In the period between May 2020 and June 2021 India registered a total of 116 Industrial accidents in chemical and mining industries across the country. It highlights the need for a culture of safety. Can an optimal Organizational culture drive a culture of safety management? Let’s start by defining safety culture.

According to IRMI (International Risk Management Institute) safety culture is a subculture of the organizational culture and therefore constrained and influenced by it. The safety culture may be defined as the truths, ideas, and beliefs that all members of the organization share about risk, accidents, injuries, and occupational health. An effective safety culture can be described as the corporate atmosphere in which safety and health is understood to be and accepted as an important core value. IRMI adds that safety culture does not operate in a vacuum. Business initiatives (restructuring, downsizing, acquisitions, etc.), organizational changes, and management's actions all affect the safety culture, and it in turn, over time, affects the people and ultimately the organization.

Now let’s dive into organizational culture and understand how it can impact your safety culture.

Are you looking for consultation on the optimal Organization Culture for your company?

Organizational culture is the way in which people in an organization relate to each other, their work and the outside world, in comparison with other organizations. Your Organizational Culture shows how your organization works: how things get done, the interactions between people, and employee relationships to their work and the outside world. The best organizations often place equal emphasis on strategy and culture. Such organizations create a culture that motivates their teams. Organizational Culture is what differentiates your business, so it is important to know the various factors that contribute to your company’s culture.

An organic approach means that management takes more of an observational approach to culture development so that culture develops naturally over time, or that the culture of the organization has not been considered at all. There are serious limitations and risks involved with the organic growth of your culture because it’s left to take its own direction – and this may not be aligned with your organization’s goals.

An active approach to Organizational Culture refers to organizations where the  management takes the lead in proactively defining and implementing an optimal organizational culture. This can involve leading by example, training sessions, consultant guidance and more. It’s important to remember that while Organizational Culture manifests over time on its own, taking a more active approach will help you strategically design it. With proper guidance on your part, you can shape it to benefit your employees, adapt to the current business landscape, provide better customer service and stand out from competitors.

To build a fool-proof safety culture, your company will need to lean towards an active approach to Organizational culture  Hofstede Insights can work with you and help you actively design an optimal culture to support your business strategy and safety culture, both in the short and long run.

You can’t build a safety culture without a well-defined Organizational culture. An effective safety culture needs top management involvement and effective communication:

Buy-in from the top management: effective safety management requires management commitment and involvement. Organizations with successful health and safety track records allocate a significant proportion of resources like time and money to health and safety vis-à-vis production costs.

Lead by example: effective managers are often seen on the shop floor and often interact with employees on the importance of health and safety. Such managers and organizations realise that incidents can occur at any given time and always have robust systems in place to fall back on.

Don’t shoot the messenger: it’s important to create a positive safety culture where employees who report safety hazards or concerns are rewarded. Employees need to believe that the reporting process is positive. When incidents aren’t reported, management and workers lose the opportunity to learn from near misses and low-severity events.

Employee participation and ownership: in successful companies safety is a joint responsibility of the management and employees. Communication across all levels can aid the transition to a safer workplace culture. Effective communication systems harness the unique knowledge that employees have of their own work and processes. Periodic workshops with a focus on topical safety issues and developments helps the team stay abreast.

Reach out to us to find out about our programs and solutions that can help you build an optimal organizational culture

International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that global spending on the digital transformation (DX) of business practices, products, and organizations is expected to hit $1.8 trillion in 2022, an increase of 17.6% over 2021. According to the latest update to IDC’s Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide, DX spending will sustain this pace of growth over the 2021-2025 forecast period with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6%. This study covers 9 regions, 12 technology markets and 19 industries. The pandemic has accelerated DX, after a minor slowdown during the pandemic period, we’re seeing a boom in DX in a post-pandemic phase. These include investments in internal operations that are focused on improving efficiencies and also customer experience transformation. The biggest challenge in digital transformation is not integrating new technology but navigating organizational culture while making this transformation.

Digital transformation (DX) usually refers to operational, cultural and organizational changes of a company or an industry through an integration of digital processes and technologies across multiple levels and layers of an organization. These changes need to dovetail into the company’s strategic goals and market dynamics. This definition underscores the importance of an optimal Organizational Culture in a digital transformation strategy.

