Developing a Healthy Culture

For an organizational culture to grow and thrive within your corporate environment, you need to set the example. Maintaining the organizational culture that you desire takes work. It requires teaching, living, and doing at all levels of the organization at all times.
In addition to teaching, you should also be doing. Get involved at all levels and champion cultural change. This will help you pave the way for change to happen. Designing a way for people to monitor their own behavior is important.
If you want people to be accountable, then they need to know how they're doing. Encourage customers to provide online feedback via a message center. This also lets customers know that your company cares about its business.
Teaching and doing are two important steps in helping your culture thrive. The third step is living the culture—making it a natural part of your interactions. As everyone lives the culture, the change will become widespread. It can energize longtime employees and transform people who are new to the company.
The following are strategies for living the culture:

• Rearrange your offices so that people at all levels work side by side. It's easier for the managers to know what's going on, and will also help them to develop rapport with the staff.
• It's not enough just to tell employees the new culture is good for them—you need to show them.
• Make people responsible for budgets, and also give them freedom to make decisions just as they do at home.
• If you're going to live the culture, you need to deal with problems proactively. Get together once a week and talk about where you are and where you want to be. Identify potential problems and work on strategies for managing them proactively.

It's time to start teaching, doing, and living the values you want to define your organizational culture.

Cultural Traits of Performance Organizations

Have you ever noticed that some organizations seem blessed with perpetual good luck, while other organizations seem doomed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
For the companies that move from success to success, there's probably more involved than just good fortune—it may be their cultures. There are a number of cultural traits that can have a significant effect on organizational performance. These traits are:
# involvement
# consistency
# adaptability
# communication

Involvement:
Does your organization strive to build human capabilities? Do the employees feel a sense of ownership and shared responsibility? If you can answer yes to both of these questions, then your organizational culture exhibits involvement, one of the traits affecting performance.

Use the following methods to encourage and maintain involvement:

• Empower employees with the authority, initiative, and ability to manage their own work. This creates a sense of ownership and responsibility toward the company.
• Place value on working cooperatively toward common goals to which all employees feel mutually accountable.
• Develop capabilities to meet future needs. Invest in the development of your employees' skills.

Consistency:

Organizations that exhibit consistency are able to reach agreement on critical issues. They have the ability to reconcile differences when they occur. Coordination and integration allow different functions and units of the organization to work together well to achieve common goals. Boundaries don't interfere with progress.
Consistency can be achieved by adopting a set of shared values that creates a strong sense of identity and establishes clear expectations.

Adaptability:
Another important cultural trait is adaptability. Adaptable organizations are able to read the business environment, quickly react to current changes, and anticipate future changes. These organizations understand, react to, and anticipate customers' needs.

Communication:
Is it important to share a meaningful long-term direction for your company with employees at every level? Communication is the fourth cultural trait of effective organizations.
Effective communication embodies core values and captures the hearts and minds of the organization, while providing guidance and direction. Clear communications convey the organization's purpose and make it obvious how everyone can contribute. When communication flows in all directions—from the top down, and from the front line upward, every employee feels free to share information, both good and bad.

Cultures vary from one organization to another, and even from one department to another within the same organization. They may differ by individual autonomy, organizational structure, rewards, and interpersonal relationships.

How much influence does a leader have on Organizational culture?

Each employee of an organization is an influencer as far as the organizational culture is concerned but my opinion is that the senior the person, the greater the influence. I would like to illustrate this with a real life case scenario of an organization. Let’s call this organization “ABC Inc”. ABC is headquartered in Bangalore and is in the software services sector. It has a fantastic culture and employee engagement levels are quite high. Employees are encouraged to take time off from their work to have fun, and make office a lively place. It also has a flat hierarchy and every employee is treated as an equal irrespective of their level in the organization.
To strengthen its presence in South India, ABC decided to open a development center in Chennai. It appointed Mr. G as the location head. Mr. G has around 30 years of experience and is quite well known in the industry. He has spent most of his years in organizations which are hierarchical in nature and where there is a clear distinction between people in different grades. He is a person who likes to exercise his powers, use his privileges and enjoys being address as “Sir” by employees.
For the Chennai center staffing, many of the staff from the Bangalore office was transferred to Chennai. Freshers were recruited from different colleges in Tamil Nadu, and then were trained at the Bangalore office and then moved to the Chennai office. Mr.G also brings in a bunch of his old colleagues and these folks assume senior manager positions at the Chennai office.
After 3 months of operation, the Bangalore headquarters start getting complaints from Chennai employees that the culture there sucks. The Headquarters decides to do a secret audit and sends one HR person over to Chennai. The HR person meets with a cross section of the employees and seeks their feedback. He finds that the Chennai office has become very hierarchical and if an employee wants to meet a senior manager, he or she will have to send a request for meeting. It definitely is not following an open door policy. He also sees that the office is quite with minimal interaction between employees.
Even though there is no policy written down that specifies how the working environment should be, the leader’s likes and dislikes get into the system and that influenced the culture. A person who has the power to take decisions, and is high up in the organizational pyramid definitely is an influencer to organizational culture.