It was my first day on a new project and I was excited to visit the offices and meet the team.
As I entered the building, I was struck by the floor-to-ceiling banners depicting various workers in a hard hats and hi-vis. They must have been 20 metres high.
The building was otherwise unremarkable - a standard corporate office for an organisation of tens of thousands. Bright, airy and bustling with activity (this was pre-COVID).
I checked in, collected my pass and was met by the project lead, who ushered me through the turnstile and towards the stairs.
"Make sure to hold the handrail", she mentioned nonchalantly as we started to climb. "Oh, and if you grab a coffee, always take the lift".
When I remarked on this, she smiled and told me a story about a colleague a few years back who dropped a laptop from one of the walkways on the third floor. No-one was hurt, but it was a close call.
"Safety is really important to us", she said earnestly. I could tell this wasn't some clever corporate messaging. She was serious.
I thought back to my own days working in wineries in my twenties. People tend to think of the wine industry as glamorous and snobby, and while that can be the case at the sales stage, most wine is made in sprawling factory-like complexes.
People die every year (wine produces carbon dioxide, which sinks, meaning if you fall into a vat, you immediately pass out and drown if there's no-one around to fish you out).
In Australia, New Zealand and the USA, safety protocols were maniacally enforced (France was a bit more laissez-faire), but in each case, they would tell stories about incidents from previous years. There was signage on walls. There were briefings from managers. In short, there was a strong 'safety culture'.
Defining culture
We can all give examples of organisational culture. We know it when we see it. We can think of times when cultures clashed, or when someone wasn't a good 'cultural fit'. Organisations pride themselves on having a 'great culture' or, conversely, can be plagued by a 'toxic culture'.
But when you dig into the literature, there is no widely agreed upon definition of what culture actually IS.
To give a sense of, here are a few of the more widely recognised models:
Cameron and Quinn Competing Values model
This model “aligns with the four biological determined drives in the brain: the need to bond, to learn, to acquire, and to defend" (Paul Lawrence, Nitin Nohria, 2002)”.
Denison Culture Survey
This measured the four key aspects of mission, adaptability, involvement, and consistency. Each of these has three sub-categories, giving a total of 12 components, which describe the organisation's beliefs and assumptions.
Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture Triangle
This defines culture within three core categories: artifacts (e.g. posters, dress-codes, job-titles, workspaces), espoused values (organisational values and behaviours, company or employee charters, team contracts, vision and mission statements) and underlying assumptions (what people REALLY think).
Deal and Kennedy’s Culture Model
An interlocking set of six cultural elements, defined as its history, values and beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, stories, heroic figures (individuals who are respected and admired within the organisation) and the cultural network.
Johnson and Scholes Culture Web
This is similar to Deal and Kennedy’s model, measuring stories, rituals and routines, symbols (similar to Schein's 'artefacts'), organisational structure (both formal and informal networks), control systems (financial, quality and rewards), and power structures.
The problem with descriptive models
While each of these models has intuitive merit, they often rely on subjective assessment. Within the Quin and Cameron questionnaire, for example, the respondent is asked to rate the organisation on a scale of 1-5 across various dimensions such as whether individual performance is encouraged and rewarded (1) vs team performance (5). Clearly, you're likely to get a different answer if you ask the HR Director, a frontline worker, or the CEO.
Like horoscopes and reiki, they are not subject to the scientific method: you can't ever disprove their validity.
While this same challenge can be leveled at much of psychology and especially therapy (and we know therapy saves lives so I'm casting zero aspersions), we should at least try to apply the basic test of replicability and objectivity: two consultants conducting the assessment should get the same result, and the answers to questions shouldn't be a matter of opinion.
Another issue is that culture is often invisible to those within in. Stories, for example, are often highly context specific. If you ask someone to tell a story about the company, they might give you a blank look, but when you send around an attachment on an email, you might be regaled with the story of the time the Finance department reported the wrong data to the board because they were working on an old version (that actually happened at one client, by the way).
Similarly with power structures, they may be invisible to many employees (and even executives) appearing only when important decisions need to be made, or budgets allocated.
In summary, a good culture model, like any other model, should demonstrate the following characteristics:
Replicable: same results from same input
Objective: doesn’t rely on one individual's view of the world
Representative: the answers should reflect the experiences of the organisation as a whole (not just senior executives or managers)
Diagnostic: tell you what is a problem and what isn’t within your context (certain behaviours, such as working late into the evening, might be highly damaging in a certain context but enjoyable and conducive to a strong team dynamic in another; any model should consider the wider strategic context, industry, market and workforce needs)
Actionable: tells you what to do with the information and how to prioritise limited resources to get the best return-on-investment for the change activities required to address the most pressing issues.
So what's the answer?
Given the fact organisational culture is a function of real people in the real world, I don't think there will ever be a perfect model that fits every situation exactly.
But a good model must do more than generate observations and information; information is only useful if it helps you make decisions or take action.
Without these characteristics models may be interesting but can’t reliably guide the organisation’s forward path. I've yet to come across a culture model that passes this test...
...which is why we've designed our own methodology, which measures over 100 concrete factors so show you both where you are, what it means and where to focus your change interventions.
For more information, contact ruth.tank@epion.co.uk or follow Epion's LinkedIn page for more articles like this.
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