How to align culture and behaviour to ensure human-centred business success

Rapid changes in the environment, social change, technology, and geopolitical instability are shaping an increasingly complex landscape for businesses around the world. But while many companies are investing in technological solutions to those issues, they may be missing a trick by neglecting the more traditional, human side of their work, according to new insights from Nextcontinent.

Human-centred innovation is a conceptual framework aimed at ensuring organisations stay adaptable, by continuously listening to their customers and evolving along with them. Shifting focus from “What can we build?” to “What do people really need?” – an area which is often forgotten in the haste of companies to simply innovate for fear of missing out – it helps organisations empathise with their employees and customers, and encourage them to renew engagement with their products.

This topic is particularly important to Nextcontinent, an international network of consulting firms which is dedicated to helping organisations evolve their operational models to thrive amid these times of constant change. As the global landscape becomes increasingly dynamic, corporations cannot afford to rely on static approaches; instead, they must adopt flexible, forward-thinking strategies tailored to diverse and complementary organisational models – and to help them, the organisation has published ‘The Future of Companies: a Human-Centred Organisation’ – an extensive whitepaper explaining why firms need to change, and how they should go about it.

The author of the report, Camille Gauthier, explains in the paper, “We believe that the human-centred evolution of companies will play a significant role in shaping the future reality of organisations. This should be taken seriously as a key ingredient of companies’ future, as it is both emerging and supported by the main trends defining the future.”

In particular, Gauthier underscored two key points. It is crucial for companies to prioritise an aligned organisational culture is crucial for their strategic considerations, spanning the entire employee’s journey. And, to achieve this, they will need to “characterise a company culture and align it with employees”.

Gauthier added, “By leveraging organisational archetypes, organisations can get valuable insights into analysing and responding effectively to evolving workplace culture. While there are other approaches to addressing this issue, this approach is, to our knowledge, the most effective and reality-based.”

Defining a company culture

Culture is the secret ingredient that makes a company succeed. Pointing to the referential work of Grace LaConte, Nextcontinent’s paper defined company culture as “expectations of behaviour, words, symbols, habits, values, and beliefs that directly impact an organisation’s work environment, vision & mission, ethical practices, objectives, and performance standards.” 

As such, it serves as the underlying framework that guides how employees work and interact, reflecting the company’s vision, ethic and norms, and often plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining talent. 

To help define the kind of organisational culture that will help firms build for human-centricity, the paper suggests organising concepts associated with the firm into a pyramid, or iceberg – with the most central concepts at its base. Looking at the beliefs of a company’s founders, this can include: what they value, how they reward staff, what they do for fun, and the structure (or lack of structure) they create. 

This can evolve progressively, integrating more of the employees’ and society’s values as time goes by – but visualising these concepts as the foot of an iceberg shows that workplace culture, though not explicit, plays the main part in defining how the employee experience will unfold.

Aligning culture and behaviour

Supercharging the company with a fruitful employee experience requires alignment between the organisational culture, and the employee’s personal culture – supported by the social structures of the company. To explain how to facilitate this, Nextcontinent’s paper points to the work of the Barrett Values Centre, which has researched the ways organisational culture can become a “winning culture”. 

In particular, two specific alignments are essential in this regard. First, values alignment is needed, with the values and beliefs of an individual resonates with those of the collective organisation it is part of. If a company’s culture aligns with the individual’s, they will be engaged to act in line with the purpose of the company. Second, there is structural alignment, when the values and beliefs at the centre of an organisation are consistent with the actions and behaviours within that organisation. With these mechanisms in place, the culture becomes embodied within the company, and is therefore actually experienced by the employees.

These alignments can ensure cultural performance is optimised, with circumstances created for an additional alignment between employees’ well-being and performance. This includes personal alignment, in which there is a resonance between an employee’s personal values and their displayed behaviour in the company’s environment. And it involves mission alignment, in which the employee’s behaviour in professional context is in line with the company’s collective action.

Gauthier concluded, “Through a description of these four alignments, we have designed a step-by-step map to an aligned company, where culture is at the centre of the success, creating both well-being and performance, through a balanced and consistent resonance between culture and structure, both collectively and individually.”