CREATING CULTURE IN A HYBRID WORK WORLD

“What’s the backbone of a successful organization – It’s the organization’s culture.”

Despite COVID-19 persisting, Organization Culture has continued evolving. Do you know what Organization Culture means? It is not just how an organization looks or feels, but also those norms and non-showcased and non-written rules of behavior that persists in the organization and helps shape how employees do their work and interact with one another. If an organization wants its employees to have the best experience, then its culture should be the best.

As an organization tries to manage the different ways in which its employees are working, the culture that the organization should have will be on the top of things that HR Managers have to focus on. Not just the HR Manager, but even other executive leaders. The worry is that their organization culture might suffer because of the virtual or hybrid working environment they have right now and they are unsure on how to maintain the same culture now, as they would if they were all working from one space, and that a weaker culture can lead to issues in performance of employees and a decrease in the level of engagement.

Even before the pandemic, there was always a slight about how much the desired culture in the organization was being conveyed to employees and in return, employees’ behaving in the way the organization culture has asked for.  Since the work environment has shifted to a virtual or hybrid work world, it does not necessarily mean that it has hampered organization culture and its impact on employee job performance. Depending on how important organizations give to its culture, its impact would have been felt differently. An organization’s culture should be strong enough to retain top employees and attract new talent, drive the performance of employees and the organization, and meet business objectives and strategies. It has to be encouraged such that employees are satisfied with the organization, while keeping in mind how the new working environment (virtual and home) influences the behavior of employees.

The leaders of organizations need to relook at and rework how they look at Organization Culture and the importance they are placing on it so that it reflects their views on what it now going to be considered as the new normal. They can do this by asking themselves a few questions like what is their business strategy now, how are they planning on driving success, etc. The trick for an organization to have a successful culture is to make sure that employees connect with it, irrespective of where they are working from. A physical place of work should not define how connected an organization’s employees are; rather it should be the culture that brings the employees together – even if they work from different cities, nations, or continents. Any kind of action that we take to activate an organization’s culture or promote it has to be deliberate. It will not be enough if for e.g., an organization just puts up the values it has on their main wall. They will have to come up with ways to translate their values into actions that employees perform every day.

Organizations that get this right will embed culture into everything that they do, so that employees understand, believe and live the culture of the organization.

Prof.Radha Pavitra
Assistant Professor
DSCE-MBA

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