How Organizational Culture Can Build Great Businesses

0

One of the most important building blocks for a highly successful organization and an extraordinary workplace is organizational culture. Today more than ever, organizations rely on the energy, commitment and engagement of their workforce in order to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century.Organizational culture is the values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. The term includes an organization’s expectations, experiences, philosophy, and values that hold it together. It also extends to production-methods, marketing and advertising practices, and new product creation. It is crucial as it directly affects the organization’s productivity and performance and provides guidelines on product quality, safety, punctuality and customer care service. It directly reflects in the company’s self-image, inner workings, interactions with the outside world and future expectations. The most important thing about culture is that it’s the only sustainable point of difference for any organization as it is one of the hardest things to change.

“In order to generate a sustained competitive advantage, organizations aim to adopt a high-performance culture. A high-performance culture is a set of behaviors and norms that enables an organization to achieve superior results.”

It is developed on the basis of shared attitudes, beliefs and customs. This culture comprises of setting clear business goals, defining employees’ responsibilities and creating a trusting environment for employees to continuously grow and reinvent themselves. Its end goal is to implement an effective performance management process, create empowerment, and develop a customer-centric strategy, increase leadership and collaboration by enhancing employee training.  Thus, it helps the company achieve better financial and non-financial goals than its competitors.

Organizational culture provides a framework with respect to the behavior of employees in their workplace. A high level of employee engagement is vital to the organization. Depending on the type of culture that is created in an organization, it can have a positive or negative effect on employee performance.  When employees perceive the culture of the organization, it allows them to have good relationships with other members within the organization. This provides them with the support and power needed to excel.  An engaged employee is dedicated to the work, works with vigor and is often found absorbed in the work.  Thus, the employee is more connected to the company’s vision, proactive in learning new skills and solving problems and committed to developing his career in the organization.

The culture of an organization affects employee satisfaction, performance and engagement. Employee engagement is linked to a variety of business outcomes like commitment, fulfillment and efficiency.  The goals and objectives of a company influence its culture and significantly affect employee morale.

An organization can cultivate a high-performance work culture by implementing the following:

Foster an entrepreneurial mindset.

When you equip your employees to think like an entrepreneur, you’re giving them the freedom to look for opportunities and solutions outside the norm. They are motivated to think beyond their ambit and develop unique approaches to solve various problems.

Create a diverse ecosystem.

Diversity is a pivotal to maximize the performance of the company. It contributes to high-performing teams and a thriving company culture, because it brings new voices, ideas, and ways of operating to the table. For the business to be able to compete moving forward, it is imperative to build a team that reflects the diversity of the people the company wishes to serve.

Develop tools to help with mental health.

Mental health is something that doesn’t discriminate against anyone. And with an ever-increasing world that makes disconnecting and rest difficult, stress and anxiety are on the rise. Thus conducting regular activities and workshops to help employees ease this stress is essential.

Improve continuously

High performing companies have to keep in mind to make sure people constantly strive to improve their performance, work better and eliminate overload. Also, focus should be on measuring progress and making necessary changes.

Develop group activities to foster relationship building.

Group activities and team building projects are excellent ways to improve people’s emotional and mental fitness. But, they’re also important for increasing company engagement.

Organizations such as Google has transformed the workplace by building a corporate culture that is not only fun, but encouraged creativity, flexibility, and camaraderie among colleagues. Aswell-known to have endless perks on-site, Google campuses include play areas, free meals, coffee bars, outdoor terraces, and dog-friendly work environments across the world. Google created their corporate culture definition to concentrate on having happy employees and making a productive workplace. The continuing success of Google is unquestionably and steadily tied directly back to their company culture.

Organizational culture research requires an integrative approach. It provides a community identity, a sense of uniqueness, and sense of connection for all members within the organization. A shared organizational culture helps to unite employees of different demographics.  Having a shared culture at the workplace gives them a sense of unity and understanding towards one another, promoting better communication and less conflict. 

Company culture is the personality of the company. It defines the identity of the company. The values and beliefs of an organization contribute to the brand image by which it becomes known and respected.An entity’s way of doing business is perceived by both the individuals who comprise the organization as well as its clients and customers. A successful organizational culture brings together the people of the company and keeps them aligned. When the culture is clear, different perspectives can gather behind it with common purpose. Culture needs to be evident in everything the company does. It starts with hiring great people who fit the culture and then letting them meet client needs, develop products and services and deal with the challenges. Organizational culture helps to drive the approach a company adopts.

Having a positive culture within the company fosters open communication, shared vision, strong corporate culture, reduced employee turnover and a strong sense of identification. Developing a high performance company culture is more important now than ever. Working within an organization of values, character and strong culture will help the company be more successful.

Previous articleHow to Align Culture and Talent: Get a Talent Philosophy
Next articleOrganizational Culture: Values and Core Beliefs
Reena Tyagi, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cigna TTK Health insurance has been a front-runner in the field of Human Resources since 1993. She is capable of shaping and grooming acquired talent and existing employees into future leaders due to her experience with top notch companies. Having completed her MBA from university of Indore, she has since acquired ample work experience and understanding of the filed by working for high profile companies such as NIIT, Tata Teleservices Ltd., ABN AMBRO and Bharti Airtel Ltd.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here