Company culture or organisational culture refers to the allowed behaviours of the company. It is a set of shared values, goals, attitudes and practices that characterise an organisation.
Creating a company culture is more than just writing out a mission and/or vision statement. It also isn’t the work of the human resources (HR) team alone. Instead, it begins with top management and ends at the delivery. That means that the people within an organisation are responsible for driving the culture. They connect the vision and mission to the operations in order to drive performance.
What makes up an organisation's culture?
A strong and sustainable company culture requires five dimensions in place in order to support the achievement of company goals.
1. Mission and Vision
Well-defined structures, purpose and values are essential for defining an organisation's culture. Good leadership sets the direction by forming expectations and supporting teams. Supporting teams can be demonstrated by creating awareness, enabling competence building within the team, and providing clear communication systems, among others.
2. People
When you think of people in regard to company culture, it goes beyond just the employees. It is all the stakeholders from top management to the shop floor, i.e. the shareholders and investors, the employees, the governments, suppliers, clients, and everybody else involved in your value chain. Every stakeholder has different needs and expectations that need to be met.
In order to create a solid culture through people, they must be empowered and equipped with the necessary tools and training. These range from leadership skills for governance, internal and external communication tools and matrices, as well as learning processes for continual improvement.
Another important facet of people in company culture is reward and recognition. While reprimanding people may be necessary, recognition and reward can also contribute greatly to the culture of your organisation. Through incentives, people feel a sense of validation and can be motivated to go above and beyond for their team.
3. Consistency
Consistency, in this case, refers to the structure in place to support accountability and performance. Without defining roles and responsibilities and having the right authority, there will be no accountability. People will therefore not be able to adequately measure performance.
Documentation is very key for consistency. By documenting the processes across the organisation, you can harmonise the ways of working. Different teams will then be able to do tasks in similar ways, and in accordance with the company standard.
4. Adaptability
A good organisational culture should be able to adequately respond to sudden changes or to the current state.
Change is the one thing in life that is constant. When things change (because they will), your culture should be able to support the change without all the systems and processes crushing to the ground. That’s demonstrated through agility – mental agility, people agility, results agility, change agility and self-awareness. The more agile and self-aware an organisation is, the easier it can and will adapt.
A culture of adaptability allows companies to quickly react to crises, manage changes effectively and solve problems faster and easier.
5. Risk Assessment
Risks are everywhere around us. They are both internal and external. They can come from machines, the environment, people, processes etc. When risks become a reality, they can stop the business from proceeding as usual. That’s why you need strong foundations and good business continuity plans (BCP). This will keep your business operations from falling victim to unforeseen circumstances such as water shortages, power outages, strikes or even lockdowns.
To satisfactorily implement BCP, you need to have all the necessary and verified risk information. Risk information comes from engaging all relevant stakeholders involved in the various processes of your business. Once the risk assessments are completed, there should be some sensitisation and awareness activities done so that the BCP is activated and executed as required and by the right people.
Reach out to us and let’s talk about how you can implement a good and sustainable company culture in your organisation.
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