innovation
From Warm
and Fuzzy
to ROI
ANALYTICS IS CHANGING THE
IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE IN THE
WORKPLACE
By Muni Boga
Every leader has heard the Peter Drucker quote, “Culture
eats strategy for breakfast,” and many successful organi-zations
around the world, such as Zappos and Lego, are
vocal about their belief that culture is core to their success.
Yet every day, companies around the world continue to ignore the
importance of organizational culture in driving business perfor-mance.
Why? For the simple reason that they have trouble seeing
the return on investment (ROI).
Culture is considered warm and fuzzy, or a “nice to have” and
often sits at the bottom of an organization’s list of priorities – but
this is changing. In fact, researchers at Duke University’s Fuqua
School found that in an analysis of 1,348 firms, 92 per cent believe
that improving their culture would increase their firm’s value.
Enter Cultural Analytics. While People Analytics is becoming a
hot topic in HCM, Cultural Analytics goes right alongside. People
Analytics in HCM uses hardware and software to measure, report
and understand the employee’s profile and performance. Cultural
Analytics was first developed by Lev Manovich in 2005 outside of
HCM. Today, HCM Cultural Analytics focuses on cultural data
in organizations and their subgroups. There are numerous defini-tions
of culture. However, when defining organizational culture,
we can incorporate the following concepts:
1. Culture is made up of shared values and behaviours.
2. Culture has varying degrees of awareness and interpretations,
both in and outside the company and its subgroups.
3. Culture is impacted by internal and external forces differently.
4. Culture is something that is learned through social interactions.
Historically, cultural analysis in organizations has been con-ducted
using surveys, with the introduction of pulse surveys
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