Designing organizational cultures for Engagement

“How do we craft an organizational culture where people will engage?”

If you’re in a leadership capacity in any organization, this will be an ongoing question.

Investigating engagement is, in reality, investigating values and beliefs.

This is the insights we took away from the 20 interviews we have realized as part of the IDEOu course on Insights for Innovation. To see the process that led to this insight, click here.

Common Identity while valuing Diversity

Crafting inclusive cultures for highly diverse groups requires a little more work than traditional teams. The implications extend from marketing messages to recruitment strategies to managerial philosophy.

For us, this quickly became one of our biggest challenges. Working and collaborating across generations, cultural backgrounds and professional disciplines, means we could not fall back on established cultural norms.

We had to create our own.

Common Values are not Enough

We quickly discovered that common values were simply not enough.

We wanted to onboard leaders who valued innovation for good as part of our core team.

Yet, when we started interviewing leaders in our community, we saw that even though everyone we interviewed shared those ideals, not all embodied them in the same way. Some were heavily engaged and led multiple initiatives while others helped by supporting leaders.

The differentiating factor, it turns out, was the belief they could have an impact on the world.

The more leaders believed that, the stronger their actions and engagement.

Creating a Culture that encompasses Multiple Beliefs

Our idea, therefore, was not to wrestle over beliefs, but rather, to understand what each belief would translate to in terms of desire to contribute.

We decided to craft roles in our organization, for each of the stages.

Bigger roles were given to people with the conviction and drive to make a difference. Smaller projects were reserved for the tentative, who wanted to see an immediate impact and measure the positive effect of their initiative before investing more.

Our understanding of personae evolved from the stereotypical age, gender and profession portrait to a sophisticated representation of belief systems.

We crafted our recruitment & retention strategy, marketing positioning and our management philosophy around these new personae.

An Ever-Evolving Community

On the one hand, people come to an organization with firm beliefs. On the other, our beliefs are shaped by our human experience. What this meant for our leadership program is that top leadership must always keep an eye out for the changes within the team. Roles, projects, communication and trainings must constantly be adapted for each individual as they grow and change their belief systems.

A word of caution, hence. Creating an inclusive, engagement-prone community is not a one-time thing. It means deeply caring about the people who join your organization, and seeing them through with roles and philosophies that continuously adapt to them as they engage deeper and deeper with you.

Creating a community for engagement is creating a culture where it’s not only ok to experiment and change- it’s expected, anticipated and planned for by leadership.

To see the behind-the-scenes story behind this story, have a look at our article, Post-Its for Insights.