Transforming Vision into Your Ideal Quality Organization
Most organizations have a vision. They know what kind of organization they want to be. Unfortunately, many find out too late that transforming that vision into reality can be difficult. The most successful changes are those which become part of an organization's culture. "Culture" can be described as the shared beliefs and values that guide the way members interact with one another and approach their work. While organizational cultures vary in terms of intensity, virtually every organization has one. For some insight into your culture, ask yourself if your organization rewards or punishes:
Risk taking and independent thinking?
Playing politics and conforming?
Setting goals and pursuing standards of excellence?
Defining Your Culture
Where does your organization, department or work unit fit into this picture? You can find out by using the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI).
The OCI provides a statistically valid and reliable measurement of how members perceive its culture, and helps them create an "ideal" or optimum culture. With this measurement, your organization takes a revealing - and often surprising - look at what behaviours are being rewarded, how motivated and satisfied our employees are, and how effectively they perform.
How the OCI Works
Through a set of 120 statements, the OCI easily and efficiently measures 12 distinct thinking and behavioural patterns, or "styles," that members of an organization might be expected to adopt in carrying out their work and interacting with others. When you administer the OCI to a sample of your work force, the collective results enable you to determine your organization's current culture.
Then, combined OCI scores are transferred to a circular graph to form a profile, or picture of your culture. You can even administer the OCI to individual departments or work units within your organization for a well-rounded look at the various subcultures within the whole.
The OCI can also be used to create a vision of an organization's "cultural" ideal. By responding to OCI items in terms of how they'd like things to be, members of your organization create a profile of their optimal culture. This ideal profile becomes a concise blueprint that summarizes your vision and serves as your organization's guide to becoming its best. Comparing your current culture with your ideal culture shows you exactly where to implement the changes that will help to attain your organizations' vision.
The Power to Redirect your Organization
OCI results enable you to determine training and organizational development requirements to support organization members in implementing a shared vision of what cultural change is your organization will look like. With the OCI you can:
Gage your organization's readiness for change.
Identify and address organizational forces likely to promote or impede cultural change
Define the specific changes that need to take place
You can use the OCI again and again to measure your organizational progress toward your cultural ideal over time - to identify what's working and what's not, and modify your plans as needed.
