Chief HR Officer, Keck Medicine of USC. Adjunct Professor, USC Marshall School of Business. Keep up with me on my website.
What is personality? It’s a collective set of an individual’s thoughts, actions and emotions based on a wide range of experiences and perspectives they’ve absorbed, processed and expressed. On an organizational level, personality is culture. This is because companies are living systems made and operated by humans, and the interdependence of these personalities dictates the collective workforce mindset.
Over the past few years, major shifts have emerged that unfortunately introduced many contradictory beliefs and objectives into organizational cultures. Some key contradictions include the pursuit to achieve higher collaboration while working in isolation, redefining hi-tech as a solution to hi-touch and maintaining work-life balance, though remote work inherently breaks down these boundaries.
At their core, measures to address this mutated organizational culture DNA are meant to enhance employee motivation, productivity and engagement. However, engagement has been on a steady decline, reaching all-time lows consecutively in the last two years. So how can we assess whether the elements of our post-pandemic culture are strategically aligned to thrive?
Our Post-Pandemic Collective Mindset
For years, agility has been at the forefront of management circles, and innovative organizations have transformed their business models to create more flexible, inclusive learning cultures. Luckily, this prepared many of those same organizations to survive the pandemic era by responding quickly to relentless demands and needs.
However, this sustained shift toward continuous reactivity has led to strategic decision-making that actually undermines the foundation of shared organizational beliefs and customs, interpersonal relationships and trust. We now stand in a volatile post-pandemic world where the impact on these fundamental elements of culture is causing issues across organizations.
Of course, it’s difficult to challenge a company’s collective mindset because it’s not built on a single personality. Each employee brings their unique life experience, knowledge, needs, insecurities and strengths and weaknesses. This means affecting the pulse and trajectory of the collective culture isn’t something that happens overnight. But what is certain is that it’s incumbent upon each organization to understand what their ideal culture is, where it currently stands and whether it’s aligned with its strategic objectives.
Resulting Challenges To Culture-Strategy Alignment
While engagement has declined, expectations for both individuals and organizations have risen. Employees are demanding more flexible resources to address their personal needs, while businesses are implementing more standardized technical solutions to increase productivity and connectivity. These pressures, which can work in opposition to each other, affect both the bottom line and overall employee well-being.
Major aspects of this disconnect are leadership’s inability to communicate values and their relationship to strategy and people managers being out of touch with their teams’ current work-life challenges. There is perhaps a larger change at hand, however. The pandemic was a severe event that shifted business culture and society at large in an instant. Like all significant world events, Covid-19 created major shifts in business practices, standards of living and employee expectations. Now, engagement data suggests we’re witnessing another monumental change in how work gets done and the expectations of those who do the work.
Culture is the force that attracts and maintains talent, so its association with engagement is both direct and critical. If today’s engagement is at an all-time low, it’s clear that existing cultural climates must change if organizations want to achieve sustainable strategic alignment. While technology can help find some solutions to the disconnect between culture, strategy and productivity, it’s not the only answer. It ultimately comes down to people and the ability to rebuild shared beliefs and customs, trust and drive toward overall objectives.
Resetting Your Collective Mindset
Amid urgent, multifaceted boardroom conversations to revisit and change culture, especially after such massive shifts, two key focal points are emerging to reestablish an organization’s collective mindset: knowing yourself and knowing your customers. Retrospection, a key (yet often lost) element of agile cultures, should serve as the first step in assessing the cultural alterations that occurred within your organization in the recent cycle. “Who are we?” and “How have we changed?” and “What gives us the edge?” are essential questions to redefining your cultural identity (self) and core purpose (for your customers).
Here’s what you can learn from your retrospection.
• Understanding Your Identity: Get to the heart of what truly happened to your workplace culture and shared mindset over the last three years. Was it poor attempts at adaptation, imitation, preservation or evolution? When you can define it and own it, then you can assess how best to (re)build.
• Knowing The Importance Of Avoiding “Fads”: Reactive, impulsive actions that may serve well for other organizations may not fit your culture. Trying to follow them could eventually result in additional contradictions that adversely impact your collective mindset. Instead, find how you can differentiate. By understanding your core identity and your collective ability to meet your customers’ needs, you’ll discover your own unique way.
• Seizing This Transformative Opportunity: It’s time to translate new expectations from both employees and customers into strategies and practices that reduce cultural contradictions and reset the collective mindset.
More valuable than ever is embracing the human factor in your organization’s success of an organization. Making herculean efforts to recraft business strategies to gain a competitive edge can bring the best results. But only if the reinvigorated voice of your collective mindset is listened to, renegotiated where needed and fueled with balance between the glaring contradictions of today’s workplace.
At the very least, do not let culture eat strategy again!
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