A lot has been written about corporate organisational culture. Regulatory authorities are insisting banks have a risk culture (our politicians say they need a customer service culture), workplace health and safety authorities urge organisations in high-risk industries to have a safety culture, and everyone is talking about having an innovation culture.

So, what culture does an organisation need to manage risk, operate safely, be customer-centric and innovative? Do companies need to choose one culture to address one set of circumstances, only to change the culture as the needs of the day require it? Of course not.

Goal setting

Organisations are great at setting goals. These goals are usually outcomes (or ends). Whether it's a bank striving for excellence in financial management, a mining company committed to highest safety standards, an organisation seeking to manage digital disruption in its marketplace, or a business striving to achieve excellence in customer service and product quality, organisations are great at setting goals.

An organisation does not have a risk culture, or a safety culture or for that matter a customer service culture. It strives to have a culture that enables goal achievement. That goal might be risk management, safety, customer service or whatever. The key difference is subtle but important – the organisation does not set goals around having a risk/safety/customer service culture – it sets goals around achieving what is required for the organisation's culture to enable risk management/safety performance/customer service excellence to happen.

There's an old saying in business, "What gets measured gets managed." That's true, but beyond that is another important lesson, "What gets measured sends signals to people about what is actually important."

So if an organisation wants to enable innovation, it needs to reward experimentation and reasonable risk-taking. If it wants to enable safety, it needs to reward identification of hazards. This means a supervisor praising a team member who is late for a toolbox meeting because they spent extra time examining an apparently working appliance just in case, rather than telling them off for wasting time and being late for the meeting. If it wants to enable customer service, it needs to reward people going out of their way to solve a problem for the customer, not set limits like maximum four-minute calls in the call centre.

What is culture?

The success of developing an enabling culture will come down to how the organisation is structured, how it implements a variety of systems to guide and direct people in their work, how jobs are designed, how the communication systems work, and how leaders lead and manage people.

A good example is the financial sector.

When banking regulators talk about banks needing to develop a risk culture this only proves their ignorance of what organisational culture actually is. What they are actually talking about is the banks putting in place more compliance procedures. The more apt question is how the culture within banks causes the staff to manage risk.

Asking banks to have a stronger customer service culture is an inaccurate proposition for the same reason. If banks were not customer-centric they wouldn't have any customers. It's how the culture within banks affects customer service that's important. Here lies the rub.

Too often we confuse culture with outcomes. If an organisation has a positive culture it will foster behaviours which help the business achieve outcomes such as innovation, risk, safety, etc. Whilst the outcomes are important in addressing the realities of the industry in which the business operates, it is wrong to think an organisational culture can be created around them. Outcomes might provide positive short-term slogans but they do nothing to address systemic organisational needs, much less create transformational changes that actually are cultural.

Until companies truly understand what organisational culture is, they will continue to gravitate more towards outcomes without addressing the internal behaviours that model the organisation's culture.

Shared beliefs

Culture in the workplace is the shared beliefs, norms and expectations that govern the way people approach their work and interact with each other. It is how people go about solving problems, making decisions, achieving goals, responding to deadlines, processing ideas and information, meeting compliance, safety and quality requirements, etc.

To influence changes in organisational culture, our companies need to change the behaviours that staff use to interact with one another and deliver their work. This cannot be achieved by focusing solely on outcomes or business climate externalities.

Behavioural norms are established by having in place certain conditions at the individual (eg autonomy) group (eg inter-unit coordination) and organisational (eg leadership) levels. Focus on these and the outcomes of innovation safety or customer service will come.

Shaun McCarthy is chairman of Human Synergistics Australia and New Zealand.

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