Time and again it has been proven that it is the culture of the organization i.e., formal and informal ways of working, which is the single factor that determines the alignment and engagement of the people in the organization and yet, there has been a lot of unclarity about how to work on shaping the culture to create the desired culture within the organization and above all when is the right time to relook at the cultural alignment.
At Kognitvus we have worked with several of our clients to help address their culture alignment challenge and as per our experience and research there are these 4 broad indicators that are the trigger points and situations in which organization culture alignment should be taken up as a critical project.
- HRM Process Overload: Many organizations have already worked on creating a certain culture by creating specific Human Resource Management (HRM) processes and they work for a while however, after some time they become an impediment.
- Too many processes or repetition of same process over time, creates a cognitive overload on people and teams.
- To reduce cognitive load, human mechanism withdraws the emotions from that process.
- This leads to, either not following the processes as desired or following it just mechanically
- In both the cases, the essence of process, specially the one that is for human connections and well-being is lost and it becomes ineffective, leading to cultural misalignment.
- Culture and Values Dilution over time:
- Culture is fluid and is formed by set of formal and informal practices and norms, followed by people in a defined group.
- While the identified processes, help to setup the formal practices and norms, the informal practices emerge as a result of individuals value system, conscious and unconscious biases, and personal agendas.
- With time, adding new people to organization and losing some old ones to attrition, leads to more inflow of informal practice, leading to values and culture dilution.
- Learned Helplessness:
- Learned Helplessness is a social psychology term which is used to define a behavior in humans and animal where one tends to give up trying to bring a positive change in self or in environment if they have experienced failure on several attempts of trying to bring that positive change.
- Most of the people, accept the status-quo and that impacts their ability to change or act on future initiatives of the organization.
- This leads to cultural misalignment as some of the people may mentally checked out of initiatives if they would not have seen the impact of it in their daily lives.
- Changed Context due to Pandemic:
- Pandemic has forced all the organizations, globally to find new ways to work an engage the teams. Working from home or from anywhere, has become a common practice to keep the lights on.
- This has deep impact on human psychology leading to create more psychological insecurity, less avenues for organizations to percolate their culture and creating belongingness in current and newly hired employees
- It’s become imperative for organizations to relook at their entire “People Strategy” and come up with ways to reinvigorate their culture in their existing people and the new hires.
If your organization is going through at least one of the above scenarios, “now” is exactly the time to rework on your culture alignment in the most scientific way.
