Have you ever really thought about the impact of your business human resource (HRs) department? If you haven’t, you’re probably missing out on the fact that it is possible to create the precise atmosphere you desire in your company through the influence of the HR team.

In addition to this, HRs play a vital role in determining and further maintaining select organizational cultures within a business. 

A founder might dictate the kind of culture they want to prevail in the company. But a huge bulk of the work involved in developing that preferred culture rests on personals of the HR department. Let’s see how this works. 

4 Ways HR Impacts Organisational Culture

We find it really interesting to dissect this topic since we personally have a thing or two to learn from it. 

Considering the Organisational Culture Goal in a Hiring Process

The basic aim of the hiring process in any company is to ensure the admittance of employees who fit a desired quality, character, or skill.

Interviews conducted by HR teams try to examine prospective employees to understand their past experience, scrutinize their capacity to work in the existing company atmosphere and discover their hidden talents and potential.

In the same vein, company HR teams are in a good position to hire people based on their understanding and acceptance of the company culture. 

For instance, businesses that embrace cultural diversity would only hire people who do the same. They would, first of all, make their cultural preference visible through their job description.

Next, they would design and enable a culturally inclusive interview and shortlisting process and make necessary considerations along the way. 

Finally, after handpicking new employees who share similar values and are judged to be the right fit for the company, the HR department would go on to train them on avoiding cultural bias in their engagement with fellow employees, clients, or customers of the business. 

Creating Attractive Reward Systems

HR teams can promote a specific company culture by setting up attractive reward systems.

This can come naturally at the end of a performance management session (with preceding phases being planning, monitoring, developing, and rating), and it will work like any other compensation scheme where positive action is taken towards people who perform satisfactorily or whose actions produce a desired result.

For example, a sales representative is given a bonus commission for reaching a new sales record within a business. It is usually common to see a company reward system focus on providing financial benefits to employees.

However, it doesn’t always have to be so. Some rather interesting alternatives for this include; company sponsored end of year trips, free launch arrangements, free commuting arrangements, and short work leaves:

Fostering Self-Development Among Employees

Now, more than ever, businesses are expressing concern for the personal and career growth of their employees. The reason is quite simple. Having a team of knowledgeable or experienced employees reduces the cost of business operations and the stress involved in undertaking operations.

You would often find that there is better communication between different levels of employees. Additionally, self-development habits will help promote a better understanding of job requirements, increase decision-making abilities (for example, when faced with an operational challenge), and spark the creativity that could significantly reduce job time or difficulty.

HRs can strategically capitalize on self-development habits to achieve the adoption of a specific company culture by:

Encouraging staff to read books that speak about the chosen company culture:

The keys to effective self-development are hidden in books and so it is imperative to choose the right books and to take the time to read properly. HRs can go ahead to sponsor a book reading habit by gifting choice books to employees, providing a physical library within the office, or creating easy access by sharing soft copies of books with staff. 

Facilitating discussions to reveal ideas and benefits of a chosen company culture:

Knowledge-sharing sessions serve to open old and new employees up to relevant company cultures and values. Human resource teams can put a foot on this when they create weekly or monthly schedules and further make plans to facilitate or enrich discussions in each knowledge-sharing session. 

Helping staff in setting and achieving goals that are centered around the chosen company culture:

Imagine that a staff sets out on a personal goal to reach less privileged individuals, hear their stories, and then figure out ways to offer assistance. The company, through its HR team, can relate with such staff and partner with them to the aim of completing the mission.

Getting this done could involve creating a funding or logistics program and infusing this into the general company program. 

You can be certain that the participating staff - in this instance- will have a deeper appreciation for the company culture, and other staff will equally feel inspired to develop and pursue their own individual goals. 

Prompting staff in learning and acquiring relevant professional certifications or qualifications:

In a company where a hierarchical culture exists, there might be one or more employees who are unaccustomed to such settings.

Typically, these employees will have a difficult time fitting in with the team, and asides from the fact that this will impact their personal experience on the job, it will also lower the overall productivity of any team they belong to within the organization. 

Regulating Leadership and Executive Decisions

Business leaders and executives shoulder a lot of responsibilities. Among these responsibilities is promoting, maintaining, and also, personally expressing the company's culture and values.

Unfortunately, however, the sheer number of activities that a business executive engages in creates a good chance of forgetting or simply failing to express one or more of the same company’s values which they encourage employees to practice - and this is where HR teams step in. 

We do not mean to say that business executives are in any position to work outside set values and culture but we understand that a high-end decision might sometimes (perhaps only rarely) push top employees to want to ignore specific company values.

This situation must be avoided at all costs. The reason is that taking steps outside the set culture will give regular staff a negative perception of their leaders. Secondly, lower-level staff will likely develop the idea of ignoring company values or culture when they see executives doing the same and going unchecked. 

The role of a business HR team towards its executives is, therefore, that of a guide in the sense that they monitor the quality, motive, and general direction of the decisions that come from the top.

Watching high-ranking employees in this manner helps to keep them in check, for instance, by making sure that they reflect company values of racial inclusivity in their interactions and relationship with people outside the organization. 

Conclusion

Organizational culture, otherwise called company culture, might refer to the clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy cultures - which we expressly spoke about in this article - or more simply to undocumented but accepted behaviors and responses within an organization.

And whichever one you may be referring to when you speak about company culture, it will always be true to say that HRs have a huge influence on it since they stand in a middle ground between employers and employees, and also even between the organization as a public entity and all its employees (including the HR team itself). 

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