Pity the team leading ‘corporate culture change’. This is time-consuming work; an attempt to define the indefinable in aspirational terms about which everyone has a point of view but few agree.
The type of organisational culture a company wants often ends up being an articulation of the hopes of those in charge. This is then promoted by people in leadership roles and rolled out across an organisation sometimes via enthusiastic volunteers charged with being ‘culture change’ champions.
Exactly what these cultural cheerleaders do and how successful they are varies between firms. Yet despite these ardent champions, many culture change initiatives that start with fanfare can be observed limping on past their sell by date having generated few tangible benefits.
So can AI mitigate this potentially familiar scenario?
Possibly. AI has the potential to illuminate existing ways of working and dominant behaviours bringing transparency to what is actually happening in a company that wants to change.
AI can also share these insights in more democratic and consistent ways than current culture change approaches allow.
How can the technology do this?
One. Transparency.
A company might really want to evolve its culture but no amount of cultural championing can assess what is happening on the ground.
If trained to recognise examples of the current culture which are getting in the way of change, an AI model can identify patterns of behaviours and actions which are out of step with the desired cultural norms.
Imagine a company believes that a healthy culture needs honest feedback irrespective of an individual’s role in the corporate hierarchy.
An AI can assess if this feedback is happening and to whom based on data gathered from performance management systems, leaver interviews and internal surveys, for example.
A model could weight evidence of feedback throughout the hierarchy and correlate this with data measuring employee sentiment that giving feedback to those in more senior roles is supported and not penalised.
Rather than making this data only available to leaders and the culture change team, a more transparent approach would be to train an AI model to aggregate and anonymise the insights. These could then be shared with employees through dashboards.
A worker could get access to data which would tell them whether the desired feedback norms were happening across their part of the organisation.
Two. Insights.
Because AI excels at analysing diverse data at a pace and depth which surpasses some human capabilities, these insights are potentially more democratic than standard internal communications methodologies on how a company’s culture is changing.
Each person can make sense for themselves whether the AI dashboard on feedback, for example, matches their own experience of the organisation’s culture.
Using AI to generate such insights might also mean there is no massaging of the message to the executives.
In this example AI could provide an unvarnished picture of how much feedback is or is not happening, where, in what context, by whom and to whom.
The most cited writer on corporate culture, Edgar Schein, talks about the problems of ‘Espoused Beliefs and Values’. In other words the gap between what people say an organisation’s culture ‘is’ or ‘should be’ and what it is actually like in practice.
AI’s potential to bring transparency and insights to those working in companies that are in the process of cultural change, makes the risk between what is being said and what is happening on the ground much more evident.
Whether anything is actually done about this of course remains the prerogative of those running the culture change programme!
Hopefully the culture champions feel empowered to take the AI insights and use these to adapt what and how they are nurturing the new norms.
References
Enholm, I. M., Papagiannidis, E., Mikalef, P., & Krogstie, J. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Business Value: A Literature Review. Information Systems Frontiers, 24(5), 1709–1734.
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership. John Wiley & Sons.
Sull, D., & Sull, C. (2024, February 12). Two experts predict AI will transform companies’ understanding of themselves. The Economist.