Organizational Structure and Climate

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND CLIMATE

Company culture can be described as a set of unwritten rules, practices, beliefs and attitudes that affect the way in which business is done. It serves as the foundation for the way and manner employee should behave and interact within themselves and their customers (internal and external customers). A company’s culture is like the identity of the company.

A company climate on the other hand is like the mood of the company: how the employees perceive the organization. It describes the morale and perception of the organization and can be quite subjective just like moods can change quite more often. The culture can be said to be a process while the climate is the outcome of the process.

Between culture and climate, there is also a convergence. Organizations create culture to distinguish themselves and meet up with their business, stakeholders and regulatory objectives and take a number of steps to ensure that employees live the culture. When employees understand, appreciate and believe in such culture and they live it, then the convergence has been achieved and there is synergy in the culture and the climate.

The steps that can be taken to promote organizational culture is to break them down into policies, processes, procedures and much more importantly attitudes which usually comes in the form of values that are promoted by the company. These set of values are carefully chosen and very well and regularly communicated to both old and new staff to ensure familiarization and imprinting them in their subconscious. For the Organization that I work for, this is termed ‘LIRIC’ which means Leadership, Integrity, Relationship, Innovation and Can-do. Over the years, I can tell you that this has been the hallmark of our success as a company and a major factor that has enabled us to obliterate competition. Apart from the regular communication of these values, part of our interview policy ensures that behavioural competency questions are...