What drives a business? Is it the employees? The management? The workflow? In fact, organizational culture is ultimately the driving force of your business, whether you recognize it or not. Organizational culture is the shared values and beliefs that incentivizes your business and your employees. Organizational culture shapes your company’s future and writes its past. Understanding and improving your organizational culture is an important step for businesses to take to achieve business success. Use these steps to identify and improve your organizational culture.
Understand Your Current Culture
The initial trajectory for an organization is rarely the same once they start achieving their goals. On the path to business success, management changes, new employees with different values are hired, and the mission statement is altered to meet business needs. While this change in vision isn’t a problem, it does make it difficult to truly understand current organizational culture. So, the first step in evaluating organizational culture is understanding your current culture. Talk to employees and managers to find out how the business functions and make an unbiased review of the environment of the workplace. Only by truly understanding the current landscape of the organization can managers start to improve their organizational culture.
Mesh Employee Values with Organizational Goals
Change is an inevitability in business. Creating a constantly moving target for success keeps businesses relevant, which is why it’s important to apply those goals to organizational culture. Once you understand your current culture, you need to mesh those items that matter most to employees with your organizational goals. For example, a workplace that values vacation time is often more motivated to meet performance goals that are tied to days off. Aligning the organizational culture of your business with the long-reaching goals is a simple but effective way to shape the culture while improving your business.
Identify an Ideal Organizational Culture
There is no ideal organizational culture for all businesses. Depending on employees, management, and industry, the ideal culture can include unlimited vacation to a matching Roth IRA and everything in between. Still for all businesses, there’s another business that has attained their ideal organizational culture. Finding that business or at least imagining an ideal business can help managers better understand the goals for the business. Create a fictitious or real organizational culture that is your workplace’s model for success. Write a biography of the average employee who works for that business. Outline how that business measures success. By identifying a goal for your organizational culture, even if it’s fictitious, you help upper management see the vision for their company and work towards it.
Incorporate Organizational Culture into the Hiring Process
Once you have identified your current organizational culture and created a path towards improving that culture, you need to support that culture. A new hire who is a poor fit for the organization not only results in wasted money training that employee but also decreased job satisfaction and morale by coworkers. Part of supporting the organizational culture of a business is hiring employees who fit into that culture. Shape your hiring process to identify and seek out individuals that will easily fit into and excel with your organizational culture.
Organizational culture impacts a business whether they realize it or not. A business that doesn’t understand their own culture will tread water hiring the wrong job applicants and offering poor incentives to their employees while a business that fully understands their culture can catalyze employees to work harder and achieve more. Use these steps to identify your current organizational culture and create a plan to mold it into the company of your dreams.
