Human Resources - Bridging the Culture Gap Part 1

This is the first in a two-part series of articles about bridging the culture gap and improving workplace culture and employee engagement. 

The Wave of Envisioned Culture

Born in the distant deep waters of the C-Suite, it swells into the tides of leadership norms, crests into the behaviors of the front line, and crashes into the jagged coastline of customer cultural reality.

The "Jagged Coastline" - a place of constant friction and individuality, where waves of vision crash and recede. What impressions do they leave? Are there smoother sections of the coast where cultural vision can create ripples in the sand, leaving a lasting impact on the environment?

The "Front Line": How do frontline employees navigate this jagged coastline? Are they equipped to translate the vision into reality? After facing the challenges and leaving a part of themselves in the process, do they carry the message back to the C-Suite?

The Deep Waters: Can the C-Suite get a better view of the coastline to understand the challenges? Can we build better communication channels to bridge the gap?

A Vision Flawed? Is the problem simply a communication gap, or is the cultural vision itself flawed and unrealistic?

Obstacles Unseen: Are there external factors, unintended consequences, or industry trends that, regardless of good intentions, impede the implementation of cultural vision?

How do you measure and identify what is most important to your team so they may deliver the Cr as close to the Cv? I often state, "What you measure, you can incentivize; and what you incent and focus on, you may improve."

Let's do this!

Never has it been a more important lesson than now that culture will eat strategy for breakfast and leave absolute carnage in its wake.

WATCH: ExperienceX - Uniting CX & EX for Unparalleled Results

Ensure Tech Talent Reflects the Workplace Culture

As AI continues to standardize systems, processes, and products across brands, organizational culture will increasingly serve as the key differentiator, forming the foundation of a unique value proposition for both employees and customers. As AI integrates into organizations to augment, collaborate with, or in cases replace human talent, the interaction between human and tech talent becomes a key differentiator. Ensuring that tech talent reflects and reinforces the organization's cultural values is crucial.

There is often a noticeable gap between the cultural vision (Big C) articulated by senior leadership and the everyday cultural realities (little c) experienced by frontline employees. This article explores measuring this gap and making effective choices to reduce it. Quantifying culture may be elusive for many organizations, but it doesn’t have to be.

The distance between the espoused Culture vision (Cv) envisioned by senior leadership, and the enacted Culture reality (Cr) experienced by frontline employees and customers is represented as Culture delta (CΔ), impacting employee engagement, innovation, and turnover, according to Forrester. Since culture is generally reflected in the brand image, a gap between the branded culture and the customer's personal experience can lead to customer churn, according to Gartner.

HR Equations

Simply put,

Where:

Cv = Culture vision

Cr = Culture reality

CΔ = Culture gap

Also, we can state:*

C Δ  ∝             Turnover/Engagement, Innovation

Turnover is directly proportional to Culture Gap, Engagement and innovation are inversely proportional to Culture Gap

*So long as organizational strategy is consistent with market conditions

The larger the gap (CΔ), the higher the turnover and the lower the engagement and innovation. Therefore, reducing CΔ is imperative for an organization’s survival and success.

Typically, the Cv is formed at the highest levels of the organization with input from various stakeholders. Cr is measured by many methods and modalities, through various internal tools or vendors, and at varied times. After Cv is created and “cascaded”, middle management is often left to handle the implementation of Cv, while senior leadership commissions the measurement of Cr. Middle management is then held accountable for the gaps (CΔ), sometimes with little or no support.

Explicitly stating the culture vision and proactively measuring and addressing the culture gap are crucial first steps. Providing middle management with the resources to implement Cv, access data indicating Cr, and act upon CΔ is key to fostering a more engaged, innovative, and customer-centric work environment. Bridging the gap ultimately leads to improved performance and offers a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining employees and customers.

Let us explore how organizations can meaningfully establish the Cv, measure the Cr, and identify the CΔ. More importantly, let us understand how we, as leaders, can proactively enable the middle managers who bear the responsibility of bridging the gap.

WATCH: OPEX Digital Transformation in HR

Establishing the Culture vision (Cv)

Value Proposition: Organizations perform competitive analysis and create a culture strategy to establish a unique value proposition for your brand. For example, in healthcare, psychological safety is traditionally a low-scoring domain. An organization could differentiate itself in recruitment by having team members praise its psychological safety, embodying a blue ocean mindset—excelling in an area where the industry typically performs poorly. See Harvard Business Review.

Playing to Strengths: Understanding which values are key strengths within the organization by listening to various stakeholders generates a weighted appreciation of the current state.

Aligning Voices to Mission: Keeping the organization's purpose at the center and carving out a niche that differentiates the organization while meeting community and team needs are essential steps in creating the culture vision.

Formation and Communication: While the formation of the Cv is important, it is imperative that the entire organization is aware of and engaged in the initiative. Once the Cv is created, it needs to be communicated in various forums, embedded into the brand image of the organization, and reflected in the journey of each team member and customer. The Cv should not just be a philosophical statement but should be reflected in values and behaviors. It is also important to consider the literacy level of all stakeholders so that everyone understands what the organization stands for and, equally, what it does not.

Think about accountability for all (team members and customers) who exhibit behaviors diametrically opposed to the espoused cultural values, and the inverted accountability of senior leaders versus frontline team members, should this occur.

Embed the Cv into Processes, Technology and Space (Physical and Virtual): From brand image to recruitment and onboarding practices, advertisements and bot interactions to billing and post-experience surveys, the Cv must be embedded and “felt” in each experience.

