HR Nuggets

Organizational cultures are the commonly shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which directly or indirectly govern how employees behave within an organization. These shared values could be intrinsic or extrinsic, and have a strong influence on employees in an organization. These organizational cultures could include the dress code, choice of language, addressing colleagues by their first name or last name and ways of performing one's job in the organization.

While some of these cultures might be spelt out explicitly, others most often are unspoken, thus making adaptation a bit difficult for new intakes. Although close observation and association with old colleagues seem to be the easiest ways to follow suit if not discussed during the orientation processes.

There are different reasons why organizations tilt towards particular ways of doing things, which could be to stand out amongst the crowd or to easily be identified and associated with the nature of their business or sector. Size is relatively irrelevant when it comes to organizational culture as both small and large sized organizations have their cultures. Whatever the reasons are, these cultures have its benefits and downsides.

BENEFITS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Means of identity­: Organizational culture directly or indirectly has a way of making employees within an organization easily relate to each other because they have a common means of identity.

Fosters Unity amongst colleagues:Employees with shared values and beliefs are easily united because they have a lot of things in common, believe in almost the same thing and collectively work together towards achieving their organizational goals.

Improved productivity­: Favorable organizational culture enhances employees’ morale to work to their fullest potential. This hitherto increases the productivity within the organization at large. Once productivity is improved, cost of production is invariably reduced. Thus, healthy culture within an organization have a positive impact on the growth as well as profitability of the organization.

Increased marketability: Recruiters often claim to easily identify job seekers who have shared values with that of the organization. While this might be true to an extent, it is however difficult to correctly decipher someone’s personality within 30 minutes or 1 hour interview.

Positive image amongst employees and society­: Good organizational culture has a way of making the society or community have a positive image about the organization. Although “good” might be relative to the way the society perceives the culture but a culture that does not interfere with the community tends to be viewed favorably than any one that interferes.

Attracts and retain the right people:­ The saying that “like minds attract” comes to play here, job seekers who believe in an organization, its cultures and values tend to strive towards getting into such organization with minimal exit rates.

CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Less attention is paid to productivity: Human resource managers are unconsciously geared towards concentrating on promoting and enforcing organizational culture than productivity. What an employee wears to the office does not automatically transcend to what he or she can bring to the table. It is very important to constantly try and balance these two as concentration on one may lead to decline on the other.

Difficulty in adaptability­: New recruits very often find it difficult to easily adapt to some of the said cultures which leads to constant struggle with every other thing happening within the organization including work relationship with colleagues.

Hire for skill and culture fit: When the right people are hired it leads to easy adaptation, increased productivity and less time wastage in inculcating these cultures to employees, but getting the people with the right skills as well as culture fit might be an uphill task.

Affecting individual personalities­ In this time and age when securing a job is the most difficult thing everyone experiences, job seekers could simply wear a behavioral mask to simply get in and remain in the organization. Although their real personalities often show in a very short time.

Inability to involve all team members: “What is good for the goose and good for the gander”. There should be no exception to culture, everyone within the organization, irrespective of sex, class, race or age. In actual sense however, most management staff are indirectly not questioned for not doing what is expected of them, leaving room for abuse of status.

Kindly note that there are much more benefits as well as challenges, but the most important advice for employees are to seek employment in organizations they sincerely respect and value their culture, or organization that have similar or same values with you. Jobs are hard to come by right? But sanity, peace of mind and retention should be worth more than just any kind of job.

We could discuss this further, hit me up on the comment section……