stories – Dr. Vidya Hattangadi

Artefacts Drive the Organizational Culture

Dr Vidya Hattangadi — Mon, 02 May 2022 00:05:40 +0000

Myntra Fashion’s office in Bengaluru

Edgar Schein a former Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management is known for his work in the field of organizational development, more so in areas such as career development, talent management, group dynamics and cultural developments. Edgar Schein‘s model of organizational culture originated in the 1980s. Edgar Schein identified three distinct levels in organizational cultures: artefacts and behaviors, espoused (adopted) values and assumptions which came to be known as Edgar Schein’s three levels of organizational culture.

This paper highlights on importance of artefacts in showcasing organizational culture.

Artefacts

Artefacts are the apparent and obvious elements of an organization. They are typically the things which even an outsider can see, such as furniture in the office layout, dressing norms, inside atmosphere, jovial and helpful. Free food, birthday celebration, annual holidays is also artefacts. A beautifully decorated reception area with artistic furniture and aesthetic fixers showcase the organization’s culture. Artefacts can be easy to observe but sometimes difficult to understand, especially if your analysis of a culture never goes deeper. The Palo Alto office of IDEO famously has an airplane wing jutting out from one wall, a surprising and puzzling artefact if one doesn’t understand IDEO’s culture of playful experimentation and free expression.

For some Microsoft engineers in India, working in tech-driven infrastructure merged seamlessly with the local cultural influence is a pleasant experience. Spread across the top three floors of a six-story building in Noida, a satellite town of India’s capital New Delhi, in their newest Microsoft India Development Centre (IDC). What sets the space apart from regular corporate workspaces is the historical context it draws from. In simmering ivory white and dotted with jaali work typical Mughal architectural style of perforated stone or latticed screen, arches, and domed ceilings, the IDC Noida campus’ architectural reference points, inspired by one of the world’s biggest architectural wonders, the Taj Mahal, are hard to miss. Microsoft wants to portray that it respects Indian heritage and wants to enrich its endeavour in India that’s what the office portrays.

In psychology a first impression is an experience when one person first comes across another person, a house, a building, an office so on. The person forms a rational image or an impression of that person or place. The interior and the exterior speak a lot about the organization or family, though they remain silent. The impression need not always be accurate; it varies depending on the observer’s frame of mind and the target person, place, object, scene, etc. being observed. It has been proved that it takes just one-tenth of a second for us to judge something. Imagine, how much time is one tenth of a second – and in that we form an opinion – some very important and some not so important.

Artefacts include any tangible, evident or verbally identifiable elements in an organization. These include the architecture, beautification of workplace, careful design, layout, fitting and maintenance, built-in space for movement (space, sound, and acoustics), functionality, attractive visuals, elegance, furniture etc. Artefacts include dress codes – explicit dress codes speak a lot about workplace culture. They are varied as workplaces are. It differs as per the nature of the workplace; it is the starting point of defining and determining a dress code. Wearing I-Card and clean dress, well-groomed employees speak a lot about 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. When an organization has a strong culture, three things happen: employees know how top management wants them to respond to any situation, employees believe that the expected response is the proper one, and employees know that they will be rewarded for demonstrating the organization’s values.

There are six major types of artefacts: symbols, physical structures, language, stories, rituals, and ceremonies.

On the most basic level, a good interior design improves a space by making it better suited to its purpose. Interior design is a process that provides people working in an organization with a set of aesthetically pleasing, pleasant atmosphere for giving efficient solutions for a better use of the space in question. The goal of interior design is to improve the user experience by better managing the space available for the interdependent processes in the working environment of an organization.

A well designed office is a nice place to work. It gives the facelift to renowned companies for their creative culture and attempt to emulate what they’re doing, but without understanding the dynamics of culture, we may only mimic its surface-level elements and fail to make lasting cultural change. For example, it’s easy to look at tech companies and notice foosball tables or beer carts and lots of free food. But such objects are only part of the picture.

Established in 1990, in chaotic commercial hub of Nehru Place in Delhi is the Paharpur Business Centre with an exterior tall, greyish-white with rectangular windows spread over 50,000 square feet and six floors. When you step inside you are taken aback with the multitude of money plants that fill your vision. It is not an ordinary office.