Measuring the experienced Cultural realities (Cr)

Stakeholders Evaluating Cr: The assessment of cultural realities involves various stakeholders evaluating their experiences in terms of people, process, technology, and place (both physical and virtual). There are several tools available to measure Cr, from various vendors. The right tool must be selected for the right stakeholder. These stakeholders include:

• Employees: Current and former (alumni)
• Ecosystem Perception: Customers, suppliers, community leaders, media (including social media), and associations.
• Customers: Current and former.

Continuous Listening Process: Assessing Cr is a continuous listening process, ideally conducted at least annually, using both push and pull surveys or other feedback mechanisms including responsibly and ethically scraping social media. Offering different listening modalities and opportunities of convenience for feedback providers is key. These methods include, but are not limited to, comments, complaints, and external reviews (for example, Glassdoor, Google).

Improving Response Rates: Ensuring good response rates involves considering literacy levels, timing, and minimizing friction. An organization’s history of closing the loop on findings and connecting actions to received feedback are crucial cultural factors that impact long-term response rates. Speed of response to feedback affects both short-term and long-term response rates and builds trust.

Modalities of Cr Measurement Include

To ensure the foundation of Cr measurement is robust and reliable, it's essential to have the right questions informed by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and grounded in psychological mindsets. This approach helps avoid the pitfall of building the "house" on sand.

Identifying The Gap (CΔ)

Scoring the Cv values of the organization at 100, use the identified modalities to have stakeholders evaluate the Cr in terms of people's behaviors and interactions with the organization’s processes, technology, and space (both physical and virtual). This will highlight specific locations, teams, or verticals with CΔ, and identify specific values and opportunities for improvement in behavior, process, technology, or space.

Root Cause Analyses (RCA)

Not so fast! Most organizations or leaders are ready to act upon and "fix" findings the minute they have survey results. However, there are two problems with the data that need to be addressed first:

The data generated is “only” data. It is not contextualized.

"Data without context is like a body without a soul."
How do we get the context?

• Focus Groups: Facilitate open discussions with diverse employee groups, sharing qualitative data to understand their lived experiences and identify areas of misalignment.
• Ethnography: Conduct observations of workplace interactions and team dynamics to gain a deeper understanding of the enacted culture.
• Leader of Leader and HR Business Partner: Provide context around factors that may influence the data's context.
• AI (Small or Large Language Models): Evaluate and summarize large volumes of comments or qualitative data to provide rich content and context. This data can be collected by the organization, scraped from public sites, or purchased.

The data is not “normalized.”

If data is obtained from a teammate survey, responses may come from a demographic mix of teammates in ratios of gender, race, or other factors that are not representative of the ratios of those factors in the organization’s workforce. This data can be normalized using AI tools and statistical methods.

Once the data is contextualized and normalized, we need to enable leaders to act upon it with appropriate resources. This should be based on the value, the amount of CΔ, the criticality of the team in the value chain, the hierarchy of the team/leader in the organization, and the number of teammates and/or customers impacted by the CΔ.

The Root Cause Analysis (RCA) should include a cross-section of stakeholders, HR, the leader of the leader involved, and appropriate subject matter experts. Context is important, and engagement with and deference to expertise is imperative. Therefore, solutioning may need to involve internal or external SMEs.

Some typical CΔ root causes include:

Leadership Misalignment: Analyze if leadership actions contradict stated values, leading to employe’s confusion and/or burnout, leading to cynicism. This is often seen in individuals who are favorites of the CEO or a senior leader, or those who are deemed to bring in exclusive expertise or revenue, creating a cascade of issues that undermine the organization’s culture.

Resource Constraints: Assess if insufficient resources (for example, budget, training) hinder the implementation of the desired culture.

Communication Breakdown: Evaluate the effectiveness of communication channels in transmitting the culture vision to all levels.

Work Design and Technology Issues: Examine if work processes or structures inadvertently promote behaviors that deviate from desired values.

Misalignment of Purpose: If the purpose of the organization and the cultural values espoused by the brand image differ from those within the organization or that of the team or individual, this can cause major friction and lead to CΔ.

Crucial Considerations for Bridging the Gap 

Leadership Development: Invest in programs that equip leaders to authentically embody and champion the espoused culture.

Manager Coaching: Ability to have psychologically safe conversations up and down to resource teams.

Performance Management Alignment: Ensure performance metrics and reward systems incentivize behaviors that reflect desired cultural values.

Open Communication: Create regular communication channels where employees feel comfortable voicing concerns and offering suggestions.

Culture-Building Activities: Organize events and initiatives that promote collaboration, learning, and the enactment of desired values.

Accountability: Ensure leadership accountability so that actions by leaders and teams align with the organization's values, regardless of the value these individuals may bring or the favor they may have with the CEO or other leaders.

Addressing cultural gaps within an organization requires a structured and comprehensive approach. By employing various modalities of cultural measurement, contextualizing and normalizing data, and conducting thorough root cause analyses, organizations can gain valuable insights into the misalignments between their espoused values and actual behaviors. With targeted strategies such as leadership development, performance management alignment, and fostering open communication, organizations can bridge these gaps effectively. Ensuring that leaders and teams are accountable and that resources are allocated appropriately will not only enhance organizational culture but also drive overall performance and employee satisfaction. By committing to these practices, organizations can create a more cohesive, values-driven work environment that supports both individual and collective success.

Editorial contributors are Jessica Patton, Angelina Gennis, and Aniket Navalkar

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