Culture is created by our behaviors

It’s called culture, and that word might feel a little distant and unmanageable if you’re not used to using it in your organization. Actually, it’s not that complicated and it’s actually workable. Will try to explain step by step here on our blog. Both in Swedish and English.

It is OK to ask questions and I will answer them here in the next blog post and on LinkedIn. And if I’m moving too slowly, we’ll be happy to have a meeting so you can get answers sooner. It is the whole idea of ​​this page and LinkedIn that we can spread what we have learned and then also help you, with these insights. Once you meet, you start learning together and then we move forward together towards a more and more functioning organization.

Back to the culture. It is an overall concept and often you do not have the right data to be able to handle it. Data helps to understand what is going on and the statistics show that our management teams, at our companies and organizations, unfortunately do not know more than an average of 9.7% of what is going on in the organization. Of course, it is very low in larger companies and in smaller companies where you have a sporting chance, you can socialize closer and thus understand more. Regardless, much of the culture goes on the way icebergs work. You see a bit of the top but not all.

Engagement is part of the data needed and unfortunately most of our HR departments have a tendency to stick to what is customary. What we at Force Agile have learned is that the world is complex and you have to learn what it means, and then also understand how you need to handle it. This is what our whole idea is all about! That we embrace that reality and adapt to it so our organizations have a chance to work, rather than just continuing to use what worked before. This is the reason why we must and need to change.

Engagement is only part of the data we need to understand our own organization. The data we see is also depressing when it specifically concerns the commitment in our organizations:

89% of employees are disengaged

This can be compared to if your company had been a ship with 100 rowers.

75 does not row

14 rowing in the wrong direction

11 row right.

As a captain it would have been completely unacceptable, but it is actually the case in most organizations in the statistics that we see from the year 2022.

Also note the error source that I see. When measuring engagement, most systems see both the 11 who are rowing in the right direction and the 14 who are rowing completely wrong as engaged. Those who are very committed but in the wrong direction, need help and they are often the ones who bear the biggest part of the reasons why the 75 non-committed find a reason not to dare to be more than non-committed.

Psychological security to dare to say what you think is part of what we need to bring to our organizations.

Psychological security is a must for an organization to be able to collaborate effectively.

Psychological security is required for us to be more Innovative.

Psychological security is an important part of the culture we need to create.

Much of what we need to do is change behaviors, but we need a baseline to start from before we even begin. We need to measure, get data and then follow up so we can see we are doing the right things, otherwise we might be doing the wrong things and that is not leading us in the right direction.

I am very sure that we need to measure the culture in step 1, otherwise we don’t even know what we have in terms of culture.

There we need more data sources, for example case management with, for example, incident reporting.

More data is that in an organization with psychological safety, the reporting works, while in an organization where you don’t have this, there will be fewer incident reports and then they can go really bad, like for example Nokia.

Yes, it can get that bad!

/ Jari

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