Working Dilemmas Framework: How to Measure Organisational and Team Culture Effectively?
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." This timeless wisdom from Aristotle is especially true regarding the culture within organisations and teams.
Culture is the invisible force that shapes interactions among team members, their approach to work, and their engagement with the world. It plays a pivotal role in the success or failure of organisational strategies.
I am sure your organisation also wants a culture that separates you positively from the competition.Your common narratives, goals, and practices that form the everyday working environment can be deciding factors in recruitment, talent retention, employee motivation, and how the company is perceived.
Some companies have been successful in this:
Google could tap into enhanced team performance, increased employee satisfaction, and better collaboration across the company when they recognised psychological safety as a critical factor for high-performing teams in Project Aristotle.
Mars International Travel Retail (a division of well-known Mars Incorporated) measured culture’s impact on the organisation and realised that oversight of cross-cultural factors was hindering their global strategy and entry into new duty-free retail markets. Armed with data, they discovered that integrating cultural awareness created moments of visible change. One sales manager described these moments as "when the penny dropped," realising the newfound competitive advantages that enhanced their market position.
These examples underline a crucial insight: there is no universal solution for cultural transformation. Effective change must be tailored to a company’s and its teams’ specific needs, ensuring that the culture aligns with and supports the strategic goals. However, an essential step in this process is clearly understanding your current cultural state. Before implementing impactful changes, measuring and making tangible the critical elements of your culture is vital. Many organisations recognise the need to influence team culture and organisational performance positively but often grapple with how to begin this process of measurement.
You may not be studying hundreds of teams in-house like Google, and your resources for initiating larger cultural change can depend on demonstrating successful small-scale pilot results.
The tools we employ at InCultures to measure team and organisational culture have proven effective across various scales—from small entrepreneur-run businesses to large banks shifting their culture to meet today’s requirements. These tools are designed to be simple enough to integrate and use across different organisational contexts yet powerful enough to provide the insights needed to facilitate meaningful change.
There is a massive advantage in measuring the culture and then identifying the gaps between the current culture and the optimal culture that would align with the organisation's purpose or goals and support its strategy:
- Insightful Leadership and Strategic Clarity: Provides leadership with tangible data for decision-making and tracking progress while clarifying which aspects of the current culture hinder or support the execution of strategic goals.
- Facilitated Change and Alignment: Pinpoints and addresses specific cultural adjustments needed to support strategic objectives, ensuring that all cultural initiatives link directly to organisational goals.
- Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Alignment: Offers a clear roadmap for targeted interventions and supports the ongoing alignment of culture with evolving business strategies.
The foundation of measuring organisational and team culture: what to look for?
Our widely applicable tools that any organisation and team benefits from as they start reflecting on culture at different levels are based on Hofstede Insights' trademarked Multi-Focus Model. One of them is called Team Culture Scan, and it is beneficial for facilitating reflection on your team:
- How do we relate to each other?
- How do we relate to our work?
- How do we relate to the outside world?
We facilitate the above reflection by making six working dilemmas tangible in your team so that you know where you stand and have a solid basis for reflection and cultural transformation. As said, no one size fits all, so you need to find the right approach for your team.
What are the six working dilemmas?
The Team Culture Scan evaluates six critical dimensions of team culture from your team’s perspective:
1. Team Effectiveness:
“How do we prefer to get things done: by focusing more on the ‘what’ or the ‘how’, and to what extent? Why?”
To optimise your team's efficiency and align your practices with the shared goals, you must balance the focus between the 'what' (outcomes) and the 'how' (processes).
This balance involves critically examining operational preferences and the underlying values influencing our decision-making and problem-solving strategies. Such introspection helps you identify areas for refinement and ensures the approach reflects your collective values and work ethic.
The approach depends on the shared goals, and teams in production or accounting should naturally lean towards a process-oriented approach due to the necessity of adhering to strict procedures. In contrast, sales teams might prioritise outcomes, adapting processes to meet targets.
2. Customer Orientation:
“What comes first and to what extent: the customer requirements or our procedures and ethics? Why?”
This question prompts you to evaluate your priority on customer needs versus internal procedures. By examining your stance on customer orientation, you can better understand how your current approach influences service delivery and operational effectiveness.
The analysis is crucial for aligning the team's actions with the broader goal of customer satisfaction while maintaining procedural integrity and ethics. The approach could be on either end of the scale in a customer service team, depending on the business.
