How to create a positive culture within an organisation: Gartner

Leaders need to understand how to embed the right culture in their organisation to ensure a better work environment for their employees.

According to Gartner, the concern is growing amongst leaders that the organisational culture will change or suffer in a hybrid world.

Elisabeth Joyce, managing VP at Gartner said, “With employees working in distributed environments more often, executive leaders worry their organisation’s culture will become fragmented and weaker, leading to lower levels of engagement, performance and innovation.”

Pre-Covid, 70 percent of HR leaders had confidence that they had the culture their organisation needed to drive business performance. However, only 30 percent were confident that their desired culture was evident in their actual culture.

“The reality is there were problems with organisational culture pre-pandemic — in terms of workforce awareness, belief in the culture and ensuring employees were consistently behaving in ways aligned to the desired culture,” the authors explained.

Employees see the shift to hybrid work as having a positive effect on company culture. In fact, 76 percent of new remote and hybrid employees report a positive perception of the “workplace.”

Similarly, 64 percent of hybrid and 66 percent of remote employees say that their organisation’s culture has a positive impact on their job — compared to just 52 percent of on-site employees.

This means that an organisation’s culture needs to be strong enough to attract and retain employees, Gartner explains.

The trick to operationalising culture is making employees feel connected to it whether they are distributed or collocated.

While some leaders believe the in-person workplace drives culture connectedness, it is not always the case. The environment doesn’t drive culture but the ways in which people within a company behave and work together.

Leaders need to be purposeful when activating their culture, its not about telling people how to behave but showing them through thoughtful everyday actions.