Organizational Culture

Organizational culture: a definition

Organizational culture (الثقافة المؤسسية) is the set of values, assumptions and patterns of behaviour that govern how work is actually done inside an organisation, as opposed to how the organisation says that work is done.

The definition sets two things side by side. On one side is the way work is carried out in practice, day after day, by the people who do it. On the other is the account the organisation gives of how it works. Organizational culture is the first of these. It is made up of the values, the assumptions and the patterns of behaviour that are at work in practice, and it is identified by what happens inside the organisation, not by what the organisation states about itself.

So the culture of an organisation is not settled by the words it uses to describe itself. It is settled by the conduct that those values, assumptions and patterns of behaviour produce when the work is being done.

Where organizational culture shows

Organizational culture does not show on the plaque hanging on the wall, where the values are written up. It shows in the decisions taken every day. Four of those decisions are signals of the culture that is actually in force.

• Who is actually promoted. It is an honest signal of the values that are rewarded. Whatever values the organisation names, the people it chooses to move up show which values it rewards in practice.
• What happens when a mistake is made. It turns on one question: does the organisation look for the cause of the mistake, or for the person responsible for it? Looking for the cause asks what went wrong. Looking for the person responsible asks who is to blame. The answer it gives each time a mistake occurs is part of its culture.
• Who speaks in meetings, and who is interrupted. It shows whose voice is heard in the organisation’s meetings and whose is cut short, as that happens in the room and not as any document describes it.
• What is overlooked. It covers the behaviour that the organisation lets pass without a response. When a behaviour is overlooked again and again, that repeated tolerance makes the behaviour part of the culture, whatever the policies say.

Declared organizational culture and actual organizational culture

Every organisation has two cultures: the one it declares, and the one that happens. The two exist side by side, in the same organisation and at the same time. The declared culture is what the organisation says about itself, in its statements and in the values it announces. The actual culture is what takes place inside it.

The gap between the two is not neutral. When what an organisation declares and what happens inside it differ, the difference is not a harmless distance between two descriptions: it costs the organisation credibility.

Take an organisation that declares «transparency» as one of its values and then keeps quiet about a decision that affects its employees. It does not go back to zero, as if the declaration had never been made. It goes below zero. Having announced the value and then acted against it, the organisation stands lower than it would have stood had it announced nothing at all.

For this reason, changing organizational culture does not begin with announcing new values. A new set of values announced while the same conduct continues adds one more declaration to the declared culture and leaves the actual culture where it was. Changing the culture begins with changing what is rewarded and what people are held to account for.

How organizational culture passes to a new employee

A new employee learns the culture in their first weeks in the organisation, and they do not learn it from documents. They learn it by watching what goes on around them. Among the things they notice are these:

• when people actually arrive at work, as distinct from when they are supposed to;
• how emails are answered outside working hours;
• whether a person who is speaking gets interrupted;
• what happened to a colleague who made a mistake.

Then the new employee aligns their behaviour with what they have seen, not with what was read out to them about how the organisation works. What they were told about the organisation and what they watched it do can differ, and when they do, it is what they watched that shapes how the new employee behaves.

That is why employee onboarding is a moment at which organizational culture is passed on, and it is a moment that is wasted when onboarding is cut down to the signing of papers. The first weeks are when the new employee is learning the culture in any case. If those weeks are spent on signatures alone, the employee still learns the culture during them, but from whatever they happen to see, rather than from an onboarding that sets out to pass it on.

How organizational culture differs from the work environment

The work environment is the set of surrounding conditions in which the work is done: the place, the tools, the working hours and the benefits. Organizational culture is the set of unwritten rules that govern behaviour within those conditions. Because they are unwritten, these rules are not set out in a policy or a document. They are seen in how people behave.

The two are related, but they are not the same thing. The conditions are where the work is done, what it is done with, when it is done and what it brings the employee. The culture is the set of rules by which people behave once they are inside those conditions.

The difference also shows in how each one changes. The work environment can be improved by a decision and a budget: a better place, better tools, different hours or new benefits can be decided on and paid for. Organizational culture is different. A decision and a budget do not change it. It changes only when the behaviour of those who hold the authority to decide changes.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.