SouthOfMetro.com | We all hear about corporate culture, but what is a good business culture? Are free meals, yoga classes, massage chairs, or promises of corporate equity or promotion? All of them are not.
Culture is the way things work in a business. There are three factors that make up culture: behavior, systems, and practices shaped by universal values. A good culture is when these elements are intertwined and aligned with recognized organizational values. When these factors start to appear gap, HR managers face many issues, including talent abandoning the organization.
Instability in corporate culture takes many forms. A company can lecture on a “work-life balance” but has no maternity or parental leave policy for both parents, or always expect employees to be late every night (the distance between the behavior and the system). An organization encourages the development of all its members but does not give employees time to take part in advanced professional training courses (system and behavior gap). Or corporate culture refers to the democratic working style, which decides in the opinion of the majority but in fact, the people who are promoted and in decision-making power are those with high positions. So how do we fix these gaps?
Behavior
Building common cultural values is a common way to form corporate culture. Importantly, if the performance of leaders and employees does not reflect the value, then the corporate culture based on it is meaningless.
Each employee can waive their privileges because of the expectation of clear standards. Given the values in the organization, which actions continually receive rewards? What behavior leads to a promotion?
HR personnel needs to spend time identifying behaviors and skills that demonstrate each value in the organization. For example, if you want to show the value of “team spirit”, what will one do and not do? An organization may think that “effective collaboration is helping others”, but in another company, it is defined as “effective collaboration is to encourage diverse ideas and ideas”. Both can perform but which behavior is more expected and expected?
Clarifying the expected behaviors of employees also makes leaders more responsible for their behaviors. How often do leaders be 10 minutes late for meetings? Meetings or start 5 minutes late for people who aren’t ready? This is a common practice in organizational culture. Before we know it, corporate culture has become late meetings, indifferent leadership, and disgruntled employees.
When behaviors that are consistent with cultural values are clearly defined, HR staff can more easily focus on how to take actions that build a corporate culture.
System
Whether or not a business culture is strengthened or destroyed depends on the systems, processes, and structures created. Here are four important systems for corporate culture:
Recruitment
Once the behaviors and skills that demonstrate the value of corporate culture have been identified, HR Managers can incorporate these requirements into recruitment. Instead of looking for people with similarities, HR can choose to compensate for defects in the existing cultures. This move towards organizational culture is built on a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.
Goal Setting
Gather people who have the same goals and give instructions on how to achieve the results they expect.
Evaluate
How are behaviors assessed? Our employees often reviewed and accredited? The absence of beliefs or doubts about the norms of behavior will create a work environment of conflict and fear.
Bonus
What criteria to become a manager, director, and vice president? What are the standard behaviors for promotion? What leadership and technical skills are needed? These are all indications of the company’s culture and values but are often overlooked. When the recognition and the rewarding process is transparent and fair, employees will not need to hesitate to make friends with the CEO, compete and frankly constructive criticism with colleagues.
A good culture will set up these processes so they can support each other to develop.
Practice And Training
Activities that demonstrate corporate culture include company events, meetings, feedback processes, decision-making processes.
Has the Human Resources Manager had a decision-making process yet? Do participants in the meeting often prefer to pretend to agree or would they accept the debate? What did the manager say about capacity assessment?
The training of corporate cultural values needs to be changed by the company such as development, restructuring or facing a crisis. Training activities need to be regularly organized and repeated regularly to create habits for members and from there to gradually form the corporate culture.
Enterprise culture is intrinsically difficult to build. Culture takes time to identify and it takes practice to get into reality. By understanding the expected behaviors in an organization, identifying the systems and processes that help these behaviors be expressed and maintained, the corporate culture can effectively impact employees and the organization, creating an effective working environment.
