Posts Tagged ‘Organizational Culture’

Is Your Organizational Culture Performance-Oriented?

Written by Cristina Mihăiloaie on September 3, 2021. Posted in Employee Performance, Performance Culture

Image Source – Freepik

Culture is an intriguing component of the organizational system, wouldn’t you say? Although most professionals agree on the importance of building a strong organizational culture, measuring the extent to which this goal has been achieved is quite challenging, and the tools for doing so have been few and far between. Fortunately, one such tool enables us to get the pulse of the organizational culture—the Global Performance Audit Unit’s performance culture audit.

Another way to get an idea of the state of an organization’s culture is to use metrics. For example, Sears uses what it calls Total Performance Indicators (TPIs) to monitor employee attitudes and retention. Similar to key performance indicators (KPIs), TPIs also relate to the more quantitative aspects of measurement. Using metrics to monitor performance or inform decision-making is always useful, but can we actually capture organizational culture in one metric or index?

Culture is a phenomenon that happens naturally in any group without necessarily being guided. Thus, it will always be a reflection of the people’s attitudes within that group. Culture appeals more to emotion than reason. Elusive and intangible, culture is something that can be easily felt but difficult to explain or justify.

Organizational culture embeds the beliefs and values that define a company, which serve to guide employees in their daily actions. Culture is a reflection of the company’s spirit, and to a large extent, I believe that an organization’s worth is equal to the value of its people.

Performance is a concept usually associated with processes that are more technical than cultural, such as financial performance or machinery performance. So why would anyone want to have a performance-oriented culture? For many people, this may seem like a very cold and profit-oriented working environment. In practice, there are several reasons to embed performance within your organizational culture:

Impact on Internal Stakeholders

Increases accountability regarding the quality of their work
Raises awareness on the importance of being efficient and results-oriented
Nurtures constant learning and professional improvement
Brings clarity on their roles and contributions to the organizational strategy
Increases engagement by rewarding performance

Impact on External Stakeholders

Positions the organization as a trustworthy and reliable partner
Influences the quality of products and services positively
Enhances customer experience
Improves employer brand and market image

A change management initiative to shift organizational culture to a performance-driven perspective can become quite an advantage for companies wishing to get ahead of their competition. To have more clarity around what a performance-oriented culture looks like, consider the following key attributes:

Shared Vision
- Strong leadership is essential for any organization. Strong leaders can communicate their vision and inspire employees to follow them. This shared vision brings and keeps people together, empowering them to work as a team.

Communication
- Intense and effective communication increases employees’ awareness and understanding of the company strategy. This impacts how they work and can help them make better decisions in full alignment with strategic directions.
- Transparency regarding decisions and performance levels establishes greater levels of credibility and confidence in relation to leadership and generates employee interest towards understanding the impact of their actions on bottom-line results.
Continuous Learning
- A performance-oriented culture acts as an enabler for implementing a performance management system (PMS) within the company. Monitoring performance facilitates the development of a constant learning process for the entire organization.
- A performance-oriented culture not only sets targets but also provides employees with the necessary training or mentoring to achieve these targets.

Process Improvement
- A common characteristic of performance-oriented organizations is their concern for constant optimization. By not being satisfied with “good” and always striving for “great”, the people in the organization adopt a state of mind in which they are constantly striving for efficiency.

Data Analytics
- In the age of big data, we need to make sure that both the younger and older generations are accustomed to working and making use of data in their decisions. Modern organizations must have the competencies and habits of data analysis.

Technology
- Progress in today’s business environment is limited without the support of modern technology. A performance-driven organization will invest in technology to support business processes.

Innovation
- Technological growth will be conditioned by the organization’s ability to adapt to market dynamics and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. Innovation comes from employees, but what can make a difference between two companies that have the same talent pool is how each one manages to nurture innovation among its employees.

Rewards
- A performance-oriented culture reflects a working environment where effort and success are acknowledged and rewarded. Rewards don’t have to be exclusively financial.

Engagement
- A performance culture should nurture employee engagement through its employee-centered initiatives.

Authenticity
- Organizations should be able to identify their uniqueness and acknowledge and promote it among stakeholders. This is what makes a company feel real and meaningful for its employees, customers, and business partners. For example, Zappos prides itself on its authenticity, which is reflected in one of its corporate values—weirdness.