The Paharpur Business Centre was declared as the Capital’s healthiest working place from environment point of view in a city. As such Delhi is notoriously famous for being the most polluted city in the world. This building manufactures its own air that is supposedly of ‘mountain-fresh’ quality and free of any toxins. The building is house for 1200 plants such as areca palms and snake plants which are placed everywhere. There are 4 plants for every employee on an average. The air inside this quiet building smells slightly medicinal and is completely still. It is only after some time that you realize why the gentle breeze and general hum of air conditioning units that are present in other offices or homes are missing here. It seems air conditioners are switched on only on the weekends to give the plants some rest.

The employees are organization’s first brand ambassadors. Law firms are different from IT firms, hospitals are different from hospitality, manufacturing is different from retail and back office work is different from client-facing work. Dress codes, languages, selection of courteous language, office jokes, all exemplify organizational artefacts. Artefacts are the visible elements in a culture and they make the first impression on outsiders. Lazy, shabbily dressed, sloppy employees mar the image of the organization. When we meet gossiping, paying no heed to customers and lost in their old world employees, we lose interest in transacting with those organizations.

From the entrance of an organization a person feels a strong or weak culture. While designing an office, weightage is given by the management to cultural priorities. Values focus not on individuals but on the organization and its goals. Leaders in successful companies live their cultures every day and go out of their way to communicate their cultural identities to employees as well as prospective new hires.

For example Myntra is a major Indian fashion e-commerce company headquartered in Bengaluru. The company’s office is the one that is full of creativity. It is full of energy with colours, elements and visual merchandising just perfect to energize and inspire its 1500 young users, the company believes that more the colours, more ideas.

Espoused Values

A mission statement describes the overall purpose of an organization. Vision statements mention aspirations of the organization; they lay out the most important primary goals for a company. The mission and vision statements are displayed at most vital places in the organization such as the entrance, boardroom, all departments, canteen etc. The organizational culture is a system of shared traditions, values, and beliefs, which have a great effect on how people behave in organizations. When organizations formalise espoused values they must be aligned with organization’s core character. They act as statement of an organisation’s guiding principles and beliefs, and provide a meaningful keystone for behaviour at all levels of the organisation. Values are lasting beliefs which have a strong influence on the people in the organization. It tells how the organization appears in public eyes.

Assumed Values

The most observable feature in an organization is the behaviour of employees. It is the manifestations of an organization’s culture that employees can easily see or talk about. Employers have a vital role in perpetuating a strong culture, starting with recruiting and selecting applicants who will share the organization’s beliefs and thrive in that culture, developing orientation, training and performance management programs that outline and reinforce the organization’s core values and ensuring that appropriate rewards and recognition go to employees who truly embody the values.

Conclusion

Artefacts demonstrate the culture, norms and values of those who are in the organisation as well as all its stakeholders. In a nutshell it is a medium of communication within the members of the organisation and those outside the organisation.

Robert Cook’s model is an extension of Edgar Schein’s model. An ineffective culture can bring down the organization and its leadership. Disengaged employees, high employee turnover, poor customer relations and lower profits are examples of how the wrong culture can negatively impact the bottom line.

Individuals from different backgrounds and varied interests come together on a common platform called organization to achieve targets as well as earning their own salaries. Individuals in organizations work in accord to achieve towards a common goal. The behaviour of the employees is driven by the culture of the workplace. How people interact amongst themselves and with outsiders also depend on the organization culture.

The artefacts, espoused values and assumed values policies, practices, principles of an organization form its culture. It is essential for an employee to understand the culture and adjust to it well to deliver his level best and win management’s appreciation.

Importance of listening or reading bedtime stories

Dr Vidya Hattangadi — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:01:00 +0000

Reading bedtime stories

“Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating and drinking; more so, in fact, while food makes us live, stories make our lives more worth living”. Richard Kearney

Stories are an integral part of our lives and it has no age limit; as children we heard stories from our parents, grandparents, teachers which were like fairy tales, morale boosting stories. And in our adult hood as per the stage in lifecycle our interest for themes of stories kept changing. Stories form an essential part of our lives, we need them regularly. One of the most consequential and enjoyable aspects of our lives is that we spent time listening to with stories, primarily in novel form, reading about events and people who interest us.