3. Control:
“Do team members feel that sufficient discipline and control are exercised? Or perhaps too much? Why or why not?“
Exploring this dimension encourages you to assess the level of discipline within the team and its perceived sufficiency. It's an opportunity to reflect on how control mechanisms are implemented and their impact on team dynamics and performance. Understanding the right balance between discipline and freedom to improvise helps create an environment supporting results.
4. Focus:
“Do we expect loyalty to the boss, the team, and the organisation, or rather identification with the profession and content of the job? Who is expected to do the thinking for the team, each team member or the management?”
Addressing this question enables you to delve into the team’s loyalty dynamics. It invites you to consider the primary objects of loyalty and how these preferences influence the team's dynamics and effectiveness.
By debating and clarifying the ideal focus of loyalty, you can foster an environment that leverages these affiliations to enhance team unity, motivation, and performance.
In high-tech workplaces, it is typical for teams to prefer professional culture, and in traditional industries or in small, leader-owned companies, loyalty may be more towards the leader than to the profession.
5. Approachability:
“How easy is it to access people and information within the team and organisation? Do we have an open or closed culture? Are there in-groups? Why?”
This discussion sheds light on the accessibility of resources and individuals within the team. For many teams, it's crucial to facilitate open communication, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.
By understanding the barriers and enablers to approachability, you can implement strategies to enhance accessibility and foster a supportive work environment.
Again, the level of approachability depends on your team’s specifics. For example, if you work in an environment where strict data protection is crucial, your practices should support that by creating a more closed culture.
6. Management Philosophy:
“What comes first in the team, input or output? To what extent are we people-oriented (even at the expense of work results) or work-oriented (even at the expense of people’s well-being)?”
This question reflects the balance between softer, people-oriented and harder, work-oriented management approaches. It helps you recognise how the management philosophy impacts team morale, motivation, performance and wellbeing.
These honest questions let you assess whether the current approach supports your long-term objectives and values.
By measuring and then setting the targets for the optimal culture in the above areas, teams can identify areas for improvement. To facilitate effective cultural transformation through practical actions, you need a clear idea of where to focus your efforts. From experience, we know that it is not wise to try to change too many things at once. It does not bring results, and the whole cultural change process will just create more frustration and resistance rather than the needed results.
Conclusion
Throughout this article, we've delved into the profound impact of measuring team and organisational culture on a company's performance and alignment with its goals.
We discussed the importance of measuring culture at the team and organisational levels to identify whether the next steps you should take involve psychological safety, as exemplified by Google, or leveraging the cultural diversity of thought as a competitive advantage, as seen at Mars Travel Retail.
We also introduced the Team Culture Scan tool, which leverages the six working dilemmas framework to provide actionable insights into your team's culture. Most teams and organisations know about the importance of culture and want to gain the benefits from measuring it:
- Data-Driven Leadership and Decision Making: Arms leaders with essential data that reveals which cultural elements are obstacles or enablers to strategic goals, enabling informed decision-making aligned with long-term organisational and employee well-being.
- Strategic Cultural Adjustments and Alignment: Identifies necessary changes within the organisational culture to better support overarching strategic objectives, enhancing team dynamics and ensuring initiatives resonate deeply with company missions.
- Sustained Growth and Responsive Adaptation: Utilises precise measurements from tools like the Team Culture Scan to provide strategic direction for cultural enhancement, facilitating a culture of continuous improvement that adapts to shifts in business landscapes and strategies.
Ready to transform your organisational culture into a tangible asset that drives success? Contact InCultures today to learn how our tools and expertise can help you understand, measure, and transform culture. Start your journey towards a more aligned and effective workplace, harness the full potential of your team and align everyone behind the optimal organisational culture.
About Pia Kähärä and InCultures
Pia is a Systemic Team Coach and Cross-Cultural and DEI Consultant with over 25 years of experience in team multicultural leadership, cultural competence building, and international team growth. She is the founder of InCultures and an insightful speaker and author on topics such as DEI, team culture, cultural intelligence and leadership development.
Wondering if your team is reaching its full potential? Discover key insights with InCultures’ Global Team Success Indicator assessment.
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Here are a few of our other articles you might be interested in:
Cultural Adaptability: The Key to Thriving in a Multicultural Environment
Turn Diversity into Strengths: When should you focus on individual cultural preferences?
