Focus Areas Organizational Development

Bringing your Hearts to work

Sep 1st 2009
By Suman Sethi

Culture today is one the most colloquial terms in any con-text be it national, organizational, community
or even home. The reason why culture has taken such a prominent position in our psyche and actions is
the context of change that we are witnessing at macro and micro levels. The global economic scenario of
recession and slowdown has nudged or pushed (depending on which industry we are talking about)
organizations to re-examine, re-evaluate and therefore re-strategize what they want to achieve and
more importantly how they want to achieve it. The how of it is completely driven by the culture -- what
type of culture would help us to get closer to our goals; and the change that we need to impact
therefore, is the question that all organizations are trying to find answers to.

The culture we have been a part of significantly impacts our motivations and aspirations. And therefore,
culture needs to be aligned to the changed aspirations that organizations may have now. Similarly, we
continue to be impacted by the constructs of shared values, beliefs and aspirations around us. Enhanced
productivity and performance is the pinnacle all organizations are moving towards. Undisputedly, one of
the key drivers for performance across organizations is the prevailing environment or the culture.

While on the one hand, a lot has been written and understood on how culture impacts human beings
more is now being observed and noted on how we impact culture on the other. At the organizational
level, culture is hugely influenced by morale of the people and their conviction in the vision and
strategy. The culture may also be characterized by a certain mindset and energy levels of its human
resource. Therefore, an imperative for successful reconstruction of an organization or its culture would
be the right attitude and high energy levels of the employees.

Traditionally, when organizations have wanted to introduce change, their normal recourse has been to
change strategy, restructure the organization, introduce or revamp systems, change or induct
personnels, et al. However, our experience of working with various companies globally has shown that
these initiatives are unsustainable as people revert to the old methods if they do not buy into and
commit to the change with their hearts and minds. Added to that is also the whole issue of signals,
systems, structures and skills not being aligned to the change that the organization is trying to create.

What is the solution?

For a successful cultural transformation, it is imperative to focus on not only the tangible issues of
technology, finance, margins, market shares, et al, but also on issues like company practiced values, the
way and energy with which groups, teams and individuals work within the company voice of the
customer, et al.

We typically follow the five box model of cultural transformation along Values, Signals, Skills, Structure
and Systems. Through this process, we redesign the genetic architecture of the organization along the
above dimensions.

As far as our experience goes, employee alignment and engagement are very powerful in generating and
sustaining energies of organization towards its goals, its vision and to any change process. While any
change initiative must be driven from the top, its cascade towards teams and employees is what
distinguishes one successful organization from another less successful one. It is critical that all teams
and employees are fully aligned to the goals, values, and strategy of the company and each employee
has a clear line of sight to the end customer.

The objective must be to align individual performance of the employees to organizational goals to
ensure that every individuals effort matches organizational purpose. Only once this happens, does the
organization create energy and help direct it towards implementation of solutions and create
shareholder value.

The power of this shareholder value is enormous once unleashed. Generally it is believed that success or
failure of a company is only the managers responsibility. However, the management is also a part of the
whole and therefore has only part responsibility. Success of a company depends upon each employee
and on how mobilized is the energy of all employees to secure the companys future.

When people do their best to ensure the companys success, a special kind of personal commitment
exists. The Quality Guru and Founder TMI, Claus Moller, calls this commitment Employeeship, that is,
what it takes to be a good employee.
Simply put, when everybody plays for themselves and for the team to win, the company enjoys an
employeeship culture. It is this personal and special commitment that ensures that the people move
with the company towards its vision, contributing his or her best towards organizational excellence.

For instance, we recently worked with a large telecom organization on developing competencies that
would align all employees to the companys values, mobilize them to consistently live and demonstrate
the values. The intervention was run across 400 employees in three locations, preceded by identification
of competencies and followed by robust integration through robust and consistent internal
communication, action learning projects, review templates and reward and recognition. The impact has
been higher employee engagement and alignment towards company values, commitment towards
personal contribution and above all towards being an employeeship person, which is now an
organizational jargon.

Similarly our work with a leading BPO firm has demonstrated that when employees live the company
values, their commitment ensures high Personal Quality - what we refer to as the human side of
quality. It was the organizations vision to have personal quality as the base for quality culture within the
company. Alignment to core values and commitment towards personal quality facilitated a movement
towards quality that translated into an upgrade on quality certification for the company, critical to its
success.

Such examples demonstrate that while the culture can build performance, performance culture is built
by people who bring their hearts to work, are inspired to achieve personal goals and are therefore
constantly mobilising their energies towards the organizations success.