Cultures At Work | Articles

7 Questions For Understanding Your Company Culture

Cultures are often over generalised. We hear people make statements such as. German culture is efficient. Fijian culture is friendly. Japanese culture is symbolic and ritualised.

How To Know If Your Culture Is Invisible

Your own culture is very difficult to see and understand when you are in it. Rather like a fish in water, a familiar surrounding quickly becomes transparent. We look through it and not at it.

Why Personal Values Drive Your Performance & Commitment

For years now I have been studying and working inside organisations, helping people to clarify and align with their personal values. In fact, in supporting organisations to lift their performance I recommend placing far more energy and investment into supporting people to clarify their personal values than working on creating a set of organisational values.

When Is The Right Time To Work On Your Company Culture?

Every organisation needs to work deliberately on its company culture at some stage. The question is, when is the right time? Here are three simple yet critical questions that will tell you if now is the time to work on improving your company culture:

Is Your Culture Survey Just Measuring Itself?

Regular readers of my E-zine will know by now that I am not a big fan of surveys being used to measure or evaluate company culture. Amongst my previous commentaries on this point are:

Why Your Engagement Results May Be Misleading

Staff engagement is known to have a significant impact on many aspects of an organisation’s performance, including: productivity, sales, quality assurance, customer satisfaction, and results.

Is Your Culture On The Pavement?

Yesterday I witnessed a large group of employees standing outside their workplace building chatting on the pavement and staring up at their offices, apparently in response to a fire alarm alert.

Cultural Clarity Has Direct Impact On Performance Levels

The need for ongoing, intensive management intervention into people's daily performance in the workplace, is the price many organisations pay for having a poorly developed and undefined workplace culture.

The Most Common Reason For M&A Failures.

Research suggests that over 30% of mergers fail because of culture incompatibility, and a lack of consideration and attention being given to the merging or transformation of the cultures.

Sometimes The Benefits Far Outweigh The Ticket Price

There are a number of studies that exist on how company culture affects performance and even stock returns. For example, The Harvard Business School completed a landmark study in 1992 highlighting the benefits of a performance-driven culture.

Why Performance Reviews Are On The Way Out

The New Yorker last week added fuel to the current trend against the traditional employee performance review. Accenture and Deloittes have both announced they are changing their approach to their annual performance reviews.

Who’d Pay $1.2b For A Culture?

Despite the recent publicity about the world famous Zappos workplace culture being potentially under threat due to its adoption of Holacracy, I still rate Zappos as having a High Performing workplace culture, and that Holacracy will in fact only make it stronger.

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