New hire’s guide to learn the culture of the company

My team is currently growing. We are hiring few new people at this time. And as we hire new people, I need to make sure that they get appropriate tools and training to come up to speed. Thus, I was creating an on-boarding plan for these new hires. My initial plan only contained specifics of what processes, technologies and tools that they need to learn. I didn’t have any idea about how to train them on our existing culture. And I thought of this blog. Following are few pointers, which might help you in learning the existing culture of your new company.

Policies: The organizational policies and procedures influence the projects that a company undertakes. The organizational procedures will determine how to implement new strategies and if the work environment will be formal or informal. For example: some organizations may allow employees to work anytime from 7.00am to 7.00pm, while other organizations may be very strict about their working hours. To get yourself acquainted with these policies, you should read all the possible policy documents at your disposal. HR department would be your best bet to find more information. Detailed oriented observation of your co-workers can also help you in learning unwritten policies.

Values: The values, beliefs and expectations of an organization have a major impact on the organizational culture. The organization’s strategic decision making choices, preferences, and approach will vary based on its values and beliefs. The criteria for the election of a project are determined by the organizational culture. For example: a competitive, ambitious and assertive organization will select projects with high risks, while a highly rigid and authoritarian origination might not take projects with high risks. Most of these values are derived from your company’s culture or your team’s culture. Your best bet would be observing your manager’s behavior and socialize with your colleague to get more information. Going out on lunch with your coworker can give you many valuable insights.

Management style: The management style of the organization is another factor that affects the organizational culture. Some managers follow a coaching style, while other managers follow a controlling style. After observing the management style of your organization, you can determine if your feedbacks will be valued or not? If the management is going to implement new strategies based on your feedback or not? As a new employee, I would recommend you to adapt to the management style of an organization. And once you properly understand your Manager’s management style, try to provide your feedback in the manner that he/she will understand.

I hope these tips will help you to learn the culture of your new company as soon as possible. Please feel free to comment on my blog, if you have any other suggestions regarding this subject. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

3 simple tips to successfully change your organizational culture

Recently, I was helping one of my client to develop a new line of product in their product portfolio. With the help of their existing equipments and resources, they could have come out with this new product very easily. In order to create this new product, they required a major shift in their existing culture. Maybe that was the major reason why this initiative hadn't worked for them.

Organizational culture is formed over years through historical events, employee's shared values, employee's shared beliefs, organization's leadership, etc. Normally, organizational culture grows over time, and most of the times people are comfortable with the existing culture. Thus, we can't expect an immediate change in the organizational culture. But we can progressively change organizational culture through following steps:

Understand your existing culture: Before any organization can change its culture, it must first understand the existing culture. There are various ways to perform cultural analysis of your organization. Few methods that I use for cultural analysis are: Schein's rubric and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Schein's rubric can be used for understanding the organizational culture of a smaller company, while Hofstede’s cultural dimensions can be used for understanding the culture of International organizations.

Develop cultural vision: After you are done with understanding your existing organizational culture, you need to develop a cultural vision for your organization. This is a crucial step, as you will be defining the strategic direction for your culture, and making sure that these cultural changes support your overall organizational goals. Envisioning culture artifacts, values and beliefs will help tremendously during this phase. For example: our new culture will have open door policy, tightened ethical standards, etc.

Change organization's behavior: In this stage, we need to change organization's behavior to create the desired organizational culture. We might not be able to change behavior of each and every individual, but we can make changes in the organizational structure and leadership to propagate these changes to an individual level. During this phase, we need to get full support from executives, and provide appropriate training to the employees to make this work. Communication is the key element for changing people's behavior. Thus, we need to provide various channels of feedback and performance metrics, through which we can measure success of these changes. For example: employees feedback sessions, employee satisfaction survey, rate of increase/decrease of productivity, etc.

I hope, these tips will help you to successfully change your organizational culture over time. Please feel free to comment on my blog, if you have any other suggestions regarding organizational cultural change. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi

Incorporate best practices into your organization's culture

Recently, I was called upon for help by one of the local small business owner. She wanted to improve efficiency of her business processes to improve production capacity. After reviewing her existing process documents, I couldn't find any major improvements. So, I visited her company and met with few employees to get more information. To my surprise, employees gave me the different picture of the organization. Most of the employees seemed to consider processes as an unnecessary overhead. Their working style reflected "Just do it" approach to finish the work. This is not an independent event. I have seen many organizations, where this problem is prominent. You can have as many processes as you can, but if you fail to incorporate those process in to your culture then nothing is going to help you in improving efficiency. Following are few tips that you can follow in order to enforce your processes.

Demonstrate Benefits:

Most of the workers push back on the use of processes based on their primary perception of "more processes = more work". While that might be true, the assumption that not employing processes will tend to create less overhead is generally untrue. Thus, an organization needs to do a better job of communicating benefits of their processes to their employees. For example: Don't just tell your employees to put in their actual hours in to the ERP system. Explain them how this will help you to get an appropriate estimates for your future projects, and how this will reduce their overtime. Also, discuss about other benefits such as reduction in employee's stress level due to more control over projects, etc.

Customize processes:

It is always better to have people adopt practices that they have thought of instead of demanding that they should follow a particular process “because I said so”. Thus, every organization should do a better job of involving their employees in fine tuning their processes. Before coming up with any kind of process or hiring an external consultant, one should ask their employees about their idea of an ideal process. Of course, you might not agree with each and every idea that is presented to you. But it will give you a baseline to think about, and that too, for free. Asking feedback from employees will make them feel valuable and get their buy-ins before you implement the process. Thus, there are more chances that those customized processes will convert into actual processes instead of being just on paper.

I hope, these tips will help you to incorporate best practices in to your organizational culture. Let me know, if you have any other suggestions regarding the same. Thanks. – Bhavin Gandhi