Know how your organisational culture affects productivity

Every organisation has its own culture. And this culture is very well reflected in the way its people work and interact with each other within the organisation as well as outside the organisation. Some Organisational culture workshops aim at understanding the pulse of the current culture of the organisation and looking at what can be done to enhance the same. Others, on the other hand, may be simply a sharing of the culture the top management wants its people to follow.

An organisation’s culture is mainly driven by its top management. It’s basically a top-down approach. The way the top management of the organisation operates and treats its people, gets pretty much replicated by the rest of the organisation. Hence, the top management forms a major stakeholder in every organisational culture workshop.

The culture of an organisation is very important. It is what gives rise to a particular environment in the organisation, which in turn directly affects their productivity.

Culture is based on the vision, mission and values that the organisation lives by. These truly drive the organisation and run like blood through its veins. They tell people how the organisation wants them to behave and in what direction they need to head to be successful. It therefore fosters the communication within the organisation and also the way people are treated. And we all know how engagement and productivity changes when we feel valued in our organisations!

Hence, an organisation’s culture is not something that can be taken lightly. And if it’s not something you have been giving too much importance to, it’s time to think again. First find out what the current organisational culture is. You can do it through a survey that all your employees fill or through an organisational culture workshop which has activities that help you sense the same. Then bring your top management team together and ask them to brainstorm and come to a conclusion as to what they would want it to be.  Now you can run organisation wide organisational culture workshops which actually tell employees how the culture needs to be. To make it easy for them this can be shown in the form of observable behaviours that they can display. And can be done very effectively through various games and activities which simulate the work environment and tell people how they need to behave in various situations.  Thus organisational culture workshops can set the context very well and aid the top management in building a culture where their people are prospering and taking the organisation to a new level.

Organisational culture workshops are not as common as other workshops like Communication Skills, Managerial Skills, Personality Development, etc. However, they are crucial. They require the leaders of the organisation to have very high awareness levels and an acceptance that the current culture may not be the best and may need a change. After all, only when the leaders are open to change, can change be driven through the rest of the organisation. And it’s the leaders who need to walk that change. And organisational culture workshops can aid largely in that.