What’s Your Organization’s CultureDNA™?
Much like human DNA, your organization’s CultureDNA™ is unique to you. When you understand the genetic makeup of your organization, you can turn it into your competitive advantage by hiring people who match your culture, and then reinforcing that culture through employee engagement and continuous development.
Whether you’re a young, growing company or a well-established organization, culture is the key to your success. Your job as an HR leader is to define that culture, and align it with business strategy and goals by understanding:
- What’s our current culture?
- What’s our aspiration culture?
- Where are our culture gaps?
Building Blocks of CultureDNA™
As you look at CultureDNA™, you’ll see that every organization has the same component building blocks that make up its DNA structure:
- Values, or beliefs about what is important of worthwhile.
- Norms, or expectations around appropriates behaviors.
- Behaviors, or the specific attitudes and actions that are needed to successfully accomplish important goals.
But, just as every DNA sequence is unique, every culture is unique.
Define Your CultureDNA™
Culture is a system that operates within your organization, whether you manage it or not. To actively manage your culture, you first have to define it. Here are a few ways to do that:
- Focus groups: This approach involves gathering small groups of employees and leading them through guided discussions to understand their perception of the current culture. This works best for smaller companies because it takes a lot of time and resources to gather and analyze data in this way.
- Organizational culture profile: This approach uses a web-based tool to capture survey data or analyze existing data for a large, corporate-level culture diagnosis.
- Third party/consulting firms: This approach involves a combination of surveys and interviews that are deployed, analyzed, and delivered by a consulting firm. Because consulting firms are expensive, most companies leverage these services only when there’s an urgent need for intervention, like during a merger or acquisition, for example.
Design HR Programs around Your CultureDNA™
After you define and diagnose your culture, then the real work begins! HR plays a huge role in maintaining and/or shifting an organization’s CultureDNA™, through programs such as:
- Recruiting and selection to ensure that new hires match your company’s culture.
- Training and development to create programs that align with your culture.
- Rewards and recognition, which shows people what is valued in a company, and what you’d like to see more of.
- Role modeling from the leadership team to intentionally and visibly demonstrate desired behaviors.
Ready to get started? Watch this webinar to learn more about managing your culture: CultureDNATM: How to Measure, Endorse and Turn it into Your Competitive Advantage.