Why do we watch movies? We watch movies and television serials to watch stories. They are so necessary because they serve so many critical functions that enable us to survive and thrive as humans, all at once. Through stories, we share passions, fears, sadness, hardships, and joys, and we find common ground with characters woven in them. We connect with those characters/protagonists in stories mentally and sometimes in real life stories we communicate, get friendly with the characters that are like us.

Stories are universal, conveying meaning and purpose that help us understand ourselves better and find commonality with others. There is a scientific explanation for our love of stories: when we hear a story that resonates with us, our levels of a hormone called oxytocin increase and this hormone is a “feel good” hormone.

We must listen to stories especially during bedtime to escape the humdrum, routine and boring nature of life. The routine nature bores us we all look up for some significant events in life. A story disintegrates the everyday events, releasing out the boring bits. Through story, we can imagine being somebody else or going in a different world of fantasies, without taking on the risks or expense ourselves. We can even do the impossible, like travel through time or explore the universe.

Listening to bedtime stories

And believe me; this escape factor makes stories highly entertaining. They pass the time. They are fun. The fun factor enables stories to fulfil their other functions. One of the most basic functions of the story is to teach. We use stories also to quickly and easily learn facts. As a Professor, I always give business examples to my students of MBA in form of stories and it works wonders. Research shows that we retain facts more readily if they are related in narrative form. Stories teach us how to be, what to be, where to be.

Human culture has evolved and bosomed via storytelling. Through stories, we communicate to our children and others how to behave, how to take decisions, values of life etc. Stories preserve our own history and culture, passing it along in a form that is easy to remember to the next generation. We use stories not only to learn but also to speculate, to pose questions and then find solutions.

Story tellers have stretched our imaginations beyond mind’s eye, we have made contact with aliens, we have gone into different space, and we have disappeared through time machine and what not. Stories help us explore all the possibilities. Stories help us understand hypothetical situation as well. When we tell stories about ourselves, we are imagining all our possible futures and, we hope, helping ourselves choose the best ones.

Beyond just speculation about what might happen, we use stories to answer the great unanswerable questions. Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? What does it mean to be human? Stories bring order and meaning to the chaos and unpredictability of life. A story always has a beginning, middle and end, which is very satisfying to us, since we don’t know how our own personal story will end. And our lives are really a search for our own story.

Psychologists say that bedtime stories work wonders for adults too as they create a new sleep onset association. Many people listen to audio books. It is really helpful, as you don’t realise when you go off to sleep. But make sure to set a timer so it doesn’t keep playing all night. The hormones oxytocin and serotonin secrete well while listening to stories because of mood stimulation. And, if you are good story teller you can help the seniors in house to fall asleep easily by telling them good bedtime stories.

A good night’s sleep is essential for our well being and our health, but in our busy lives sleep is often poor and overlooked. Now is the time to stop a while and find comfort and wonder in other worlds where all is well and sleep just a stance/a page/ a pause away.

What is faith and how is it important?

Dr Vidya Hattangadi — Thu, 14 May 2020 00:01:00 +0000

Faith balances the psychological and emotional disturbances in our life. Faith expresses a hope in our mind. Faith is total trust, confidence or assurance in somebody, a theory, an idea, or something. Faith is connected with belief in God; more than a yearning, it is closer to a belief, that your wishes will be fulfilled. A belief is deep-rooted in the mind but faith is based in the heart. The world is full of diverse castes, creeds and religions; the way of thinking of each society is different, their impressions and philosophies are different but yet, each one has been grounded because of faith. Faith has a lot of positive energy. Faith is a quality that is inbuilt in a cultural mentality. It has been there right from beginning of mankind. However logic has always challenged faith. When ‘if’, ‘but’, ‘can it?’, ‘does it,’ ‘will it’ crops up in mind, faith is challenged or disputed. Faith gives immense strength to our mind, the moment we try to rationalize faith, it creates imbalance and we lose our peace of mind.

