Corporate culture - the heart of any company
Corporate culture determines how people in the organization see themselves, work together, act, and what solutions they recognize. For us at MenschWert, culture is the sum of all the small, unconscious decisions that everyone makes every day. Every company has its very own culture, which can be explicitly shaped and formed, just as a person’s personality can be specifically matured.
Questions we are asked are:
- We are too slow and too busy with ourselves; how do we become more agile?
- How do we organize feedback that moves us forward?
- Our employees should and want to take on more responsibility – but how?
- How can we promote collaboration in the organization for more synergies?
If an organization wants to position itself as crisis-proof and stable for the future, the way always leads through the corporate culture. Companies are faced with the task of creating new guardrails. These determine the success of leadership, recruiting, talent development, and interaction with customers and other stakeholders.
Modern corporate world does not necessarily mean new work, remote work and virtual teams
Often, a few tricks are all it takes to establish New Work approaches successfully and thus increase employee engagement and make the company attractive to internal and external talent.
Teams learn to cultivate the office as a collaboration space and reorganize online work. Social glue and looking beyond one’s role is not lost, whether in the office or hybrid and remote. This ensures that employees identify strongly with the company and enjoy being part of the team.
Modern corporate culture enables continuous learning
Learning goes beyond the mere accumulation of knowledge. Learning means combining knowledge and experience into insight, adapting to current challenges and constantly asking oneself new questions.
- How does our organization learn?
- How do we organize retrospectives or lessons learned?
- What opportunities do we provide to make learning possible?
- And how are insights documented and made accessible?
In modern corporate culture, the focus is on continuous learning. In doing so, you better say goodbye to best practice. There is no best practice for a constantly changing world with its individual challenges. A learning organization always ventures a bit into unknown territory – but even that can be learned and need not end in painful trial and error.
Each company is asked to define how it wants to learn and to what extent other perspectives are allowed. The fact is that organizations must learn to remain capable of functioning. This will only be possible if employees and managers also want to learn and understand how learning works beyond the mere transfer of knowledge.
Modern corporate culture is characterized by feedback
Feedback is an essential component of corporate culture. In a corporate culture focused on the future, feedback is seen as a means of learning from and with each other. It serves to exchange perspectives, to broaden each other’s horizons. This opens up great opportunities for personal development as well as for the development of the organization.
Feedback should not be understood exclusively as praise and criticism but rather as an invitation to dialogue about the equally critical different perspectives to achieve a common (overall) view.
A sincere and positive feedback culture encourages people to reflect on situations in an unbiased manner. It improves cooperation and strengthens the company.
A good feedback culture uses the criticism conversation, in which explicit requests for change and respect for the rules of the game are addressed with the appropriate consequence for misconduct. At the same time, it highlights opportunities that arise from considering the different points of view.
Modern corporate culture demonstrates responsibility
Stability and growth are only achievable in a corporate culture where management and employees take responsibility.
What does responsibility mean in your company, and how is it learned? We repeatedly hear that employees don’t take ownership, don’t care about much and don’t think far enough along. At the same time, there is a great yearning for more responsibility. It’s a classic dilemma and a question of definition: Is responsibility equated with mere power and dominance, or is it seen as freedom to think outside the box to achieve profitable results?
A modern corporate culture is characterized by genuine acceptance of responsibility.
- To what extent do managers demand and encourage ownership?
- Is responsibility actually taken on or just pushed from A to B?
- What responsibility is there beyond the desk?
- Are you already talking about responsibility or are accountabilities still being discussed?
Responsibility in companies is aimed at many areas. These include sustainability, social responsibility or corporate social responsibility, just like respect, good cooperation and compliance.
Modern corporate culture is adapted to the challenges of the company
The prerequisite for agility is a future-oriented, strategic perspective, a company vision that is convincing for everyone, and a clear strategy that makes sense to every employee. Organizations must learn to make far-reaching cross-functional decisions in a competence-based, swift and determined manner. The ability to adapt to react quickly to new insights and circumstances is a decisive competitive advantage. To ensure that flexibility does not become arbitrariness and chaos, transparency, ownership and reliable consequences are needed.
Agile transformation means that there is high strategic alignment at all levels, that it is clear how data is viewed and interpreted, and how adjustments are made in sync with other teams.
We accompany you on the way to a modern corporate culture
We are happy to work with you to develop a roadmap to initiate a cultural change in your company. Building blocks can include:
- Analysis of the corporate culture and the maturity level of the organization
- Analysis of existing competencies and personality structures
- Development of vision, goals and guidelines
- Development and implementation of a coherent and motivating communication concept
- Development of tangible, culture-creating measures
- Design and implementation of a suitable performance management system
- Training in communication, self-management, reflection and creativity techniques
- Management training for performance- and resource-oriented appraisal interviews
- Workshops to identify and dissolve unconscious belief patterns
