Organisational Behaviour Assignment Analysing Case of Closing the Culture Gap

Question

Task:
Closing the Culture Gap: What Your Employees Want May Not Be What You Deliver

By PAUL JARRETT Paul Jarrett studied management before completing an MBA. He is the director and founder of Renaix, an international recruitment and executive search consultancy specializing in placing senior management, finance, and audit professionals. The company celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017.https://www.renaix.com/

There is plenty of water cooler chat about organizational culture these days, but this important topic still finds itself at the bottom of the boardroom agenda. This is a risky oversight, as cultural time bombs are ticking away in many organizations.

A recent survey from PwC assessing worker attitudes in 50 countries found that “employees feel less positive about their workplace cultures than their employers.” Moreover, 80 percent of respondents said their organizational cultures would have to evolve in the next five years if their companies were to continue growing, succeeding, and retaining top talent.

To prevent your organization from being blindsided by a cultural crisis, take some time now to assess your culture and address any brewing issues before it is too late.

Revealing Your Ideal Culture Gap
If you want to build an organizational culture that attracts and retains talent, you must first understand where you’re currently at and where you need to be. In other words, you need to measure the gap between your current culture and your ideal culture — a.k.a., your ideal culture gap.

To assess this gap, start by establishing what your employees want. The simplest way to do this is to survey existing employees about the working conditions, benefits, and other items they value most. It’s a good idea to survey candidates in your talent pipeline to get a handle on what job seekers want from your company as well. Consider bringing the subject up informally during the interview, sending out a job-seeker survey, or gathering insight from a third-party study. For example, Renaix’s recent survey of 5,000 job seekers found flexible work (cited by 40 percent of respondents), career development (19 percent), and generous annual leave (12 percent) to be among the most desired workplace benefits.

By conducting pulse surveys, exit interviews, and engagement surveys, you can find out how employees feel about important engagement and retention factors like pay, benefits, ways of working, etc. The difference between what your employees and job seekers want and what the company delivers constitutes your ideal culture gap. Narrowing that gap is not simply about acquiescing to the demands of employees and candidates. It needs to be win-win, which means your cultural interventions should simultaneously improve performance, recruiting, and retention.

Establish a Baseline

You’ll need to demonstrate to decision-makers how your new culture initiatives will actually benefit the business. This will secure stakeholder buy-in, which you’ll need if you want the budget to actually make cultural improvements.

The simplest way to make your case is to take a snapshot of some key metrics at the outset. This will establish a baseline to work from. Some key metrics to consider tracking:

1. Staff turnover/retention rate
2. Offer-to-acceptance ratio
3. Cost per hire
4. Time to hire
5. Quality of hire
6. Engagement levels
7. Positive mentions on social media
8. Time to productivity for new hires

Benchmark these baseline metrics against external competition or industry norms. If you can demonstrate below-market metrics in these critical areas, you’ll have a strong business case for investment in cultural improvement initiatives that promise to bring your organization up to industry standard.

Bridging the Gap
When you analyse the data from your culture and engagement surveys, you should be able to develop a report showing your company’s strengths and weakness. This report will enable you to understand the size and specifics of your culture gap. Using this information, you can then develop a list of targeted areas to improve. Brace yourself. The results may be overwhelming at first, and you might not be able to fix everything in one go. Prioritize areas that promise to have the biggest, most immediate, and most visible impacts on organizational culture. That way, you’ll generate momentum and build support for further initiatives. Perpetually hot topics like flexible work and career development are good candidates for initial interventions.

The Timeline Is Crucial
Many of the changes you need to make may not be quick fixes. Bridging the ideal culture gap often takes time. For example, introducing flexible work arrangements would require the support of multiple stakeholders from diverse areas like customer fulfillment, IT, finance, and production. It may also require changing or introducing new underlying administrative and technological architecture. Implementing flexible work is a whole project unto itself, which is likely to be the case for many of your cultural interventions.

At the outset, develop and communicate a positive timeline for change to all key stakeholders and those who stand to benefit. This could be an exciting launch schedule outlining the key dates when new initiatives will mature, a lot like a product’s new feature release schedule. Even though you haven’t yet bridged the culture gap, you can still motivate and excite your staff and job applicants based on what is to come.

