Report Summary
Report: ORCHESTRATING CULTURAL CONVERSATIONS Examining and understanding the link between organizational culture and the employee experience
Date: April 2019
Report Details: 17 Pages, v1.0
Author: John Sumser and Cecile Alper-Leroux
Price: Free when you subscribe to The HRExaminer Weekly Edition Newsletter. There’s no purchase required and you can unsubscribe at any time. John Sumser and Cecile Alper-Leroux
Summary: Much is made of organizational culture and its relationship to the employee’s experience. Little is understood. Even less is predictable. Cecile Alper-Leroux from Ultimate Software and veteran industry analyst John Sumser provide you with a pragmatic definition and framework for exploring culture, with an eye to gaining deeper insight into the dynamic inputs and outputs that inform every organization’s culture.
Report Summary
ORCHESTRATING CULTURAL CONVERSATIONS Examining and understanding the link between organizational culture and the employee experience..
Much is made of organizational culture and its relationship to the employee’s experience. Little is understood. Even less is predictable.
In the mid 1980s, MIT psychology professor Edgar Schein said, “culture determines and limits strategy.” (“Culture & Leadership,”1985). Refined over the years to “Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch,” the idea continues to drive articles, graduation speeches, and consulting fees. We all largely agree that culture is a primary driver of business results and is critical to how an employee experiences work.
Yet, we know little about the inner workings of culture and less about how to effectively modify and improve it. There is no agreement on what it is, how it works or how to modify it. Somehow, we live in cultures and micro-cultures, experience organizational cultures at work, but have trouble defining them, let alone “transforming” a culture.
In reality, what we can best hope for is nudging a culture along in a few critical areas based on diagnosing significant disconnects between what a culture is said to be and embody and what people experience of the culture.
Talk about an audacious place to start a conversation.
We’ve created a simple map of the territory and hope you’ll find it useful.
We hope that this paper becomes the foundation of a dialogue, both within and outside your organization. The intent of the project is to provide you with a pragmatic definition and framework for exploring culture, with an eye to gaining deeper insight into the dynamic inputs and outputs that inform every organization’s culture.
