In the first of our three-part webinar series on what is culture and why does it matter, Jamie Notter, noted author of the bestseller books, “When Millennials Take Over” and “Humanize” and the founding member of WorkXo explained, how to map organizational culture using the eight key culture markers: agility, collaboration, growth etc. using the model of workplace genome.
Culture is a vast topic and revolves around organizational management and productivity. In the second part of the webinar, Jamie and I spoke about culture management and metrics.
According to Jamie, “culture is fundamentally what is valued in an organization. What gets your attention, resources and what gets reinforced: words, action, behavior, and anything that is tangible”.
What is Culture Management?
Taking culture to the next level Jamie explained what culture management is? Jamie defines culture management as, “the collection of activities, processes, and systems an organization uses to understand, shape and change its culture on an ongoing basis”.
Culture management should be the “Mantra” for most organizations. For example, organizations have systems in place for financial management. But do they also have a system for culture management?
Most organizations and their management team will have difficulty in defining what culture management is or what drives success in their organization. Traditionally they would say, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
Jamie had a different take on this. Culture and strategy are the two sides of the same coin. According to Jamie, “culture and strategy should rather go out for lunch”.
Watch the Entire Webinar Here!
Culture Management and Metrics in an organization
With the help of the workplace genome model, Jamie in the first part of the webinar explained how to map organizational culture. With the help of the eight markers, an organization can understand what culture is, but is that enough?
Image Courtesy: WorkXo
To dig deeper you have to understand what culture management is and what metrics can be used. Taking a real-time example of a Non-Profit organization Jamie explained Innovation (one of the culture markers) as innovation is something that every organization talks about these days.
Using eight building blocks for innovation, and based on these building blocks, an organization can know whether they can have a culture of innovation or not. So based on a ten point scale, every building block is marked between 1-10.
The average score determines whether or not the organization is marching to achieve the culture marker. In this case, the NGO scored a 6.7 which means they definitely are innovative in their organizational culture.
Image Courtesy: WorkXo
Jamie also went ahead and explained how they derived these building blocks for the markers. These building blocks are a result of research and studies conducted with the organization and based on these building blocks the human behavior in an organization can be determined. Also, it is important to understand how to do the subgroups in an organization experience the culture.
Image Courtesy: WorkXo
In the graph above the metrics is based on the roles in an organization and how do they experience the culture. In an example like this when you have a pattern, where the lines follow a similar path but there’s a gap that’s where the organizations need to put in more efforts to build the culture markers.
Finally, for an organization to align culture to drive success, only moving numbers in a particular direction isn’t enough, they have to stop and think and actually clarify where their culture needs to be.
Culture management surely needs to be “a thing” according to Jamie and well that’s true!
Learn more: Risk Culture Survey Questions + Sample Questionnaire Template
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