken down into three levels:
Got questions about how this model applies to your team?
Our Organisational Development Psychologist, Jono, is happy to chat.
Start a conversation with him. jono@ascentpeople.com.au
Artefacts: These are the visible signs of an organisations culture such as dress codes, job titles, and the design of team members workspaces. Despite being the easiest elements of an organisations culture to observe, they are also the shallowest, and provide little insight into the true values, beliefs, and practices of the organisation.
Espoused Values: These are the things an organisation says about its culture and ways of working. This includes Mission and Vision Statements, Codes of Conduct, and the types of things promoted through internal communications. The Espoused Values of an organisation provide more insights into culture than Artefacts, however they often fail to capture key deeper elements of culture.
Underlying Beliefs: These are the deeply held beliefs, shared by members of the organisation, that reflect the way an organisation really works. They include assumptions about how team members should work together, and the beliefs about what behaviours will lead to success or failure. For example, organisations may espouse that remote and flexible working is an accepted part of their culture. However, team members may share the underlying belief that working remotely or flexibly will reduce their chance of promotion or pay raise.
Each level of an organisation’s culture can be impacted by initiatives such as leadership and job design. Yet, these initiatives are not directly representative of culture, and should be considered as distinct. For example, the implementation of a leadership program cannot directly change the underlying beliefs of an organisations culture. However, if that program leads to meaningful behavioural change in leaders, and the behaviours they promote within their teams, it can impact and improve team members’ assumptions and, ultimately, improve team culture.
This model highlights why many ‘culture change’ efforts struggle: Shared underlying beliefs are challenging to directly change. Organisations working to improve their culture should first seek to understand the systems, practices, and processes that contribute to existing underlying beliefs (such as poor leadership). Through changing these systems, processes, and practices they can gradually improve the organisation’s culture.
Want to talk about how these insights apply to your team?
Get in touch with us. We’re always up for a conversation about building better workplaces through culture.