Organisational culture assessment

Culture is not the values written on the wall

Organisational culture is easiest to discuss at the level of declarations — which is exactly why that discussion changes nothing. How people actually work with each other is settled by much smaller things: who informs whom, and who finds out by accident; whether a decision has an owner; what happens when somebody says “that’s not my area”; what a meeting looks like when nobody came prepared.

The aim of this process is to recognise the practices, behaviours and communication habits that affect the quality of collaboration, the atmosphere, the sense of accountability and how smoothly the organisation operates — and then to design change where change is actually needed.

This is not about judging people

That sentence is the boundary of the whole method, not a courtesy. We are looking for mechanisms: seemingly minor, repeated behaviours and unwritten rules that can blur accountability, obstruct the flow of information, stretch processes out, limit commitment, or simply manufacture tension between people and between teams.

A mechanism can be changed. Judging a person produces defensiveness — and closes the very sources of information the diagnosis was meant to come from.

Two phases, in this order

Phase I answers one question: what actually needs to change? The diagnosis draws on several complementary sources — an on-line survey built around the organisation’s structure, a workshop using our own „Mozaika Kultury Organizacji” tool, a SWOT analysis of the collaboration culture, individual conversations with people from different levels and areas, and an analysis of specific situations and everyday practices. None of these is sufficient alone: a survey shows the distribution, a conversation shows the mechanism, a workshop shows what people are able to say about themselves together.

Phase II is the rollout and the embedding of change, and its scope follows from the diagnosis. Only once it is clear what is not working, or where the organisation loses energy needlessly, can anyone decide how best to work on it and how to make the change stick. The formats vary — team workshops, training courses, work with the management team, coaching or mentoring, consultations, working out simple standards for communication, changing selected practices or processes — and that is precisely why we do not settle them in an offer.

What you receive after Phase I

A diagnosis naming the mechanisms that support collaboration and those that hinder it, together with the risks. A map of priority change areas with a recommended way of working further. A presentation of the findings discussed with the team accountable for the project, and an agreed action plan.

Phase I is complete in itself. If you decide afterwards to carry the work on with your own people, you leave it holding the material that makes that possible.

A boundary worth knowing

An organisational culture assessment is a consulting service, not a training course. It has no syllabus, no level and no open enrolment date — it has a diagnosis, a change design, and a rollout whose scope follows from the diagnosis. If what you need is to build competencies in a workshop format, the trainings linked from this page are the right path.

There is a boundary in the other direction too. If the diagnosis is needed because the organisation has just acquired another company, and somebody has to run the whole integration cycle — the operating model, processes, HR systems, governance and culture at once, with decision points for the board — then a culture assessment is one workstream rather than the whole engagement. The right service in that situation is post-merger integration support.

Let’s talk about what has stopped working in your organisation — the shape of the diagnosis follows from that.