Organizational culture is the way in which people in an organization relate to each other, their work and the outside world, in comparison with other organizations. Your Organizational Culture shows how your organization works: how things get done, the interactions between people, and employee relationships to their work and the outside world. The best organizations often place equal emphasis on strategy and culture. Such organizations create a culture that motivates their teams. Organizational Culture is what differentiates your business, so it is important to know the various factors that contribute to your company’s culture.

Are you looking for consultation on Organizational Culture?

A Capgemini survey themed around the ‘Digital Culture Challenge’ found that ‘Cultural issues’ were the number one hurdle to digital transformation. This outscored other factors such as IT systems, lack of digital skills and lack of clear leadership vision. Capgemini surveyed 1,700 people in 340 organizations across 8 countries. 62% of the respondents picked culture as the primary challenge in digital transformation.

A BCG study of 40 digital transformations revealed that companies that focused on culture were five times more likely to achieve breakthrough performance than companies that neglected culture. An optimal culture is the foundation for a successful DX strategy. It helps a company attract better talent and employees to deliver results faster. BCG analysed digital champions and digital laggards among close to 2,000 companies in Europe and the US and found that the impact of culture was even greater than other factors like investing in digital initiatives and recruiting digital talent.

We can help you build an optimal Organizational culture to facilitate your DX strategy. 

We work closely with organizations across the world to build an optimal Organizational Culture

Define your strategy: the vital first step. Even before you are able to align your Organizational Culture with your strategy, you have to clearly define what that strategy is.

Understand your current Organizational Culture: it’s important for you to get an impartial understanding of how your Organizational Culture is today. You can do this by seeking inputs for different areas of your organization before you establish an overall view of the situation.

Identify areas of improvement: Once you have clearly defined your strategy and have an overview of your current Organizational Culture, you are ready to identify the gaps where improvements could be made.

Create an action plan: once you put together the big picture, you are now ready to create an action plan. In most cases you will have too many gaps to address at one time and that is why we suggest starting with the most beneficial ones  to your organization.

Monitor the progress: In order to ensure consistent monitoring, we recommend creating what we call Culture Squads. This means tasking a group of people with driving and monitoring change. Hofstede Insights provides training and mentoring for this as well.

Re-evaluate regularly: Consider evaluating and re-evaluating your Organizational Culture on a regular basis in order to make sure you are continuously moving in the right direction. This also helps you to understand if the actions you are taking are having the desired impact on your Organizational Culture or if different actions could have more impact.

Reach out to us to find out about our programs and solutions that can help you build an optimal organizational culture that can complement your DX strategy.

We’ve seen a resurgence in interest across the world around Organizational Culture at a time when many large global corporations continue to operate in virtual or blended work environments.

Research by Gartner revealed that 70% of HR leaders in a pre-pandemic world were confident they knew the culture their organization needed to propel business performance. But only 30% were confident that the actual culture of their organization reflected the desired culture. Culture has been a glue of sorts that has helped many corporations cope with the pandemic. The same survey revealed that 64% of hybrid and 66% of remote employees reported that their organization’s culture has a positive impact on their job. As one of the world’s pioneering Culture Advisory Firms we often get quizzed about the layers of culture. We’ll aim to give you an overview on the very term culture and the key elements of Organizational and Company Culture.

Are you looking for consultation on the optimal Organization Culture for your company?

You constantly hear about Companies and their culture. About how employees quit because they don’t see a ‘cultural fit’. At Hofstede Insights, we’ve always compared culture to an onion. Just like an onion, culture has multiple layers. Symbols occupy the outer most layer of the onion. These are external symbols. We recognise logos like the Mercedes-Benz three pointed star or the Apple logo instantly. In a country culture context these could include monuments like the Great Wall in China as well as food. A bowl of pasta will immediately conjure up images of Italy.

The second layer is the zone of heroes. These could include high profile corporate executives like Sundar Pichai at Google or real life public figures – for instance Roger Federer is strongly linked to Switzerland or most of us will instantly think of Lionel Messi when Argentina is mentioned. You will find meetings and rituals in the third layer – the closest to the core. This includes rituals such as karaoke in countries like Japan.

Culture is an all-encompassing term. Professor Geert Hofstede defines it as: “The programming of the human mind by which one group of people distinguishes itself from another group”.  Culture is learned from your environment and is always a shared, collective phenomenon.

