America's Benefit Specialist July 2023

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

studies, organizations that have great cultures also have bet ter financial performance, retention and innovation. Further, organizational culture correlates with all these measurements: 4 financial performance (revenue and profit)

must think of this as a change-management initiative. Re member, much effort will be required, but the benefits and ROI are extremely high when we get this right. Archetypes and models are helpful at this stage. Asking yourself “What can a great culture look like?” is important. Think in terms of things like: 4 encouraging diversity 4 great onboarding and welcoming of new employees 4 engaging employees 4 recognition and rewards 4 clarity of the current expectation and the vision moving forward By the way, this isn’t simply human resources’ job. We know that most organizations that focus on this effectively have their leaders all on board. In addition, everyone in the organization can play a part in developing and maintaining a great company culture. Executives can build the vision, mid dle managers can put initiatives into action, and employees can offer their ideas to strengthen the company’s culture. Fifth , there are many tools and assessments that can help us measure organizational culture; however, I will focus on one well-accepted assessment to make this concrete.

4 employee satisfaction 4 employee engagement 4 reduced turnover and reduced recruiting costs 4 higher productivity 4 improved morale 4 creativity and innovation 4 improved customer satisfaction 4 greater interest in the organization from top external talent

The widely held position by both academics and practi tioners is the belief that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like client service, building a brand, and hav ing a passionate work force will happen on its own. Contem porary examples are leaders such as Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos, and Herb Kelleher, chairman emeritus of South west Airlines. Both talked frequently about the importance of organizational culture to their firms’ success. Fourth , how should we move forward? What should we focus on? It is important to identify and use actual data in our as sessment. Be careful. We do not want to manage by anec dote. Make sure your assessment is based on data, facts and evidence, not stories told by the water cooler. There are many assessments and conceptual frameworks available to measure the current state and even look into the future. A key concept is validity. Let me define what that means and why it’s important. First, we must accurately measure the current organiza tional culture. Next, we must analyze the information using critical thinking skills. Then, we must build a realistic list of recommendations (three to five) based on the data and our analysis, in areas to improve that will provide the largest impact to the organization. Don’t try to boil the ocean or the chances are this change management initiative will fail. Finally, we must measure our progress along the way. I am a big fan of the PDSA cycle—plan, design, study, act. Constant refinements are very important to initiative such as this. Both quantitative and qualitative data is useful. Think of quantitative data as the numbers. These would be things like surveys and other measurement tools. Qualitative data is like feedback and interviews and observations. Once we have the data and evidence and are ready to move forward with our analysis and recommendations, we

One tool to consider is the Organizational Culture Assess ment Instrument. It is a widely accepted tool in both the academic research and among practitioners that advise with corporations. It utilizes a competing values framework to uncover cur rent states of organizational culture and a preferred state.

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