Organizational Culture | Equil Consulting

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast"

Peter Drucker

An unbelievable amount of time, energy and money are spent on developing business strategies. Private, public, non-profit and government agencies all have to create a roadmap that will steer their organizations to success. Operational, financial and traditional human capital planning are generally the focus.

Understanding the impact of organizational culture can be difficult because it represents both the tangible and intangible aspects of an organization. Whereas organizations build clear-cut systems to manage things like operations, finance, sales/marketing, HR, and IT, they don’t generally have a culture management system that helps make sense of the more intangible aspects of how an organization operates.

Culture flows through an entire organization and can assume different forms in various departments, divisions or locations. Because culture can appear to take these various forms, many would believe that environment dictates culture. We see it differently. Our belief is that culture is a collection of "personality traits" that "inform" each facet of your organization. Identifying, defining, designing and leveraging this cultural force can determine how successful your organization will ultimately become.

Below is a brief overview of how we can help your organization to harness the power of your culture.

Assessment:

We start with a quantitative and qualitative assessment of your organization's culture. Depending on the type of engagement, we use one of the two following assessments. It should be noted that both of these assessments are administered by a third party and that the results from either assessment are completely confidential. No individual data is made available to either the organization or to our consulting staff.

Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI): This assessment provides data on the style in which your staff/employees are most comfortable working and looks at both your current culture and if respondents think a change in working style needs to take place. The results illuminate if staff/employees are happy with their current work style and whether this style aligns with management’s expectations.

Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) and Organizational Effectiveness Inventory (OEI): This assessment takes a deeper dive than the OCAI and provides behavioral data on staff/employees. Human Synergistics , the developer, states that the OCI “reveals what members collectively believe is expected of them and how those behavioral norms influence their engagement and effectiveness — ultimately providing an unmatched foundation for constructively changing organizational culture.”

To gather the qualitative data, we interview certain staff/employees and management in order to gain insight into your organizations “story” and to begin the process of fleshing out the OCAI or OCI data.

Facilitated Meeting(s):

The next step in the process will be to confirm that the data we have collected is accurate and to begin the process of “owning” the survey results. Our consulting team will work with your culture exploration team to determine the appropriate number of meetings to be held and then facilitate those meetings in order to add qualitative data to the quantitative assessment results. These discussions are important so that your organization can begin to define the aspects of your culture, discuss any changes they feel are necessary and then begin the process of designing and owning the determine culture. Our facilitator will document this process and provide a summary report that shows any differentiation between sub-cultures and will highlight where mis-alignments exist between your current culture and any expected (or ideal) culture.

Reporting:

Depending on the engagement, we will provide you with a summary report identifying significant organizational culture issues and the next steps in orchestrating a culture change. Our process has been used:

For compatibility analysis between organizations considering a merger, acquisition or another strategic redesign effort where multiple cultures are going to work together in order to reach a defined goal.
During strategic planning in order to ensure that workplace horsepower supports the overall strategic vision the board and leadership.
To build Cultural Acuity (CA) in order to better manage culture and be positioned to proactively address culture issues.
Inform a variety of workplace initiatives related to employee satisfaction, talent management, succession planning, board design and make-up, and efficiency and effectiveness analysis.