I was fortunate to be present at the session by Abhijit Bhaduri on Organizational Culture. He works as the Chief Learning Officer for the Wipro group. Prior to this he led HR teams at Microsoft, PepsiCo, Colgate and Tata Steel and worked in India, SE Asia and US. He is on the Advisory Board of Wharton’s prestigious program for Chief Learning Officers that is run by the Univ. of Pennsylvania. He is an advisor on Social Media usage for SHRM in India. He is also a great fan of R D Burban He has also authored the books like Mediocre But Arrogant, Married But Available. He is an actor, writer, RJ and HR manager too.
Abhijit has a charming personality and blessed with enormous level of liveliness. At some stage in his speak he touched topic like employer branding. Abhijeet believe that everything which is tangible can not be a competitive advantage for an organization, its intangible which gives competitive advantage. Human Resource Management is all about working about dreams. HR is meant for working on intangible to accomplish people’s dream. And then he began to talk about organizational culture. The definition of organizational culture is organizational values, also known as "beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals. But Abhijit defines organizational culture in simple two word i.e. culture is all about organization’s stories. Stories which employees or outsiders talk discuss or raise their eyebrows at. The stories can be pleasant or horror but those stories talk about organization culture. He mentioned fabulous points in simple language:
1. Need outsider to see culture. - To feel organization’s culture you need to look at your own culture as an outsider. Many times outsiders find extremely hierarchical culture or cool and open culture but that may not be the reality. The true culture can be been only when it comes to decision making. So consider outsider’s perception when you are working on your culture.
2. Organization culture has many sub cultures- Organization will have different culture in different departments and sub culture grows. Culture is not about rules and regulations. Here he mentioned beautiful example of parking story of Premji. Premji said,” there is no need to reserve parking for me. If I come first I will park or I will search for the parking.”
3. Perception creates brand in our mind while mentioning this point he mentioned Pepsi and Haldiram case. People may not have a idea about Pepsi or Haldiram’s turnover but still outsiders find Pepsi is better as it can be perception about Pepsi brand.
4. Perception takes time to change. – But during M & A change the perception fast otherwise you will loose your talent.
5. Listen to the stories which employees discuss and what is the moral of the stories.
6. Add value to reward, story of Mudra- Advt. Company. When he paid stipend to management trainees which was a very small amount. But while giving that sum on the envelope he wrote that,” it’s the lowest amount which you are earning in your life but it is most valuable money which you have earned in your life.” Most of them have still not spend that amount and have kept the that envelope as it is.
So culture is all about stories. I learnt great lesson of HR... Create good stories.. which will talk more about your culture than documenting it somewhere…
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