Organisational Culture

Since CSR is an attitude, it must start with a personal attitude (which each organisation could help develop) but of course, it must also be the organisational attitude.

I say attitude which of course means 'culture' but is more than that. Organisational Attitude is how the oganisation approaches decisions and stakeholders. Decisions should be approached with a view to be fair, to be balanced, to look for the best (long-term) answer. Decision-making processes need to consider so many factors I can hardly list them here, but if employees are aware of the concept of considering the impacts of their decisions on them, on other employees, on other decisions then they might just make better decisions. And these decisions could also be more responsible on a personal, and organisational, level. A good start for decision making could be to look at consequences from a few different models: Triple Bottom Line (Social, Environmental and Economic), Stakeholder (Employee, Customer, Supplier, Shareholder, Community and others), Time (Past, Present, Future) or more 'academic' ones such as the 3 lenses framework* (Contribution to Purpose, Consistency with Principles, Inmpact on People).

According to the World Bank online course on CSR and Sustainable Competitiveness, there are a few other interesting considerations such as Why do 'good' Managers make bad choices? Apparently because they believe the decision is ethical, or it's in the indivudal/organisation's best interests or no-one will discover its impact. An organisation needs to consider issues like these in light of how the people it recruits makes decisions, how it encourages or rewards certain types of decisions and how it creates the frameworks for company decisions as well as personal decisions.

Then there is how an organisation approaches its stakeholders. Does it communicate, and is the communication effective? Does it appreciate or respect them? Are stakeholders able to impact each other (and therefore provide a motivation to manage each other)? How much control can one have over stakeholder's actions (like media, government etc which are not equal to the organisation)?

Crucially with the issue of organisational culture is to start with the most important thing in the organisation: its people, and this is what the term commonly refers to. Some leading organisations tie culture in with branding, since culture is normally internal, and branding normally external. Realising that the 2 are actually the same ensures a cohesive message is portrayed to all stakeholders. Entire courses are written on both branding and culture, so what could I write in 1 paragraph or even claim to know (having not read many of those books)?

Well, as always, I like to focus on the important things: having a culture defined, communicating it to others ALL the time and not just tangibly, but also intangibly. Intangible company culture -hmm, not the easiest of topics -but one that I truly believe is what defined an organisation. Its what you feel when you walk into the organisation's building, its how people talk about their organisation (with love or hate!) and its what keeps employees, keeps customers and creates a team spirit -an attitude of working together towards common goals, or doing so responsibly!

The problem with CSR is that how many organisations have the ability or the time to consider issues like these? Not many -and this typicalises why CSR is currently still dirven by large organisations; those with smart people and the money to pay for people to spend their time on these issues. These are crucial issues. Surely the businesses that can consider them will be more successful than those that cannot, thus ensuring larger businesses go from strength-to-strength but smaller ones might find it much tougher to grow or compete! There are of course many cases of how this cycle is broken (every large company was once a small company!), it would be interesting to find out how?

There is also the problem of outsourcing. Where are the limits of the organisation and how much control does an organisation have? Does it force new employees to change their values? The perils of outsourcing are that you lose control over creating a culture, and this is the reason behind outsourcing failing: conflicting objectives, lack of team spirit towards common goals or passion towards the organisation, no feeling of belonging, trust or respect. In fact, the reason why so many SMEs are so successful and have no 'obvious' CSR' is because they are small, often dominated by the personality of their leader and work closely in a team with a great culture. They don't need to have to analyse so many issues related to decision making or creating and communicating a culture since it happens naturally. But when they start transitioning to becoming larger companies then they face these problems. In fact when any organisation goes through change it faces problems, and this is a topic for a later post.

*For more information on this framework, refer to Lynn S. Payne, Three Lenses for Decision Making, Harvard Business School, August 7, 1996, 2-396-200.