The myriad of benefits that stem from a performance-oriented culture should be reason enough for any organization to adopt it. However, it’s worth noting that culture can be inherently divisive, especially when change is in the air. Leaders must take care when shifting from a culture that many of their employees have grown accustomed to in order to mitigate friction and foster buy-in.

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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on March 12, 2016. It has been updated as of April 16, 2025.

Cargo cult or “The Credible Hulk”: Which characterizes your organizational culture?

Written by Agnes Ilyes on August 12, 2021. Posted in Articles, Organisational performance

Source: pixabay.com

Organizational culture is the unique environment of an organization that is formed through shared beliefs, values, experiences, specific rituals, behavior, interactions, language, and norms. These elements of the culture are developed over time in both visible and invisible ways, such as the organization’s output, interactions, goals, branding, company policies, reward systems, among others.

It is possible that most of the members of an organization are not aware of the origin of their rituals and why they are expected to behave in a specific way. Or they may know exactly what they are doing for what reason and can explain everything with facts. Which of these contradictory approaches characterize your organizational culture more?

Is it a cargo cult organization or “The Credible Hulk”?

Cargo cult thinking in organizations

Cargo cult refers to the belief that a real achievement can be realized by simply imitating visible behavior. This belief exists even without understanding the correlations between the different steps of a process and the consequences of actions.

The origin of this terminology goes back to the first half of the 20th century, when some remote-island-based tribes saw American cargo planes landing on their island. The tribes tried to recreate the different tools and instruments they saw from the cargo planes without knowing how those goods were manufactured. They made radio from stone and wood but without getting the same effect.

This phenomenon can be observed even in advanced 21st century cultures, particularly in the modern corporate world.

Many organizations are adopting the same practices they observe in other companies, such as workplace habits and the design of an office, without fully knowing their impact on the organization. For instance, some companies would place bean bags in the office even if they are hardly used. Some do not observe the business casual dress code on Fridays. And some have ping pong tables.

The paradox is that it is also a rational strategy to follow organizations or people who seem to know what they are doing. When used responsibly, cargo cult thinking can be really useful when making decisions because it saves management a lot of time.

Oversimplification versus overcomplication

Have you seen the meme “The Credible Hulk”? Inspired by the film and the character “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Credible Hulk” is a monster that backs up anything with facts and documents.

The opposite of cargo cult thinking is supporting new initiatives or practices with facts and research. Organizations with this kind of practice are deemed more credible in terms of their innovation practices.

These companies are the ones that look beyond the surface in order to analyze the successful elements of the other innovative organizations, such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. They do not just use transparent glass doors because they look good, but also because they want to promote transparency and improve communication in the organization.

However, such an approach is time and resource consuming. Organizations have to justify everything with research, leaving little to no room for instincts and creative innovations that could drive success in the long run.

Cargo cult thinking cannot be completely eliminated. The only way to exclude it from the organizational culture is to learn and know everything, and that is, apparently, impossible. Therefore, organizations could either find the right balance between the two opposite poles or customize their approach based on their goals, the company size, or the nature of their business.

If you would like to learn more about the organizational culture and its influence on the employees, check out our Certified Employee Performance Management Professional and Practitioner courses.

Collective genius – revealing the way successful leaders drive innovation

Written by Diana Butean on June 7, 2021. Posted in Multimedia

At a time when talent and innovation are highly valued, a large majority of organizations fail to develop new and attractive products and services. So what can CEOs and managers do in order to drive innovation across their organization?

Three Ways to Foster Meaningful Change

Written by Casey Mulqueen on February 24, 2021. Posted in Articles, Organisational performance

ways

How often do you do the same thing day after day? Probably more than you think.

Terms of disengagement: too many rules in the office

Written by Borbala Pentek on November 11, 2020. Posted in Editorials

In many cases when measuring organizational performance, companies tend to focus solely on the financial perspective, setting objectives such as “Achieve profit growth” (measuring it through $ Gross profit margin, $ Net cash flow, or similar indicators) or “Maintain financial discipline” (measuring it through % Budget variance, # Berry ratio, or others).