Leadership would need to re-orchestrate plans to drive a Culture Transformation agenda that can synthesise factors to create a vibrant, dynamic workplace.

There is much talk of disruption, change and culture in management literature. However, it is difficult to articulate what these words mean in practice. Management literature attempts to define culture as an embodiment of certain characteristics such as attitudes, values, beliefs and rituals - expectations and assumptions that are reinforced within an institutional framework. Cultural transformation is usually left for the top management to create and transmit, though it is a complex and ambiguous task. Organisations will face dramatic challenges in the next decade as a result of multiple transitionary factors, and will significantly impact the nature of work, skills and job roles. Leadership would need to re-orchestrate plans to drive a Culture Transformation agenda that can synthesise these factors to create a vibrant, dynamic workplace.

Business transitions and change in business models due to the digital impetus and the rapid advent of technology would be one of the most prominent drivers of change. Technological adaptation and increased investments in futuristic technologies would call for deep work around organisation design, process restructuring and the impact on rituals, values and expectations of performance and risk management in organisations.

A gravitational shift

Talent practices in today’s organisations are largely ‘employee’ centric. However, a gravitational shift is levitating the workforce ecosystem. The extended workforce that includes contract workforce, fixed-term trainees/apprentices/ interns, outsourced services manpower and the gig economy would propel additional cultural shifts in organisations. Robotics and Automation may cause another disruption when workplaces could be hybrid models of human and machine-based workforce. This will affect the traditional ‘worker-centric’ life cycle processes and call for the creation of newer ways of leadership, interaction and new paradigms in evaluation performance and outcomes.

The organisation structure is undergoing fundamental transitions. Jobs were hitherto defined by a hierarchy, which served the purpose of disseminating and perpetuating culture through values and behaviour. However, the world of hybrid work has created fluidity in structure with loosely bound working team structures that come together to fulfil specific objectives and disband once those objectives get fulfilled. Such a transition calls for a very different kind of framework of leadership and values. The workforce itself needs to be able to embrace the ambiguity of such a design, which would demand a shift from formal hierarchies and siloed functional deliveries towards an organisation design that emphasises end outcomes to customer segments and meet the overall business objectives, using the end-to-end founder-owner mindset.

Organisations of the future

Organisations of the future would also need to consider the finer nuances of the impact of multigenerational, multi-geography workforces. By 2035, Baby Boomers (1946-64) and Gen X (1965-80) would have retired, and Gen Y (1981- 1996) and Gen Z (1997-2012) would increasingly constitute the workforce composition. More importantly, there might be a titanic shift in terms of having the seniors return to the workplace as it would get increasingly difficult to have a younger workforce that would be engaged full time with organisations. Multi-generational preferences, along with future socioeconomic and geo-political shifts, may necessitate a substantial rethink in the values and rituals of the organisation. The hybrid workforce of the future might result in a substantial evolution from being India based to global based. The workforce would need to be prepared for a greater degree of global inclusion and multi-cultural awareness, coupled with new behaviours to work asynchronously across time zones. Organisational culture impacts the risk management and performance of the organisation. It represents a key factor in determining performance.

Organisational culture is an outcome of a slew of different variables and develops when the culture and principles of the employees are compatible with the culture and principles of the institution and it reflects high performance and efficiency. And it is also influenced by the perception of risk and risk management, which gets reflected in the strategic management and performance as the combination of efficiency and effectiveness (Abuzarqa, 2019).

Diagnosing organisational culture

Different methods are used to diagnose organisational culture. The three-level model of culture was originally proposed by Schein and adapted by Sathe (1985). The first level addresses aspects of technology, art and audible and visible organisational behaviour patterns. This level considers elements that are easy to see but hard to interpret without an understanding of the elements at the other levels. The second level of culture attempts to interpret patterns of how people communicate, explain, rationalise, and justify their actions and words. The third level is the deepest layer which deals with underlying assumptions, beliefs and ideas that could be implicitly governing communications, justifications and behaviour. A diagnosis of this type is a helpful starting point to understand how individual elements stack up in the current and what needs to go into modifying them to make changes for the future.

Transformation for the future often involves taking a series of baby steps in the present and requires a multi-pronged strategy in different areas of operating effectiveness. A pivotal aspect is the function of the capacity of the organisation to alternate between “two distinct, yet complementary modes of organisational learning known as exploration and exploitation” (March 1995). For large corporations, this is a slippery slope. Exploitative learning is characterised by refinement or improvement of what is already in existence. While this might prevent the company’s performance from suffering, it also inhibits organisations from being able to make disruptive changes.

