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Abhay is a young and promising investor who wants to become the CEO of the hedge fund organization he’s working for. When the present CEO decides to step down due to health issues, an opportunity opens up for Abhay.
At his CEO pitch meeting with shareholders, Abhay presents a nearly flawless plan of taking the organization forward and tripling its profits over the next five years. Shareholders are impressed, but they find something missing.
That missing ingredient is supplied by Muskaan, Abhay’s competitor for the position of CEO. Even though Muskaan’s pitch doesn’t promise mind-boggling profit projections, she manages to convince shareholders that under her leadership the organization can change its culture, not just its bottom line on the balance sheet.
At the end of the pitch, Abhay learns a difficult but relevant lesson—organizational culture is not just corporate jargon. Instead, it is a concept that must be carefully conceived, designed and executed if one is to assume organizational leadership.
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What Is Organizational Culture?
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Reasons To Change Organizational Culture
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Steps To Change Organizational Culture
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Organizational Culture Change Examples
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Master Organizational Cultures And Their Transitions
What Is Organizational Culture?
Organizational culture can be defined as the beliefs, behaviors, norms and practices that govern how people act in an organization. Organizational culture can include formal as well as informal modes of interaction, from how board meetings are conducted to the ways in which employees bond during lunch breaks.
Organizational culture can’t be built overnight. It takes years to establish the values, principles and objectives that are distinct to an organization. It follows from this that to change organizational culture successfully, organizations must give themselves time. Organizational culture change examples are never successful if they are too sudden.
Reasons To Change Organizational Culture
To change organizational culture, organizations need time, resources and a willingness to evolve as per the new needs within the organization as well as in the industry. To change organizational culture successfully, any reasonable organization will need sufficiently strong reasons, the most common and important of which are listed below:
- Urgent steps must be taken to change organizational culture if an organization is found to have encouraged or actively engaged in corruption and/or malpractice
- An equally urgent need to change organizational culture can arise if organizations stagnate and cease to be profitable, even productive
- Steps to change organizational culture should be initiated if employees within the organization voice their grievances against the way things work
- A small amount of effort to change organizational culture is necessary during transitions, be it a change of leadership, an overhaul of personnel, or a return from a crisis
Steps To Change Organizational Culture
Organizational culture doesn’t come with a textbook list of ways in which it can be changed. However, on the basis of precedents as well as research and analysis, a number of essential steps to change organizational culture have been identified:
1. Understanding The Current Culture
No culture can change if no understanding is established of what went wrong in the first place. For new cultures to be developed and practiced, it’s vital that organizations come to grips with their current culture and figure out the shortcomings of the same.
2. Having A Vision
Among the most fundamental steps to change organizational culture is creating and harnessing a vision that the entire organization can rally behind. A vision is about identity, about prioritizing what values and principles come to define an organization and become its non-negotiables.
3. Aligning Vision With Strategy
To change organizational culture successfully, an organization’s vision needs to be in lockstep with its strategy. This means that whatever commercial plans an organization makes, they must be connected to the vision in some way. For example, if one of the core values of an organization’s vision is diversity, it can’t possibly sanction a corporate strategy that recruits people only from a certain socio-economic background and/or from a select pool of elite universities.
4. Switching Personnel
Often the simplest way to change organizational culture successfully is to change or swap personnel in and across teams and departments. Once new people enter new settings, the disruption that follows is generally an enabler of change.
5. Effective Communication
Organizational change should ideally be through gradual evolution rather than rapid revolution. One way to evolve gradually is to have an excellent and effective communication network, not just within employees but also with clients. Honest and structured feedback and an environment where individuals are encouraged to engage in constructive criticism create the best conditions for positive organizational change.
Organizational Culture Change Examples
Some prominent organizational culture change examples are listed as follows:
- To change organizational culture successfully, Hubspot created a 128-slide presentation known as the Culture Code, which reflects its values or HEART: being humble, empathetic, adaptable, remarkable and transparent
- Under its 1-1-1 model, Salesforce donates one percent of its product, time, and equity to various disadvantaged communities in what is one of the most socially relevant organizational culture change examples
- Among other meaningful organizational culture change examples is Southwest Airlines’ decision to come up with special employee benefits, employee-specific events and an employee-centered vision that puts employees at the center of everything the organization does.
- Realizing the amount of problematic content that was seeping through its virtual walls, Facebook set up an oversight board for independent judgment and content moderation on the world’s biggest social media platform
Master Organizational Cultures And Their Transitions
It’s not easy to change organizational culture successfully, especially if such changes have to be fast and radical. With the help of Harappa’s Navigating Workplaces course, you can not only gain valuable insights into the concept of organizational culture but also equip yourself for dealing with and creating changes in the same. As part of this course, a world-class faculty and comprehensive frameworks such as the Thomas Kilman model and the Stakeholder map will steer you toward becoming an expert at decoding culture, handling office politics and managing conflict.
Sign up for the Navigating Workplaces course without any further ado and you’ll never be apprehensive about a change in organizational culture again.
