Organizational Self-Awareness

An increasing body of evidence supports the linkage between an organization's culture and its business performance. However, managerial and non-managerial staffs in Shanghai rarely talk about their company’s culture at ease.

During the past several weeks, I conducted very sporadic and unsystematic research in China to gauge employees’ and especially recruiters’ ability to describe their company’s organizational culture. The majority of professionals that I spoke with had very little to say when asked; third-party recruiters knew the least.

Comments were usually limited to: young staff, international team, big and established company, dynamic environment, processes to foster innovation, specific culture, unique culture, very distinctive culture, etc. Well, let’s stop before we get even more vague and tautological.

So, how can employees provide more substantive responses when referring to their company’s culture? One way of doing so involves increasing organizational self-awareness through:
• Learning dimensions of organizational culture,
• Understanding how the company scores against these dimensions, and
• Communicating the above to employees regularly (message reinforcement).

Raising organizational awareness can increase recruiters’ ability to promote the company to talents, managers’ ability to engage employees, and employees’ understanding of their own roles.