You Might Not Always Get What You Want

By Michael Allen

What does it mean to have a "Formal Culture" and an "Informal Culture"?

Have you ever instituted a new policy or procedure into your organization, spent countless hours and dollars trying to drive the initiative throughout the organization, only to see it fall flat?  Organizations large and small face a similar problem -- how to make their organization become what they envision it to be.  

When organizational experts refer to the overall performance of an organization, they often use the word “culture”.  While there is disagreement on the exact definition of organizational culture, most would agree that it includes the values and behaviors that the majority of participants engage in; what most of the people believe and do most of the time.  This is called the “informal culture” as compared to the “formal culture”, or what the leadership wants the culture to be.  It makes no difference if your organization is a large corporation, a small “mom and pop”, a non-profit, or an educational institution, each of you have a formal and informal culture.  One aspect of great organizations is that they close the gap between the two cultures so that “what’s going on  - out there” very much resembles the vision of leadership.  

“Informal Culture is what 

most of the people believe and do 

most of the time.”

You may wonder if these great organizations close this culture gap by hiring the “right people”, or if they do something more intentional to close this gap.  The answer quite simply is both.  Great organizations start with great people, but they also understand and affect the other aspects of their culture.  

The Best Organizations

The best organizations don’t stop with simply creating rules and policies, they do much more to impact the everyday behavior of their employees.  If you’ll refer back to our August 2012 Post on the role of contextual factors in industrial safety incident prevention, the very best bosses and organizations understand that human performance is a result of complex systems.  Organizational factors such as rules, policies, and reward systems are only a portion of the complex system that drives human performance.  The best organizations understand that it is also people, both the individual and intact teams, plus surroundings that drive their overall performance.  If the employee base has failed to implement a new directive from leadership, there could be several reasons affecting this.  It could be that employees don’t understand the new initiative, operational pressures contradict the initiative, they don’t have the equipment necessary to make it happen, or a myriad of other factors.  The very best organizations are those that are able to gather field intelligence detailing actual performance and factors driving the performance, and then institute corrective measures that enable the workforce to align their own performance with the vision of leadership.

So what does that mean for you if you are in an organization with a gap between your formal and informal cultures?  We would first encourage you to perform a cultural analysis to get a better understanding of your informal culture.   With this knowledge you will be able to  understand what contextual factors are driving the performance of your employees.  This information will allow you to initiate corrective measures to close the gap between your formal and informal cultures.  The best organizations don’t make the mistake of simply focusing on changing people, they focus on the entire context to enable those on board to perform to a higher standard.

Is Dissent in the Workplace Good for Results?

by Mike Allen

We are inclined to conform to what we believe the people around us expect and value.  This has been demonstrated by decades of research into social conformity dating back to the Solomon Asch Line studies in the early 1950’s.  The crux of this research is that when in small groups, we tend to acquiesce (conform) to the view of the group even if it is not our natural view to begin with.  Think about how this would impact team decision making.  When the majority have one view, even when we have a different view, we are less likely to express that view because dissenters are labeled trouble-makers and most of us don’t want to be trouble-makers.

Dissent does, however, serve some very important functions.  

1.  Dissent boosts group creativity  

While conformity results in fewer variations, creativity thrives on a variety of ideas.  

2.  Dissent can prevent failures 

We conform to what we *believe* others expect and value, but sometimes people are doing things simply because they aren't aware of the possible negative consequences.  

For example, in the safety arena, dissent (which we call ‘Intervention’) helps to prevent undesired consequences by stopping an unsafe behavior.  Imagine that you see two co-workers put a tool into service that you see is compromised.  Speaking up could mean the difference between operations as normal and a catastrophic event.  Unfortunately, the group norm is to “keep quiet”, so you conform and 

don’t speak up and the tool goes into service.  

The key to capitalizing on dissent is to do it right.  If you go about it with a critical tone, unflappable confidence that you are right, or punitive intent, not only will it probably do more harm than good, but you are sure to end up with that ‘trouble-maker’ label.

Consequences of Not Speaking Up

by Phillip Ragain

     What we learned upon completing a large-scale (3,000+ employees) study of safety interventions is that employees directly intervene in only about two of five unsafe actions and conditions that they observe in the workplace.  The obvious concern is that a significant number of unsafe operations that could be stopped are not, which increases the likelihood of incidents and injuries; but this statistic is troubling for a less obvious reason - its cultural implication.

     The influence of culture on safe and unsafe employee behavior is of such concern that regulatory bodies, like OSHA in the U.S. and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the U.K., have strongly encouraged organizations to foster “positive safety cultures” as part their overall safety management programs.  

     Employees are inclined to behave in a way that they perceive to be congruent (consistent) with the social values and expectations, or “norms,” that constitute their organization’s culture.  These behavioral norms are largely established through social interaction and communication, and in particular through the ways that managers and supervisors instruct, reward and allocate their attention around employees.  When supervisors and opinion leaders in organizations infrequently or inconsistently address unsafe behavior, it leads employees to believe that formal safety standards are not highly valued and employees are not genuinely expected to adhere to them.  In short, the low frequency of safety interventions in the workplace contributes to a culture in which employees are not positively influenced to work safely.

     These two implications – (1) that a significant number of unsafe operations are not being stopped, and (2) that safety culture is diminished – compound to create a problematic state of affairs.  Employees are more likely to act unsafely in organizations with diminished safety cultures, yet their unsafe behavior is less likely to be stopped in those organizations.     

(Look for the full-length article in the May/June 2011 edition of EHS Today.)