How Do You Know If It All Worked?
By comparing your relevant metrics at periodic points throughout the process to your baselines, you’ll be able to demonstrate how your improvement strategies have concretely contributed to organizational success. If your key metrics aren’t improving, you’ll need a post-mortem analysis to ascertain why. Culture-building is an inexact science, and things don’t always work out the first time. Perhaps you focused on initiatives your employees didn’t value, or your employees did value them, but the execution fell short in some way. With a few modifications, you may be able to produce better results the next time around. Persistence will pay off in the end.

Questions: Consider the above case scenario and prepare an organisational behaviour assignment answering the following questions:

1. In what ways Leaders can best understand and address, the critical gap — between leaders’ perceptions of what people care about and the actual realities of the culture ?
2. Critically advice Paul has discussed his commitment to improvement while engaging his audience?
3. How can you connect the dots between having high aspirations for improving culture and making lasting changes that lead to real results?
4. Discuss How Most organizations are missing a clear connection between culture, team building, and leadership development ?
5. Give reasons why do organizations fail to connect culture and strategy?

Answer

Introduction
It is discussed within this organisational behaviour assignment that it should be essential to comprehend others' behaviour and attitude as well as to making them understand everyone else's while working in a group. Organizational behavior may be concerned with the study, forecasting, and management of human behavior inside an organization, whether it occurs independently and collaboratively. The different perspectives of how organizational behaviour might be evaluated from the company's perspective are internal and external perspectives (Katzenbach, Steffen and Kronley, 2014).

Q.1 Understanding and addressing the critical gap in culture.
Whether individuals wish to develop an organizational culture that draws and keeps talents, one should first figure out where the organization is now and where company wants to go. To put it another way, one must first determine the distance between the present culture and the desired ideal culture, which is referred to as one's ideal culture gap. India's working population is comprised of individuals of several different ethnicities and religious convictions. As a consequence, there's been an increase in linguistic and social heterogeneity throughout all degrees of the industry, creating a plethora of new issues. Because communicating is regarded like the lifeblood of every business, it is becoming critical for workers to properly comprehend cultural differences throughout the employees. Disparities in language and social differences are viewed as an unnoticed cause of miscommunication amongst persons of different ethnicities within that organization. To assess such disparities, organizational leaders must first understand what employees want. The simplest way to accomplish this would be to run a poll of existing employees to identify what individual’s value most in terms of employment, benefits, and other considerations. It's also a good idea to survey applicants during the recruiting process to find out what they desire most from the organization. Consider bringing up the subject lightly, mostly during interviews, distributing an employment questionnaire, or obtaining data from a following analysis (Rongala, 2019).

Q.2 Critical Analysis of the commitment to cultural improvement by Paul.
For organizations operating on international terrain, possessing a diverse multicultural workforce could provide a competitive advantage. The special external advantages for these firms are a greater knowledge of domestic personnel, regional stakeholders and consumers, and even the existing cultural, legal, and values are considered. Possessing a deeper understanding of cultural differences, on this same issue it is only beneficial if it leads to improved interpersonal communication. In organizations that operate on distant place, maintaining a diversified staff has several internal benefits. The key benefits she cited broaden the scope of organizational reasoning by introducing fresh ideas, viewpoints, and judgments (Reynolds, 2019).

Having a multi-cultural workforce may have a variety of disadvantages for firms. Ethnic nationalism and broad generalization are responsible for many culturally particular disadvantages. By strengthening international knowledge and professionalism, the frequency of oversimplification and ethnic identity can be minimized. Intercultural communication refers to the ability to understand and accept persons from various cultures. Multinational organizations must focus on cultural sensitivity, cultural understanding, and behavior adjustment as the initial stage in continuously increasing international competency. It bears noting that intercultural communication and competencies are founded on intercultural communication teaching (Emma, 2019).

Q.3 Connecting links between high aspiration and cultural improvement.
Everyone who involves the collection of data from company culture and engagement surveys should be able to provide a report outlining the company's strengths and challenges. This data may then be utilized to provide a list of particular areas for improvement. The discoveries may seem overwhelming at first, and individuals may not be able to solve everything all at once. Leaders of an organization should prioritize the areas that will have the greatest, most immediate, and visible impact on organizational culture. This will contribute to the development of momentum and support for future projects. Topics that are constantly in the news, such as flexible employment and professional growth, are ideal candidates for preventive diagnosis. pulse width modulation questionnaires, personal interviews, and concept of perceived may be used to learn what workers feel regarding key recruitment and retention issues such as compensation, perks, and work habits. The optimal culture variance is the difference among whatever the staff member’s demands and unemployed people to do and what the firm provides. It's not just about yielding in with the requests of workers and applicants to narrow the gap. It has to be a major competitive advantage, which implies that particular cultural adjustments should enhance the experience, hiring, and engagement all at the same time (Pisano, 2019).