Structures basis needs

Organisation structure also impacts factors such as organisation learning. While service industries such as e-commerce and retail have gravitated towards decentralised structures, capital intensive industries prefer centralised governance to achieve economies of scale. There is a grey area between these two ends with some structures, as in a matrix structure. Organisation design theory has taken a leaf out of the Complex Adaptive Systems theory by considering fractal structures that can be broken down into molecular team-based structures that facilitate optimisation and innovation through the process of decomposing the structure into loosely coupled subsystems. Governance becomes an important mechanism of ensuring that the efficiency of the transformation is maintained (March 1995, p. 431). This means that the organisation standardises and benchmarks, and constantly recalibrates to meet its growth objectives.

The real-time marketplace of today demands that business processes are synchronised across enterprises (Ricker & Kalakota, 1999). Deep information exchange and integration amongst the collaborative partner network allows companies to optimise in real-time basis the daily trends and market conditions. Business-process synchronisation becomes a key value driver for enhancing corporate metabolism and scalability. At the same time, the concept of fractal repeatability enhances quick adaptation across the value chain while optimising resources. Established corporations are wary of shaking up the ongoing processes or mechanisms that are working and tend to prefer missed approaches that encourage innovation within a governance framework. Transformation efforts in corporations usually focus on incremental changes to structure and process, and sometimes, leadership.

In response to the demand for speed and rapid turnaround, the concept of agile working has emerged. The Agile working methodology, which is hugely popular in software development operates on the four levers of flexibility – spatial and temporal, resource integration, constant innovation and communication (Russell & Grant, 2020) to respond dynamically to service and market needs and to meet both individual and organisational goals. Some benefits of agile methodologies are their flexibility, low costs, less time, high levels of client satisfaction and engagement. In addition, the team of the project and the client are more motivated because they work rapidly and efficiently.

A fundamental lever

Job and Career architecture redesign would be a fundamental lever to augment people practices driving culture transformation in the ecosystem. Cost sustainability would be another lever that would drive the transformation agenda for the future. At the intersection of people and costs, would be the performance levers that could result in organisation growth. For the culture to change, the workforce needs to morph or transition and would call for an identification of Workforce Mix, Job Roles and Skills needed in the future due to progressive cycles of Business, Digitisation and Automation and Generation Shifts. The strategy could be operationalised through an appropriate bundling of Internal Talent Upskilling, changing the mix in external sources of talent, creating a curated set of policies and practices and enhancing career mobility.

Leadership in organisations is set for a transition. Research is talking about a new type of leadership, “paradoxical leadership”, which is related to “strategic agility”. Strategic agility evokes contradictions, such as stability-flexibility, commitment-change, and established routines-novel approaches. “These competing demands pose challenges that require paradoxical leadership—practices seeking creative, both/and solutions that can enable fast paced, adaptable decision making” (Lewis, Andriopoulos, & Smith, 2014). In all, the future calls for a more responsive, collaborative, innovative, agile and inclusive workplace, where culture and leadership are the key levers. More than leadership, social interactions and networks would enable a culture transformation initiative that entails changing rituals, habits, and behaviours. We can look forward to some exciting times ahead!

References

Abuzarqa, R. (2019). The relationship between organizational culture, risk management and organizational performance. Cross-cultural management journal, 21(1), 13-20. Lewis, M. W., Andriopoulos, C., & Smith, W. K. (2014). Paradoxical leadership to enable strategic agility. California management review, 56(3), 58-77. March, J.G. 1995. The Future, Disposable Organizations, and the Rigidities of Imagination. Organization, 2(3/4): 427-440 Ricker, F., & Kalakota, R. (1999, Fall). Order fulfillment: The hidden key to ecommerce success. Bartleby. https://www. bartleby.com/essay/Order-FulfillmentThe-Hidden-Key-to-eCommerceF3VDWJC8KDRTA. Russell, E., & Grant, C. (2020). Introduction to Agile Working and WellBeing in the Digital Age. In Agile working and well-being in the digital age (pp. 3-17). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Sathe, V. (1985). Culture and related corporate realities: Text, cases, and readings on organizational entry, establishment, and change. Richard D Irwin.