Business Culture
A business culture starts with the genesis of the business. Business leaders may carefully define, sow and landscape the culture. Employees may cause it to grow rampant and randomly, fertilized by the attitudes and behaviors of the more prominent members.
The culture exists in both formal and informal forms. Formal culture is composed, published, and distributed, usually in such documents of Policy and Procedures, Employee Orientation Guide, Annual Reports, and Communications to Community and Clients. Informal culture is recognized, respected, and followed without ever being printed and rarely being spoken.
Informal culture typically exerts greater influence on factors including, but not limited to, employee motivation and satisfaction, community respect, customer satisfaction and loyalty, candidate recruitment and employee retention, management success, financial success (revenue, expense, profitability)
Values and Value
Culture provides fundamental values from which the business operates. These values—behavioral, operational, interpersonal, and ethical—determine the value the business generates (financial, community, political, commercial, spiritual, etc.)
For example, a hospital may epitomize the values of appreciating the worth of the individual and committing to the continuous well-being of its community. By doing so effectively and throughout its entire employee population, that hospital experiences valuable loyalty and respect among its employees, its patients and their families, and the members of its community.
Similarly, a hospital may operate with attention to the procedures and processes that keep it running but without attention to the culture (and values) from which it makes its decisions and choices. That hospital is more likely to experience indifference (at best) from the several customer bases it seeks to satisfy: patients, physicians, employees, shareholders.
Culture Impact: Typical
Many organizations (hospitals included) ignore their culture. Consequently, it goes unrecognized until a problem arises. It is sensible to pay attention to the needs of the business, yet it is strategically significant to pay attention to the business culture.
Consider how rarely organizations hold conversations among all levels of employees concerning what the business stands for; what values are most critical to fulfilling the business purpose, vision, and mission; what values at the individual level contribute substance to the business values; what daily behaviors exemplify those values.
Such rare attention (or inattention) limits successes the organization can achieve. Such cultural indifference means putting out more fires, solving more problems, dealing with greater dissatisfactions.
Culture Impact: Potential
An organization that keeps its culture—the purpose, the values, the behaviors—clearly in its view gives itself more chances for greater successes. Knowing the culture at the three levels allows all employees to operate with both a macro- and micro-view of living the culture and therefore satisfying the culture’s intentions.
The three levels are
- What does the culture contribute to the business’s overall purpose? How?
- What values support that culture and are expected by that culture?
- What behaviors manifest and implement those values?
A business can experience almost unlimited potential success by attending culture conscientiously.
Management & Culture
A hospital can expect employees to engage fully in their work.
Managers can tell employees they are expected to engage fully in their work.
Employees can hear and comprehend the instruction to engage fully in their work.
The hospital may still garner typical returns on an employee engagement survey (+/- 30% of employees fully engaged; +/- 70% of employees only neutrally engaged and/or actively disengaged).
The significance is that Employee Engagement leads to Performance Improvement and so Desired Results.
The fact, however, is that employees must engage themselves. Engagement is not and cannot be third-party. For the employee to engage s/he must know specifically what engagement is expected and s/he must have the opportunity and the resources allowing engagement.
The hospital organization that successfully defines and continuously refines its culture (top down) increases its chances of engaged employees.
The hospital organization that engages its management team in the concepts and the skills of managing for engagement by the employees (not merely for completion of desired tasks) increases those chances further.
The hospital organization that focuses on strategic plans including communication, opportunities, resources, and encouragements for employee engagement (by leadership and management) increases the chances the furthest yet.
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