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Organisational Culture
“Organisational culture, or corporate culture, comprises the attidues, experiences, beliefs and values of an organisation. It has been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organisation and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organisation. Organisational values are beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organisation should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organisational members should use to achieve these goals. From organisational values develop organisational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organisational members towards one another” ( Wikipedia definition for Organisational Culture )
Organisational culture can differ from country to country, or between different industries. It is important for leaders in these organisations to create and develop the right culture for their employees to work within. HR Directors must understand the dynamics of the organisations culture in order to implement cultural change programs that are aligned to the overall strategic goals of the organisation itself.
This is very important when it comes to collaboration and communication in the enterprise. There are many processes, projects and workflows within the daily operations of large organisations which require employees to collaborate with each-other. This presents challenges to the leaders in the organisation in terms of providing the employees with the correct tool-set to achieve these tasks.
The combination of email and the MS Office suite brought with it many advantages. Asynchronous communication and delivery of information in the form of documents (Word Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations, and Project Plans) helped to reduce the amount of work involved in getting tasks as part of a project completed.
Unfortunately, the mis-use/over reliance on email within organisations is actually hampering the efforts of employees to get their jobs done. Tasks such as document review and sign-off can sometimes run as follows:
- An individual creates a document, e.g. Functional Specification, for a project.
- They email it as an attachment to the relevant stakeholders, requesting that they review the documents and reply with any comments by a certain date.
- The stakeholders receive the mail (one of many they may receive that day) and decide to review it later, but some may forget to do so.
- Over the following days, the document owner receives a few replies with comments or requests for updates. This can be difficult to follow as each comment is in a separate mail. Some stakeholders have not responded.
- The author once again, updates the document, with all suggested changes and sends it out once more for final review and sign-off.
- Once again, some reply with their sign-offs (each a separate mail which often then have to be saved to disk for regulatory purposes) and still some do not respond.
- In order to progress the project to the next phase, the document owner (with the help of the project manager) now must start “Sign-Off Chase” those stakeholders who have not yet responded.
- In the end, the document author has all their sign-offs, but it has taken much longer than the original time-scale they had planned
If the culture in the organisation is such that their employees do not respond to requests such as document review or sign-off in a reasonable manner, then there will be un-necessary delays encountered by the project managers or document authors in getting tasks completed and progressed to the next phases every time they work on a project.
As business environments grow more competitive and advances in technologies such as web2.0 move us towards real-time collaboration & communications, the term “speed to market” is driving IT leaders to deliver more efficient tools to the workforce.
Latest page update: made by mooneycol
, Nov 22 2007, 11:39 AM EST
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Edited by mooneycol
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Keyword tags:
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