Now let’s take these layers of culture or the onion and apply it to a company culture context. Changing a logo doesn’t have the same impact as changing rituals. Symbols like powerful logos do have emotions attached to them. Kia Motors rejigged its logo recently but it’s unlikely that it impacted the emotional connect the brand shared with its loyal customers. Imagine a scenario where you move companies and have to deal with a new way of conducting meetings; this is not an easy change to get used to.

At the core of the onion you’ll find values or broad preferences for a certain state of affairs (e.g. preferring equality over hierarchy). Values are transmitted by the environment in which we grow up, like the behaviour of parents or teachers showing us what is acceptable and what isn't. Most of our foundational values take shape by the time we are 10-12 years of age. It’s this collective programming, consisting of values as the core, and the three layers that envelop  that core that we define as culture.

 Organizational culture is the way in which people in an organization relate to each other, their work and the outside world, in comparison with other organizations. Your Organizational Culture shows how your organization works: how things get done, the interactions between people, and employee relationships to their work and the outside world. The best organizations often place equal emphasis on strategy and culture. Such organizations create a culture that motivates their teams. Organizational Culture is what differentiates your business, so it is important to know the various factors that contribute to your company’s culture.

Find out how Hofstede Insights can help you understand if your current Organizational Culture is the perfect culture for your company.

Refers to a group of people who have been brought up within a given country. In comparison to others, these individuals tend to share certain expectations of how things should be done and values around these expectations. National culture takes shape at a formative age, these impressions are completely formed by the age of 12 to 14 and are a product of the environment we grow up in. It’s easier to sense National Culture in larger groups because individual qualities supersede national qualities in smaller groups or if you interact with one individual

Culture is a group phenomenon, we use advanced tools to analyse and understand the behaviour of groups. Our tools also make an assessment of the likelihood of groups of people acting in a certain way. One person doesn't represent the whole culture but in a group of people from one culture, people are likely to act in a way appropriate for that culture.

From a business point of view this makes culture an important tool of management, with regards to groups of people. You may not be able to change values of people but you can make appropriate changes in the practices of your organisation to ensure you’re working with those cultural values, rather than against them.

Reach out to us  to discover how Hofstede Insights can help you a more active approach and take necessary actions to improve your culture.

In a global survey conducted with CIOs, respondents stated that fully remote work will likely transition to hybrid work in the future. About 15 to 16 percent stated their companies’ workforce worked remotely prior to the pandemic, and as of late 2020, 34 percent of respondents expected the workforce to be working remotely permanently. By June 2021, 42 percent of respondents expected to be working in a hybrid model permanently (Statista). The pandemic has exacerbated virtual working environments like no other event has done before.

Are you looking for consultation on the optimal Organization Culture for your company?

Organizational culture is the way in which people in an organization relate to each other, their work and the outside world, in comparison with other organizations. Your Organizational Culture shows how your organization works: how things get done, the interactions between people, and employee relationships to their work and the outside world. The best organizations often place equal emphasis on strategy and culture. Such organizations create a culture that motivates their teams. Organizational Culture is what differentiates your business, so it is important to know the various factors that contribute to your company’s culture.

One of the biggest challenges in a virtual environment is to build and sustain an effective Organizational Culture. How do employees now feel and experience the norms that define ‘why we exist’ and ‘how we do things’. How do employees keep up with how your organization is staying ahead of the competition and industry disruptions. Can you feel part of a team when you’re not in the same location? When do you feel a part of a team when logistically you’re a part of several teams?

Is it possible to trust someone you’ve never met? This has been particularly challenging during the pandemic when many new team members never got to meet their colleagues even in the same city. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

• Speak the truth clearly and appropriately:     online environments have a tendency to increase miscommunication in general. Often, cultural differences fuel these misunderstandings. This is why clear communication is crucial. When you express yourself honestly and tell the truth, you become more reliable in the eyes of others because you increase the predictability of your behaviour.
• Clarify and align intentions and expectations:    when your intentions or expectations are implied, not clarified, you risk misinterpretations. If as a result of these misinterpretations the results are not what was expected, the level of trust in the team will decrease. When you clarify your intentions, expectations, and requests, you promote transparency in the team and increase trust.
• Keep your word and honour commitments:   one of the oldest and simplest ways to foster trust  in a relationships between people and groups is to keep your word. Remember that a promise is a promise. When you make appointments, do it carefully, and, once set, honour them. Make it one of the things you are known for. If you are unable to fulfil a promise due to factors out of your control, let the people know that you will not be able to do it.
• Practice consistency between speech and action:   what you do is what people trust you to do.  Actions really do speak louder than words when building trust.

