FOR CORPORATE CULTURE
Using your corporate culture to leverage your business performance.
Corporate culture has always been important in business performance, but it has rapidly transformed from a secondary consideration to a foundational concern. The question is whether or not it is built intentionally to optimize business performance. Companies that place client interests, ethical decisions, and concern for their workers at the core of their operations usually produce high performance as an outcome. Failure to use corporate culture to your advantage is a missed opportunity, while total lack of regard for corporate culture can cause significant damage including penalties, complaints, fines and loss of reputation.
Corporate culture can be a challenge to assess and measure. However, assessment is an essential consideration for organizations that want to maintain their momentum and a competitive advantage. An important tool in determining where your corporate culture is today, and whether or not it is moving in the direction you desire, is culture assessment. While there are many culture assessments on the market, those that focus on measuring high performance culture provide the most useful business insights. Performance culture assessments also make tangible the actions required to position the culture to drive optimal business performance.
Our assessment solution: The Denison model of Organizational Culture (DOCS).
The Denison model of Organizational Culture (DOCS) highlights four key traits that an organization should master in order to be effective. At the center of the model are the organization’s “Beliefs and Assumptions.” These are the deeply held aspects of an organization’s identity that are often hard to access. The four traits of the Denison model, Mission, Adaptability, Involvement and Consistency, measure the behaviors driven by these beliefs and assumptions that create an organization’s culture. The Denison model links organizational culture to organizational performance metrics such as Sales Growth, Return on Equity (ROE), Return on Investment (ROI), Customer Satisfaction, Innovation, Employee Satisfaction, Quality and more.
The Denison model and survey:
- Job descriptions meet business requirements
- Candidates are assessed against consistent selection criteria at every stage
- The candidate can be confident it is a genuine job offer
- The process can be followed by all stakeholders.
Positive corporate culture enhances productivity and performance, improves employee engagement and drives a business forward. However, before you can enhance corporate culture, you need to understand it. Organizational assessment tools are the first step, and through regular use, they will help you gain the essential insights that you need to create and maintain a high performing corporate culture.
The assessment tools will also help you select the right workers which is also essential in building a high-performance culture. Our advice is to hire based on cultural fit and talent and this is very important when you build multicultural teams and hire expatriates. Expatriates and workers who share the corporate philosophies and align with its purpose and values will have the greatest success within the organization. If you hire bright, energetic, and capable people who are opposed to your culture, they will use all of that talent to undermine it unless you coach them in the direction you want them to go.
When selecting new team members, our assessment tools will help you ascertain that their values reinforce your corporate culture and the kind of practices you expect from your employees. This will allow you to have a rigorous recruitment process that apart from focusing on talent, also includes an open debate on values and work culture.
These traits are organized by color and are designed to help you answer key questions about your organization.
- Mission: Do we know where we are going?
- Adaptability: Are we responding to the marketplace/external environment?
- Involvement: Are our people aligned and engaged?
- Consistency: Do we have the values, systems and processes in place to create leverage?
Each trait breaks down into three indexes. For example, Adaptability breaks down into Creating Change, Customer Focus and Organizational Learning. Each index is made up of five questions, for a total of 60 questions, on the survey. Each of the four traits is represented by a color on the circumplex model. This color coding helps to group the related constructs into the four traits and also helps provide visual and intuitive feedback in the reports.
Denison’s research has demonstrated that effective organizations have high culture scores in all four traits. Thus, effective organizations are likely to have cultures that are adaptive, yet highly consistent and predictable, and that foster high involvement, but do so with the context of a shared sense of mission.