This article is based on ideas from my latest book The Center of Experience: a Blueprint for the Experience-led Enterprise

The importance of both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) is now well-known, with a majority of companies competing based on both factors for both top talent, and loyal customers. Because of this, a comprehensive brand experience, or customer and employee experience combined, must be achieved by companies. I refer to this combination of EX and CX within the enterprise as brand experience, and it is operationalized by a set of processes and coordination between people, processes, and technology referred to as a Center of Experience.

It goes without saying that there are real, tangible benefits to designing and fostering a successful organizational culture. But even the process of measurement can have multiple benefits and can be used in several practical applications. Let’s discuss a few below.

Recruiting the best talent

Companies that actively understand both their current and desired cultures have a unique advantage when recruiting new employees.  By understanding an individual’s desired organizational culture and comparing that to both the current perceived culture as well as leadership’s desired culture, a hiring manager can make informed decisions that set both the employee and the company up for success instead of a hiring mismatch.

Organizing teams

Similar to finding new talent from outside the organization, defining the desired organizational culture helps a company organize teams more successfully. Keep in mind that different teams within an organization might have different dominant cultures than others. This is not only to be expected, but is often optimal. It is more important that teams are growing or changing in the same trajectory as one another than that they map to the exact point in the culture quadrant.

Achieving organizational priorities

According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workforce report, 21% of employees strongly agree their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work, and only 33% of U.S. employees are actively engaged at work.

Organizations that are able to successfully define their ideal culture, match employees with that culture, and motivate the workforce to support their transition from their current to ideal culture will have a more motivated workforce because expectation and reality are more closely aligned.

What does success look like?

While it may appear to be a matter of luck or happenstance to outside observers, a successful organizational culture takes a lot of intention and a concerted effort to implement and maintain. Let’s explore some of the components of a successful culture.

Dominant culture vs. monolithic culture

An entire company isn’t going to be completely one type of culture, though it will likely occupy a place within one of the quadrants as opposed to sitting square in the middle of both axes.

For this reason, we qualify the term culture by describing an organization’s dominant culture, since the notion of a single, monolithic culture is both not desired, and unlikely in the first place. This particularly comes into play during the next point about diversity.

Importance of diversity

This is such a critical and historically overlooked aspect of successful corporate culture that it is hard not to underscore its importance. Because of this, diversity and inclusion is also included in our measurements of culture. An enterprise can simply not be truly successful without diversity and inclusion. 

It is also important to make the distinction between diversity in culture, background and ideas, as opposed to diversity of purpose and goals. While the former is invaluable to an organization, the latter is more complicated.

In other words, companies benefit greatly from employing people with different ideas, socio-economic, cultural, and other types of backgrounds. What makes a strong culture is alignment around achieving a common purpose or goals for the company. When people (diverse or otherwise) are working towards different purposes or not aligned on mission, then an organization may be in need of alignment.

Shifting needs

In addition to the need for some types of diversity within an organization at any point in time, different types of cultures can often be needed or beneficial at different times in a company’s lifespan.

For instance, think about what it takes to make a startup successful, versus a mature organization. Then, as that mature organization becomes challenged by disruptors and other upstarts, its needs change as well. There are times and places for more and less flexibility, as well as more of an innovative versus competitive culture throughout any organization’s existence. 

Smart leadership understands how to balance this so that, in addition to a general amount of diversity, the right emphasis is placed at the right times in the company’s lifespan. 

This article is based on ideas from my latest book The Center of Experience: a Blueprint for the Experience-led Enterprise