Can Current Management Practices Enable Organisations to Intelligently Measure and Manage their Complex Organisational Culture & Behavioural needs?

 

Article - by Hamid Soltani

 

There is a serious paradox in the way most organisations innocently go about tackling their cultural challenges.

On one hand, organisations generally find it difficult to convincingly articulate in words what culture means to them, what exactly it is meant to enable in their business domain and the context in which culture can directly influence their business outcomes and be used as a measurable business capability.

On the other hand, organisations are always keen and strangely confident to routinely run employee surveys that by and large have no foundations or logical basis for measuring their current cultural status.

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A REALITY CHECK

The employee surveys, the commonly adopted practice, at best are wishful attempts that provide no tangible organisational insights into cultural challenges.

The problem with such a measurement approach arises due to organisations’ lack of predefined/ pre-existing baseline for a healthy culture (i.e., expected cultural behaviours that should directly be linked to measurable business outcomes). Without such an essential baseline, cultural surveys often have nothing of substance to measure against and become a PR exercise.

 

At best such surveys bravely, but inadequately attempt to discover what behaviours might currently exist, but they can never explore what a healthy or desired culture should look like or be able to effectively use such great intelligence to optimally serve the organisation.

 

SUMMARY OF CHALLENGES

There is an inherent systemic inability with currently available management tools that consequently limit organisations to meaningfully measure and optimise their culture

 

According to the Harvard Business Review – Culture is easy to sense but hard to measure. The workhorses of culture research, the employee surveys are often unreliable. Organisational culture can catalyse or undermine the success of a business. Yet, the tools available for measuring it—namely, employee surveys and questionnaires—have significant shortcomings.

 

SOURCE OF THE PROBLEMS

The currently available management tools suffer from chronic limitations of reductionism and systemic linearity. Fundamentally such practices are not geared to rationally address the complex management needs of today.

 

Reductionist practices are not designed for helping organisations methodically fix the challenges of managing their complex and multifaceted workforce or balancing the competing needs of their stakeholders.

 

SOLUTIONS

Management needs to rethink and adopt holistic capabilities to enable them to confidently measure and sustainably balance their complex behavioural influences (that are often avoided and ignored) with their traditional financial drivers so they can intelligently plan and achieve their strategic visions. For more information. 

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At Organic Intelligence we use a pioneering approach to help clients:

 

• Increase organisational awareness of their underlying business and behavioural complexities.

 

• Organically propagate novel ideas for better management practices throughout the organisation.

 

• Develop organisational capabilities for intelligent actualisation of their strategic visions.

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CLIENT BENEFITS

Organisational Culture has the potential to make or break organisations. However, most organisations have great difficulties in clearly articulating what Culture is, where it should sit, and how it can be measurably applied to enhance organisational effectiveness and business outcomes. We apply a variety of sciences including behavioural, systemic, organisational, and advanced mathematics to create a sustainable behavioural map that can show how every behaviour interrelates to your business outcomes, and how it can be measured and rationally improved. We can help you to fully grasp:

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• What culture means in words and concepts

• What it is supposed to do, for whom and where

• Who should be responsible and capable to oversee its management

• Where it should sit within the fabric of the organisational architecture

• How it relates to business domains and why

• How it can be intelligently measured, assessed, and enhanced

• How it can be integrated into everyday business activities

• How it can be used as a strategic tool to differentiate your organisation

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