Plug “organizational culture” into Google and you get more
than 32 million results. Clearly, culture is a topic on
many people’s minds. Forward-thinking business lead-ers,
in particular, have embraced the link between culture
and performance, which is good news for human resources pro-fessionals
– the natural owners of culture. You might say there’s
somewhat of a tipping point happening at the moment, setting
the stage for HR to positively influence, impact and steer corpo-rate
culture like never before.
From the front-line worker to the off-site accountant, from the
CEO to the front-desk receptionist, culture
permeates every nook and cranny of an
organization.
“It really has to do with the val-ues
and the assumptions that
guide day-to-day behaviour in
the workplace,” said Kelow-na-
based Graham Lowe,
president of workplace
consulting firm The
Graham Lowe Group
and author of Creat-ing
Healthy Organiza-tions.
“It’s the unwrit-ten
rules people carry
around in their heads
that guide how they re-late
to each other, how they
relate to customers and how
they go about their work on a
daily basis.”
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Whether an organization has spent
years developing an entrepreneurial
and collaborative culture, or they’ve let
things slide into disengaged and com-petitive
mire – there’s still a culture.
It’s not surprising that organizations with a clear and com-pelling
purpose, as well as a set of values that define how they
work together, will attract and engage employees who have
a similar purpose and set of values. And these organizations
will outperform other businesses on both financial measures like
productivity, share price returns, profitability and employee en-gagement
and retention.
“Culture is the lifeblood of any company,” said Bonnie Flatt,
a leadership coach in Toronto. “The clearer and more purpose-ful
your culture is, the more you’ll differentiate yourself from your
competition.”
CULTURE IN CONFLICT
Management expert and author Peter Drucker famously assert-ed,
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Essentially, no matter how
great your business plan is, it’s really the wellness of your culture
that will determine whether or not your strategy takes hold.
When there’s no alignment between what an organization says
it’s all about and how employees think and act on a daily basis,
strategy doesn’t stand a chance. What’s more, an organization
could be at risk for reduced performance, decreased engagement,
retention difficulties – and worse.
When the space shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas on
February 1, 2003, news reports pointed to foam insulation that
shed on liftoff and struck the left wing, allowing hot gases to pen-etrate
and destroy the wing structure on reentry. The internal
investigation, however, revealed a very different cause.
“When NASA conducted an inquiry, they said that the root
cause had been a failed safety culture,” said Lowe. “NASA is an
organization – at least on the surface – that had been known for
rules and procedures, for safety and zero tolerance of any error.”
Engineers working on this particular shuttle, however, were
subjected to a different set of pressures and incentives that steered
them away form the formal commitment NASA had made to
safety.
“They were focused on deadlines,” said Lowe. “The real corpo-rate
value that was placed on safety became secondary and that’s
what resulted in the disaster.”
cover feature
HRPATODAY.CA ❚ JULY/AUGUST 2014 ❚ 21