Faith gives us little peace, consolation, comfort and security; it gives us awareness that the creator – Almighty is guiding us. We are being protected by Him. We act in faith even when there is no guarantee, no certainty. There is such a lot of unpredictability in life about everything. Yet, we transact, we take up jobs, start businesses, hire people, take higher degrees, we marry someone, produce kids, bring them up – do you realize – we do so many things by one single emotion which is called faith. Without faith the world would have stopped up. Faith speaks the language of the heart. It is an expression of hope that goes beyond the conscious mind. All that we hold precious and valued in our life strongly rests upon faith in people, faith in relationships, faith in nature, faith in goodness and its potential. When from the history of mankind there are evidences of cheating, grabbing, warring, brutality and viciousness on one side, on the other side there is compassions, tenderness, kindness and concern. Faith helps us fight the bad. Faith makes us stronger human.

It seems shortly after turning fifty Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis. With his all recorded great works which had made him so famous in world, he found his sense of purpose diminishing, he felt his celebrity and public acclaim fluttering. Tolstoy started sinking into a state of deep dejection and melancholy despite having a large estate, good health for his age, his wife was good and she had borne his fourteen children. Tolstoy was a public figure and had gained eternal literary fame. Still he faced a mental trauma and was on the brink of committing suicide. It seems he made one last grasp at light amidst the darkness of his existence, turning to the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions for answers to the age-old question regarding the meaning of life. Tolstoy – the great literary man has mentioned about faith in his later mythical works.

Life is not anything but roller-coaster ride. When things go right, when you are doing well, people will ignite your passion for achievement by believing in you, supporting you and cheering you. But when you experience bad time, when you journey becomes bouncy, the same people criticize you for the smallest mistakes. They defame you. When you have to rise to the occasion and face the challenges of life on your own, only faith gives you the ability to fight it out. It is therefore important to have faith in yourself and in your capacity to perform to the best of your ability. When faced with rough situations, always believe in yourself. If you don’t believe, no one else will. Your self-confidence and esteem stem from a strong belief in who you are and what you stand for. It is very important to bear in mind that you are your number one supporter and fan. Secondly, life is what you make it. Believing that you can make it happen for yourself is an important step towards making a life which you imagine. You must consider that you can do it and that you will succeed. Napoleon Hill has said it precisely it takes a person’s half lifetime to discover the objectives of his life. A lot of the decisions you make and things you do depend upon you; so arm yourself with faith in yourself.

Do you know that for Newton the world of science was by no means the whole of life? He spent more time on theology than on science; indeed, he wrote about 1.3 million words on biblical subjects. Yet this vast legacy lay hidden from public view for two centuries until the auction of his nonscientific writings in 1936.

It’s only your faith in the God and yourself which helps you in worst times in your life. I have read this little story somewhere which I am sharing with you all. Read on: One rainy night, at 11:30 p.m an older African American woman was standing on the side of an Alabama highway
trying hard to tolerate a lashing rain storm. Her car had broken down and she desperately needed a ride. Soaking wet, she decided to flag down the next car. A young white man stopped to help her, generally unheard of in those conflict-filled days of racism in 1960’s. The man
took her to shelter, helped her get assistance and put her into a taxicab.
She seemed to be in a big hurry, but she took down his address and thanked him. Seven days went by and a knock came on the white man’s door. To his surprise, a giant console color TV was delivered to his home. A special note was attached. It read: “Thank you so much for assisting me on the Alabama highway the other night. The rain drenched not only my clothes, but also my spirits. I wanted to rush home to meet my dying husband. Your timely help enabled me to make it to my dying husband’s’ bedside just before he passed away……………………God Bless you for helping me and unselfishly serving others; sincerely, Mrs. Nat King Cole.”

That’s the charm of having faith. God sends somebody to help you because he can’t let down your faith in Him. How important is faith? It takes faith to believe that what God always supports your right deeds. He holds you in tough times. Your faith helps you trust and walk each and every day. Whatever faith you have inside of you will determine the outcome of all your deeds. Many people mistakenly identify faith with religion, but faith predates religion. Faith is intangible…………..it’s abstract and subjective. Everyone has their own measuring sticks as to what information is credible and worthy of trust.

These lines of Thomas Aquinas superbly explain what faith is: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible”.