Organizational culture is hugely critical to the success and overall health of a company, employee, and their customers. So, it’s helpful to spend time considering why a company’s culture is the way it is, and why it’s important that it stays that way (or changes) in the midst of covid-19.

Organizational culture starts at the management level. If disaster and recovery have been left to management of various institutions the COVID-19 experience should make you revisit that strategy. Most businesses picture short-term recovery needs because some catastrophic events are well beyond their horizon.

They just don’t think in terms of major famine, flood, political unrest or pandemic disease. The challenges presented by the spread of Coronavirus present opportunities to assess and correct your business survival strategy and develop a strong organizational culture that is resilient to damages caused by covid-19.

Recovery does not equal to Organizational Culture

Peter Ashworth explains that your organizational culture “defines for you and for all others, how your organization does business, how your organization interacts with one another and how the team interacts with the outside world, specifically your customers, employees, partners, suppliers, media and all other stakeholders.” Organizational Culture encompasses values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization.

It explains how far a tree will bend in a disaster, how well a roof will resist a flood, how much impact concrete will absorb, and so on. Organizational culture is a property that ensures survival and the potential for bouncing back for organizations.

The key to a successful organization is to have a culture based on a strongly held and widely shared set of beliefs that are supported by strategy and structure. Traditional organization recovery and disaster plans are reactive.

They do include valuable follow-up instructions, including whom to contact for different services, how to rescue data and records, where to look for temporary facilities, and more.

But reactive practices are not enough if you want to build a strong organizational culture. For example a strong organizational culture will planned even before the emergence of covid-19, and not to react as a result of the pandemic.

The plans should include policies and practices to anticipate various emergencies. People should understand their specific roles in adversity. They should have instructions on escape routes and alternatives.

For example, a training institution would have developed online training facilities and training their faculty to handle the online training to their participants and students. Employees of your organization should learn how to work from homes and not affect the performance of the organization.

Facilities management must manage utility feeds and emergency response systems. Company officers should have a comprehensive grasp of succession plans.

Managers in the hotel industry should be able to develop new strategy that will anticipate pandemic and address them that does not affect their organizations’ operation. However, even this preparation does not ensure a strong organizational culture. A strong system should not only be a preparation stage but a culture among employees to address disaster when faced.

Well-functioning Organizational Culture

Organizational culture requires a proactive, evolving, and adaptive strategy for Management. Despite the burdens of an executive office, leaders will make room for the unthinkable. Leaders in managerial position in the various organizations can offer guidance and model behavior under crisis such as covid-19.

How much leaders can accomplish will vary across business sectors? Their power and effectiveness will vary with company size, infrastructure, and status as local, national, or global. Still, they must be proactively involved with Organizational culture planning. For example, in a strong organizational culture employee must be clear on their roles as essential, nonessential, or somewhere in-between. But you must build some flexibility into those designations. 

Even in a midst of covid-19 a strong organizational culture within an organization should define a trigger point at which tasks switch to work-from-home mode. Work units must know how to make the shift and what is expected of them.

We realize for example most organizations in Ghana struggled during the locked down. But if there a strong organizational culture with well defined strategy to switch to work-from-home mode. A strong organizational culture will address employee anxiety whether they will receive their salaries in the midst of switch mode.

A successful organizational culture brings together the people at your company and keeps them focused in the midst of covid-19. When your culture is clear, different perspectives can gather behind it with common purposes.

The culture at your organization sets expectations for how people behave and work together, and how well they function as a team. In this way, culture can break down the boundaries between siloed teams, guide decision-making, and workflow overall without it being affected by covid-19.

Organizational Culture and Technology

Businesses run on their technology. Every aspect of a business depends on one high-tech functionality or another. Companies with a strong organizational culture are confident in their IT infrastructure and connectivity across functions and locations.

Typical disaster plans include strategies for IT recovery and patching under duress. However, this assumes engineering mindsets with their rational and reductionist thinking. Crises require more than help desk personnel. Information systems are so broad and deep with a business operation they need constant resilience testing.

Paul Barrett sums it up nicely, writing that “bringing technology to enhance employee performance have the potential to bring huge benefits to the organization and employees alike but they need to be introduced in the right way for the right reasons, and at the right time.

To be properly effective they need modern technology application in a holistic way, consistent with a business culture that is conducive to their successes. That means supportive technological system, flexible working options and an open culture that allows employees to improve their performance and enhance the output of the organization.

Organizational Culture and Adversity

A Strong organizational culture with companies can survive. Indeed, they strengthen their recovery because their system has legs. A strong organizational culture is fluid and flexible. They are people and purpose-driven and ready to adapt to change before procedures are taxed. Optimistic leaders organize and lead a strong organizational culture within organizations, and optimism is a function of foresight.

Their optimism, in turn, provides a positive, consistent, and comforting touchstone for people inside and outside the organization. This foresight devises collaborative strategies for foreseen and unforeseen events. Ghanaian organizations should seek to build a strong organizational culture to be prepared for pandemic. Ghanaian organizations must anticipate present and future covid-19 related diseases.

Conclusion

COVID-19 should motivate all Ghanaian companies to create less fortified and more elastic technological infrastructure and behavior under a strong organizational culture. And, they need leaders who are agile enough to call the best shot, encourage positive deviance, and model decisive and empathic behavior while fueling, energizing and enabling critical response under a strong organizational culture.

These are just a smattering of reasons why organizational culture is important, but they’re a good starting point to get you thinking about what your own organization brings to the table in the midst of covid-19 that will make your organization stronger and not be affected by the pandemic.

The Author, Paul Danquah, currently is a Senior Consultant at GIMPA Consultancy and Innovation Directorate (GCID), the consulting outfit of Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).

Email: pdanquah2012@gmail.com