Is organizational culture overrated?

Whenever it comes to organizational culture, for most employees it seems to be more of an HR thing or something that adds a little shine when spoken about in a leadership meet – but does that really resonate with the employees.

While most of us would like to believe that it is a ‘must have’, it becomes a ‘nice to have’ for many.

Is it because:

• Organizational culture is a myth?
• We don’t know what the culture of our organization is?
• We don’t know how we get impacted every day because of the culture we work in?
• We don’t know what we can do to contribute to it?

Some unconventional questions to answer.

Perhaps it starts with a gap of understanding the basics – knowing what is culture and then recognizing the context which gives a deeper insight to how a culture was established, developed and evolved.

Understanding culture in general is not about changing your identity or challenging your identity but it is about recognizing an identity different than yours, finding commonalities and exploring ways to work around it so that both can co-exist.

However, when it comes to organizational culture, very often the definition of it is limited to the values and competencies and so on – things which are great to know about but hard to relate to and internalize & live by it every day.

For example, you may have a customer centric culture in your organization and by definition people may understand it, they may have heard great stories which exemplify a customer centric attitude but how does all that boil down to day-to-day work? How do you make it a part of your work culture?

At a strategic level even if the leaders are on-board; at an operational or at a tactical level, it does become boring or sometimes too difficult to live up to.

That is the reason perhaps we feel it is overrated at times but it is actually not.

Not having an organizational culture is like not having an identity for your brand.

So then, how and who should bridge the gap?

Of course, it starts with the HR team or to be specific, the Learning and Development team who are endowed with the responsibility of drilling it down to everyone but historically we have time and again noticed the misalignment among employees, the reluctance to leave them back in the meeting room, the disbelief that they are just mere words that aesthetically adds value to the work stations but perhaps have nothing to do with real work.

Starting from sensitization to implementation – everything cannot be done by one team. Others will have to come forward to help newer employees understand the culture and imbibe it but are there more creative ways that the HR or Learning and Development team can adopt to make orientation to organizational culture more interesting as well as influencing?

The answer is ‘Yes’

At Contoole, we have helped organizations internalize organizational values and culture through simulated and blended learning and development initiatives.

Whether it is during a change in the business model, or a strategic change that impacted day to day operations or a change in the product portfolio where culture had to be redefined to create a new identity for the organization – we have supported different organizations in their journey.

If you would like to know more, talk our team today or request for a case study.

Reach out to Contoole Team.