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

 

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, 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.

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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. - refer to – the Organic Intelligence pioneering approach.