• It’s important to be clear with processes, responsibilities and decisions. Not doing so can result in broken down communication and distrust in the team.
• Back up your communications in writing. If you make a decision during a conference call, make sure to send a follow up email to ensure people understood correctly what was decided.
• In addition to the team meetings, make sure your managers work to develop personal relationships with each of the team members. In a virtual team you will need to allocate more time to this but it’s worth even more than in a face-to-face setting.

Reach out to us to find out about our programs and solutions that can help you build an optimal organizational culture

The first edition of Culture Insights, the all-new video podcast from Hofstede Insights India addressed a challenge many start-ups are confronted with. Culture Insights will explore evolving trends and the multiple facets of Organizational Culture. The first edition featured Akhilesh Mandal (Managing Director India, Hofstede Insights) in conversation with Manu Parpia (Business Consultant / Former CEO & Founder - Geometric Ltd). Manu is a veteran industry leader who has founded several organisations and handheld them from start-up to growth phase. The ideal person to talk about the significance of organizational culture in start-ups and more importantly how they arrive at an optimal organizational culture as they scale up. Even before we bring you the excerpts from this insightful tete-a-tete, let’s define Organizational culture first.

Are you looking for consultation on the perfect Organizational Culture for your company?

Organizational culture is the way in which people in an organization relate to each other, their work and the outside world, in comparison with other organizations. Your Organizational Culture shows how your organization works: how to things get done, the interactions between people, and employee relationships to their work and the outside world. The best organizations often place equal emphasis on strategy and culture. Such organizations create a culture that motivates their teams. Organizational Culture is what differentiates your business, so it is important to know the various factors that contribute to your company’s culture.

Manu reminisces of a time when start-ups didn’t have the benefit of analytics. It was the good old ‘gut feel’. Organizational Culture sets the tone for decisions to be made and for people to understand what is acceptable and what is not. For example, if you have a performance-based culture – you are promoted when you perform and you’re out if you don’t, that defines the kind of talent you attract. The tone you set is important. It’s not just the tone but it’s also transparency. Does an organization share data down the line or is it restricted only to the top management. Manu believes that culture and values are closely interlinked.

The discussion progressed towards how culture is built especially at a time when many start-ups are more focused on existential challenges and keeping their heads above the water. Akhilesh spoke about the Hofstede view that the best culture is when the team works while the leadership is not around. “Once you’ve set the culture, things just happen; you don’t need to intervene”. Manu concurs – “Culture is an enabler. It frees you to do other things”

The Hofstede view is that Culture is contextual. It is determined by what stage the organization is at, what is the environment your organization is embedded in, and the pole star of your business and the strategic intent. This brings us to a key question: do cultural elements change from a start-up phase to a scale up mode?

Manu believes that at many times they do, albeit subtly. It’s why leaders need to change sometimes. A leader may be good in the start-up phase but may not be an ideal candidate to take over the organization in scale-up mode. The excitement of a start-up is difficult to maintain as you expand. Things that made you successful as a start-up may not make you successful as you expand. Processes become more important as you scale up. You do build processes as you start. Manu remembers a time when he thought titles were not important but gradually learnt that they do matter to employees and their external support systems.

As you expand you have to build structure. This structure affects culture. External stakeholders like shareholders also impact culture. It’s difficult to maintain the speed of decision making. initiative and the desire for initiative as more processes are added. Manu believes that the best solution is to remove irrelevant processes. Simple example, should the boss approve your leave? If you’re surprised by the leave application of your subordinate, it shows you’re not in touch with your staff.

Manu remembers a time when he had to step back and make for a CEO in one of the start-ups he helped establish. That CEO took the company to great heights but it still needed Manu’s entrepreneurial streak in the initial phase before the CEO stepped in. The trick is to step back, most entrepreneurs find it difficult to let go or take a backseat when their usefulness is exhausted. But it has to be done to help the start-up achieve scale.

Reach out to us to discuss the challenges faced by your organization. We can help you build an optimal Organizational culture.

Hofstede Insights doesn’t believe  in a good or bad culture. Culture should serve as an enabling component to the business strategy. Your strategic intent is the anchor, culture should be built to achieve this intent. That brings us to the question - does every organisation need to building their own nuanced culture? Manu reiterates that a “Culture cannot be copied but can be emulated” You can learn from other people.  Make your own blend that is suitable for your organization and your context.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Culture Insights.