The Profit & Loss Account of Corporate Culture

- getting people central to Human Resources
 

I was at a think tank with a group of senior HR practitioners the other day about what they see as the really important issues within organisations – and it was an interesting glimpse into how the “people” side is commonly framed.

We were discussing what the organisation needs to provide and what people need to bring to the corporate party with them.

Four themes emerged in each sector as deemed far and away the most important. Within corporate obligation sat a safe and a healthy place to work, clear role specifications and behavioural boundaries, fair rewards and, fourthly, protection from excessive stress and bullying.

In the other section, each person should bring with them into the workplace honesty, punctuality, a commitment to work hard and a consideration of colleagues.

Our take on this, as corporate culture researchers and strategists, is that such an analysis is missing two key dimensions.

The first is that the workplace is still being envisaged as two armed and potentially hostile camps; the “organisation” and the “people”. Great corporate culture will never emerge, prosper and sustain as long as this divisive paradigm predominates.

Great corporate culture lives in relationships and this relational sense of the mutual involvement and commitment of all people and all resources is the magic that permeates organisations with outstanding cultures.

Our second objection to this HR framework is that whilst all the points are necessary, they are by themselves nowhere near sufficient – they are merely a minimal moral baseline, not a guiding aspiration to higher values.

Words like excellence, integrity, persistence, mutuality and support need to be face-up and bold on the table – and within reach of everyone. And they must become lived values, unlike the vapid vision statements in business plans and annual statements, as contrasted with the stories that people in huddled clusters around the water cooler tell each other of the real, lived culture.

At The Cultureship Practice we are forever stressing how what are sometimes dismissed as “soft” skills are in fact matters fundamental to organisations' success.

The topline of the corporate culture profit & loss account is that entitlement must be balanced with responsibility

The bottomline is that superior performance can only sustain hand-in-glove with higher satisfaction

There's still that need to break free from thinking almost exclusively in terms of rules & regulations and strategy & process. We need to be totally unembarrassed at letting the people into Human Resources.

On a simple level, I could easily be diverting commentary like this off into specialist HR sites - but that's a major part of the problem.....there is a training sector and a training sector largely divorced from the daily experiences of growing businesses and sustaining organisations.

Great corporate culture happens in relationships, now, in the next moment and in the moment following. It happens with you, me, and everyone else, stepping up the plate and saying, "No, we'll do this right, we'll lead it with higher values this time - and we'll get together with others and make it happen."