I have consistently advocated reviewing the organisation’s culture, core values, vision and mission once every 10 years. The business environment is fast changing with the influx of baby boomers and millennials into the workplace. Is your company’s vision, mission and value still relevant? Are they connected to your employees? Culture is key to the survival of every business.
The responsibility for defining the culture of any organisation is that of the Board of Directors. The executive management is to implement the board’s decisions. Where there are culture deficiencies, the management must have either misinterpreted the culture or implemented it as favourable to them and not likely to work in the company’s interest for the long term.
Where there are culture deficiencies, the management must have either misinterpreted the culture or implemented it as favourable to them and not likely to work in the company’s interest for the long term
One of the reasons management subverts culture is for short-term personal gains and recognition. Institutions like Twinnings, Tabasco, and Jim Beam that are over 100years old must have had a synergy of culture as crafted by their founders and as implemented by the management teams over the years. The likes of Safaricom in Kenya and Nandos in South Africa must have had a positive correlation between culture and strategy to emerge among the top-most innovative companies.
Where there are negative correlations or huge culture gaps, the integrity of the executive management is at stake. As I mentioned to the fifteen thousand teachers, I spoke to at the Lagos Teachers’ Conference in 2018, anyone who fails to develop the competence required to do what they are being paid to do lacks integrity. Culture audit is, therefore, one of the ways for the executive management to gauge its competence integrity to the board, except where the written culture is a mirage. Where the envisaged culture is a mirage, the core values will never be the way of life.
Aside from the source of information for the audit of culture, the avenue of getting the data is also essential. Culture audit failed to achieve its purpose where people who execute it are theoreticians. A foreign firm might write good proposals on culture audit and use questionnaires.
Still, it takes external personnel with the knowledge of the industry and the company auditing its culture to connect with the staff and extract information (tacit) on the ways of life at the workplace. One of the best ways to obtain information on the manifested culture from employees is by asking a set of probing questions, which cannot come from someone without the experience of similar culture and the knowledge of the industry’s peculiarities.
Below are four requirements for a successful culture audit for organisations aspiring to transform into institutions.
This first bastion is candour. A management team that cannot accept open and sincere feedback will mess up the essence of any culture audit. One of the ways to know a culture with a conscious bias against candour is if the team leaders at strategy or culture alignment meetings give assurance or grant amnesty to staff to speak their minds ahead of comments or response sessions. This indicates that people can quickly become anathema for being sincere in their feedback and comments.
The second requirement for a successful culture audit is the sincerity of purpose. This is the level of desire to weeding out the unintended behaviours in the workplace. It is not enough to harvest honest suggestions or feedback. The management must be willing to take the difficult decisions for the organisation’s long-term interest.
Another requirement for an effective culture alignment with strategy is the avoidance of ‘grade range.’ The grade range is a shielding behaviour where offenders get away unpunished because they are either above or on the same grade as the custodian of the culture.
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The offences are often settled at the close door meetings where the staff of lower rates which have been offended are not privileged to attend or even get excited. The grade-range culture encourages impunity and high executive handedness with grave consequences for the company’s brand.
To avoid grade range, senior and non-compromising staff should be the custodian of the culture. In most organisations, human resources are perceived as the owners of the culture, but experience showed this role as a relegated option to recruitment, promotions, and processing of documents.
It is, therefore, desirable for companies who are serious about their middle-level employees to empower a department, possibly the compliance team, for effective monitoring of the culture and core value violations and report to the Board of directors directly.
Since most people will end their career at the middle level in the organisation, a culture that treats the majority of the workforce reasonably will encourage ownership thinking and a result-oriented atmosphere. It will reduce attrition and disengagement rate among the staff and ensure a better exit where necessary.
The test of the effectiveness of a company’s written values and the manifested culture is how staff exits are being managed and the level of ambassadorial commitment of the ex-staff to the company.
Hence, culture is a critical factor for organisational sustainability and is a measure of the integrity of management.
