Culture & Values
About Organisational Culture and Values
Culture is the ‘personality’ of the organisation and can be defined as the core beliefs, traditions, shared feelings and values. Culture is a key to achieving organisational excellence in that it not only shapes managers’ and employees’ behaviour, but also determines the manner in which people interpret and respond to any given organisational situation. Values are important building blocks of culture and are deep-seated and enduring. They motivate behaviour and emotional responses. They underpin the very way people approach their work, make choices and decisions, and deal with each other. The leadership of an organisation is responsible for the creation and management of its culture and should aim to achieve alignment between managers’ and employees’ individual values and the organisational values.
Why are Culture and Values important?
Setting an organisational culture allows managers’ and employees to:
- Learn more about each other as persons and enable closer and more successful working partnerships;
- Understand and respect diversity and individual differences;
- Hire new staff who ‘fit’ into the organisation;
- Create and function better in teams; and
- Align their actions towards organisational goals with motivation and commitment.
Several studies indicate that the primary reason for an organisation’s lack of success is a neglect of their organisational culture.
How We Can Help
Understanding and assessing your organisation's culture can mean the difference between success and failure in today's fast changing business environment. IntegrateHR’s objective cultural assessment tools can provide measurable data about real organisational values and norms. We can help you understand what really matters in the organisation and can help dispel illusions. After measurement and evaluation we can help the organisation move forward in aligning strategies, plans and actions towards organisational goals; communicating its culture and values to managers and employees; reinforcement through behavioural competencies; and performance management.
Why IntegrateHR?
Our Consultants have helped a wide range of organisations to implement organisational culture and values initiatives. They are highly skilled in advising an organisation as to how to analyse and shape their core beliefs, traditions, shared feelings and values. Our experience enables us to see an organisation’s culture and style, both the tangible and intangible elements, more clearly from the outside than members of the organisation can from inside. Our analysis can help save valuable time and effort during organisational culture and values initiatives.
Case Study
A leading cable television provider had completed its acquisition of a competitor and needed to instil a common organisational culture and values across the new company. Our consultants worked with the client (executive discussions, staff questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews) to analyse both existing cultures and the company’s vision for its future. We the agreed a new vision statement for the organisation and its accompanying values. With the development of a new competency framework we then embedded the new culture through communication, goal alignment, training and performance management.
Culture & Values