Human Resource Professionals play a crucial role in creating a healthy culture in an organization. Even though it is widely said that employees are the ones who create the culture of an organization, that is only partly true. Employees do play an important role in creating the culture, but Human Resource professionals make sure that the environment is healthy, creative, and engaging.
What is Organizational Culture?
In layman’s terms, an organizational culture is how a company operates. Being more precise, organizational culture is a set of values, beliefs, attitudes, systems, and rules that provide an outline of how an employee is expected to behave within the organization. Culture is always consistent, but at the same time, it is also very dynamic.
For example, in the early 2000s, organizational culture was vastly different from what it is today. In early times employees were not given the set of benefits that are commonly given today, employees were not given mental health leaves, paternal leaves were not common in those days, employee-related events were not held, and so on. In today’s modern era, employees have numerous opportunities, and organizations work hard toward employee satisfaction and retention.
Nowadays, with monetary benefits, employees also need non-monetary benefits for intrinsic satisfaction, such as self-motivation or feeling valued. To stay updated with the latest trends, Human Resource professionals create certain strategies and offer several incentives that keep employees satisfied and create a friendly organizational culture.
1. Importance of Organizational Culture
A work environment that motivates and inspires employees to become more engaged in their work duties and internal communication, is a true reflection of a healthy organizational culture. Having a strong culture that motivates everyone to do their best work will ultimately lead to organizational success. Organizational culture is important because of the following reasons:
- Increased Employee Engagement
- Reduces Employee Turnover
- Improves Productivity
- Strong Brand Identity
- Transformational Power
- Effective Onboarding
- Healthy Team Environment
2. Role of HR in Creating Organizational Culture
Creating a positive culture isn’t as easy as it sounds; it requires Human Resource professionals to manage the tiniest detail of the organization so that the strategies they have created could be implemented effectively. The Human Resource professionals make sure that the culture is operating in both ways, directly and indirectly.
The most difficult part of creating a culture is managing employee actions. As employees are the pillars of a company, their actions matter immensely when creating a culture. If employees don’t cooperate with HR, then the implementation of strategies or plans cannot reap fruitful results.
To create a positive and healthy culture, Human Resource Professionals could use the following ways to get the anticipated results:
3. Supporting the Top Authorities
Corporate culture is always driven from the top, and Human Resource professionals ensure that the culture is followed at each level. Company culture is not something that is written and simply needs to be acted upon, it is HR’s responsibility to reflect the corporate culture in all HR-related practices, which also generally covers all of the employees working in an organization. Recently, a lot of online HR trainings and certification courses get focused on this area because of the ever-increasing role of the HR depart in the company’s revenue goals. This cannot be achieved with a traditional HR mentality that heavily focuses on recruitment and payroll management.
Even though the culture is a top-down approach, it is still the HR department’s responsibility to ensure that the policy that will be implemented is risk-free and they also need to identify if it includes something that would be contradictory against labor laws and regulations. Most importantly, HR’s task is to effectively implement and manage the entire process of creating a culture.
4. Enhancing Employee-Employer Relations
The main role of HR is to maintain a good relationship with their employees. If employees support every decision of HR, then implementing a new culture or an enhancement in the culture won’t be a problem for HR. If HR successfully manages to make everyone in the company feel valued and included, then incorporating new strategies for employees won’t be a difficulty.
The real problem for Human Resource professionals arises when employees are not supportive. This creates a huge barrier for the HR department to implement any strategy. Enhancing employer-employee relations is a must for Human Resource professionals because if you have them on your side, then everything goes smoothly.
5. Focusing on Organizational Values
The values of an organization are the foundation of organizational culture. With suitable strategies and policies, if you correct organizational values, the culture will automatically be impacted. The main problem is that values are fixated on the tiniest details of an organization, from its operations to its work environment. Changing values means changing the foundation of an organization, and when a structure is shaken even a little bit, the entire building gets affected heavily.
To change the values, employees’ behavior and organizational norms are also taken into consideration. This means that you need to change the behavior of an employee as well, which is quite a handful when you have hundreds of employees working under one roof. Therefore, HR in these situations try to keep their communications clear and comprehensible, so that employees don’t feel that they are being watched or monitored closely over each of their moves.
6. Recruiting a Team that Shapes the Company Culture
As you might be aware that one of the HR department’s main functions is to recruit new talent. If Human Resource professionals make sure that the new talent that is selected could help in creating a positive culture, then they select those candidates only who could easily align with their strategies. If in the beginning only an employee is explained the company’s values and expectations, then their norms and behavior will be set according to that only.
7. Deploying Engagement & Feedback Tools
A feedback strategy is effective in everything, and true leaders mainly aim to create an effective feedback strategy. Using a feedback mechanism is the primary responsibility of a Human Resource professionals in order to create a pleasant workplace culture.
By using a feedback strategy, firstly, employees feel valued by the organization. Employees feel that their feedback and suggestions matter to the company, which ultimately would increase employee motivation. Moreover, feedback also strengthens employer-employee relations and enhances employee engagement as well. Secondly, through a feedback strategy, the employee could improve their performance by knowing their setbacks, and it also helps them recognize their glitches.
If there is any problem with the implemented strategy or plan, then that could be amended immediately to create a more suitable environment for the employees. The feedback strategy forms a more cohesive organizational culture and should be followed by every organization.
Conclusion
Creating a positive culture could also lead to company growth. Nowadays creating a positive culture has become a necessity, employees have numerous opportunities, and if they don’t get one, they jump on to another immediately. The job switching rate has increased from 2.3% in Great Recession to 4%, and people who switch jobs are likely to have an increase in pay in their new job.
We used to believe that an employee is the one that needs the job, but now that philosophy has changed, now the company needs an employee to do their work. Employee retention is a key element for every organization, and with proper strategies and actions, you could do wonders in the industry. The best way to retain an employee is through a positive organizational culture.
