What is Organisational Culture?

Organizational culture is a critical driver of both employee behavior and overall business performance. It possesses the power to inspire or deplete, encourage or inhibit, and ultimately, significantly impact a company's bottom line.

Defining and Influencing Organisational Culture

Organisational culture is understood in two ways: what an organization is (the shared beliefs, attitudes, and values of its members) and what an organization has (the formal systems, structures, practices, and policies). Both are vital for a positive culture, but the elements an organization has are more readily modified. Attempting to directly change individual attitudes and beliefs is considerably more challenging and often fails.

Research suggests that shaping employee actions and behaviours through "organizational controls" is a more effective way to influence thinking and beliefs. Therefore, developing and managing an organization's culture must be a deliberate, strategic process, not something left to chance. Cultures that develop haphazardly or "organically" may occasionally succeed, but more often lead to performance problems.

Leadership's Role

Leaders must be acutely aware of the cultures they are establishing. If left unmanaged, the culture will inevitably dictate the leader's approach, making the journey to recovery long and difficult. Business leaders need a clear vision for their desired culture and a planned strategy for implementing it to achieve positive employee and business outcomes.

Measuring Organisational Culture 

The Compono culture assessment is grounded in academic research and evaluates 12 psychometrically validated dimensions of workplace culture - for instance, whether the environment fosters innovation or encourages risk aversion.

Employees use a slider to rate their work environment on a 1-to-5 scale for each dimension. The assessment uses the same 12 dimensions for both current and desired culture, with the difference being the guiding question:

• Current culture: Describes the work environment as the employee perceives it today.
• Desired culture: Describes how the employee would like the work environment to be in the future.