The smell of the place… creating an organisational culture

BY ONYEKA AGHATISE

I’ve lived in different cities in the course of my time on earth – London, Crawley, The Hague, Abuja, and Lagos (which has my heart). One thing that has always struck me is how these cities impact the person I am. In London, I love to cook, I am continually experimenting and whipping up new dishes; in Lagos, I find that I hate cooking. In Abuja, I’m outgoing, willing to explore the city, something I don’t dare in Lagos. My time in these cities is scattered and overlapping, so I wonder, why am I a different person in each of these cities?

I didn’t understand the psychology behind it, until I watched a culture talk given by the Late Professor Sumantra Ghoshal at the World Economic Forum titled “the smell of the place.” The crux of Ghoshal’s message is that humans don’t fundamentally change who they are without a severe personal crisis. He explained that the context we create around human beings plays a significant role in how they behave. To drive this point home, he compared his behaviour in Fontainebleau in France (in spring) to his time on holiday in downtown Kolkata (in the hot and humid summer).

The ethos of Ghoshal’s message and how it plays out in the workplace is excellently captured by Edgar Schein, who holds that leaders cannot ignore creating and managing organisational culture, as this will have an impact far beyond the expectations of leaders.

Over the last year, Nigerian social media has been awash with stories that indicate business owners don’t understand the impact of the cultural context they create. There have been stories of employers leaving interviewees waiting for hours on end for a scheduled interview, getting upset with candidates who ask to reschedule interviews and owing employees’ salaries only to fire them eventually. In some establishments, staff are hired in the finance department, for example, only to find that their role scope has grown. Job enrichment is not a bad thing, however, picking kids up from school and covering up the boss’s infidelity hardly qualifies as enrichment. These examples are real cases (with far more available in the social media sphere).

These behaviours cumulatively form a strong scent (or in this case, stench) that becomes the cultural context for your organisation. Wittingly or unwittingly, the way we treat our employees creates a cultural context that drives their behaviour (and performance). I hear people counter this (especially about domestic staff), by arguing “if you’re nice, they will walk over you”. My answer to this is easy: niceness is not a requirement for creating the right cultural context.

It’s quite simple, the organisational culture you enable dictates what type of employee you get. You can be firm, supportive etc. without the need to be a doormat. There are other means like proactive performance management and engagement to drive the right behaviours in your organisation. In a longitudinal study on the effect of organisational culture on performance and motivation, researchers looked at 95 independently owned dealerships over six years. They concluded that not only did culture impact performance (in this case, sales) positively, it also had a strong positive impact on customer satisfaction.

I’ll wrap this up by painting you a similar picture using your experience as a consumer: imagine you have some shopping to do. Some of the groceries you need are available from a supermarket, however, some are only available in Oke Arin (Lagos market). You start with the supermarket; the store is sectioned, pricing is displayed, the store is air-conditioned, and you have a trolley to wheel your shopping. You can conclude your visit in 30 minutes. You head to Lagos Market; it’s hot and humid, items are not displayed, you have to ask for prices and then bargain. You do this while fielding offers from other traders trying to earn an honest living by grabbing your attention. Reflecting on both situations, where are you more likely to be operating optimally (ignoring for a moment that some of us just love bargain shopping)?

Instead of a culture fueled by compliance, control, contract, mistrust, there’s a need to shift to clearly articulating your purpose values, and overlaying this with coaching, guidance and trust. This will enable employees (who have the capacity) to thrive. Getting the right employees is down to sound recruitment practices (that is a topic for another article).

Making the shift requires commitment and this is more difficult in the Nigerian cultural context. Driving this change is not the preserve of Human Resources; it is the accountability of business owners and senior managers, enabled by HR.

So, if you’re a business owner or manager in a larger company, think long and hard: are you creating the fontainebleau/supermarket experience or the Kolkata/Oke Arin experience?

Now, what are you going to do about it?

Onyeka is an HR professional with over a decade of experience in a wide range of HR generalist and specialist areas in business partnering, project and change management, talent management, data analytics in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, North Africa and The Netherlands covering. She has worked in various multinational organisations successfully partnering with diverse business leaders to translate business objectives into HR initiatives that improve performance, growth, and employee engagement; displaying commercial acumen and deep understanding of business value.

Aghatise holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Lagos and a master’s degree in Human Resource Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science.