Q.4 Connectionless bonding between culture, team building, and leadership development.
Mind-set for strategic planning, and mentoring programs should all be linked or intertwined to establish a reason based bonding among them. Implementing workplace flexibility, for instance, would necessitate the cooperation of multiple stakeholders from various fields such as customer service, Technology, administration, and manufacturing. This may necessitate the modification or introduction of new administrative and operational infrastructure. Developing alternative work arrangements is a full-fledged initiative in itself, and so are many of other socio-cultural initiatives. A leader should establish and convey a progressive change timetable to all various stakeholders and others who will benefit from it from the start. Even if the cultural gap has not yet been overcome, one may still engage and excite their employees and job candidates by focusing if anything is to emerge. Every day by evaluating the much more important indicators to the baseline methods at various stages all throughout program, it will be possible to show how the performance improvements have benefited to organizational success. If the main indicators aren't positively affecting, a post-mortem investigation is required to determine why. Developing a culture is an iffy proposition, and matters don't always go as planned. Perhaps one is concentrated on certain projects, but the workers don't appreciate that method of thinking, or maybe our workers do, but the implementation falls short in some manner. With a few tweaks, one might be able to get greater outcomes the following time. Persistence will eventually pay off (Smith, 2020).

Q.5 Reasons behind failing, organizations to connect culture and strategy.
Organizations usually improve when a single CEO is motivated and devoted. However, new CEOs usually want to take a divergent path than their previous ones, which may result in an ineffectively tumultuous culture. Companies may avoid this simply by guaranteeing that the executive board — the "deciding game" on who will become CEO has made cultural adherence a plausible idea (Lyons, 2017). Employees must comprehend how they, their company, and their society will benefit from confronting revolutionary culture. Executives frequently speak of cultural transformation in broad terms that are rarely translated into specific goals. Many people fail to understand how a circumstance might lead to cultural change, and without them the whole system thrives.

Individuals in the working world begin to wake up praying that they haven't run out of food and that there won't be heavy traffic on the road during office hours, otherwise they would be late for work - again. Most people's primary reason for not focusing on enhancing their culture appears to be that they live in the Real World. The bulk of cultural reform attempts, on the other hand, are inspired by the Fantasy World. The real world is a confusing mess of ambiguity, complexity, and overload. Bonuses and promotions are a source of anxiety for many people. They're worried with staying under their budget, seeming intelligent in front of the boss, and avoiding traffic on their way home (Bajer, 2019).

Conclusion
Change of culture may prosper through long-term dedication, genuine attempt to comprehend whatever motivates employees, and rigorous preparation to connect policy objectives with strategies. Doing so needs more than just an only some email or a panel discussion once a year. Protracted advantages would accrue to leaders who constantly demonstrate the transformation they demand from their workers. Thus, researching organizational behavior aids in the recognition of human attitudes and behaviors’, which in turn sheds insight on how certain processes dramatically impact an organization's effectiveness.

Reference list
Bajer, A., 2019. The Real Reasons Why Most Culture Change Efforts Fail. [online] Agabajer. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Emma, L., 2019. Advantages and Disadvantages of Diversity in Workplace. [online] Chron.com. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Katzenbach, J., Steffen, I. and Kronley, C., 2014. Cultural Change That Sticks. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Lyons, R., 2017. Three Reasons Why Culture Efforts Fail. [online] organisational behaviour assignment Forbes. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Pisano, G., 2019. Innovation Isn’t All Fun and Games — Creativity Needs Discipline. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Reynolds, K., 2019. 13 benefits and challenges of cultural diversity in the workplace Hult Blog. [online] Hult Blog. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Rongala, A., 2019. 7 Ways to Bridge Language and Cultural Gap at Workplace. [online] Invensis Learning Blog. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].

Smith, C., 2020. The Pros and Cons of Organizational Culture Transformation. [online] Change! Change Management News & Tips. Available at: [Accessed 6 Dec. 2021].