Gaps Between Desired Culture and Actual Culture: Analysis

Most organizations likely agree that a gap between desired and actual culture can undermine performance.

By methodically analyzing discrepancies between aspirational and current culture, leaders can map a path to greater alignment, engagement, and productivity.

In this article, we'll explore proven techniques for conducting a cultural gap analysis, identifying priorities for change, and bridging the divide between today's culture and tomorrow's vision.

Bridging the Gap Between Desired and Actual Organizational Culture

Defining Organizational Culture Aspirations

An organization's desired culture represents the values, norms, behaviors, and artifacts that leadership aspires the company to embrace. This aspirational culture enables the organization's strategy by aligning employees behind a shared mission, vision, and goals. Leadership defines the desired culture based on the behaviors and mindsets that will drive organizational success.

For example, a fast-paced tech startup may desire a culture of innovation, agility, and quick decision making to support bringing new products rapidly to market. The desired culture provides a compass to guide employee actions and foster an environment optimized for the organization's strategic needs.

Assessing the Current Organizational Identity

In contrast to the aspirational culture set by leadership, an organization's actual culture depicts the current state - the informal values, assumptions, and behaviors demonstrated by employees day-to-day. While formal policies may dictate expected cultural norms, the actual culture manifests through unwritten rules, habits, myths, and rituals adopted over time.

Surveys, focus groups, and employee engagement scores reveal the health of the current culture from an employee perspective. Discrepancies between desired and actual culture become apparent by comparing leadership's cultural aspirations to the lived experiences of employees.

Understanding the Culture Discrepancy

The gap between the intended, desired organizational culture and the informal, lived culture experienced by employees is known as the culture discrepancy or misalignment. A cohesive culture exhibits alignment between aspirations and actuality, while a fragmented culture displays tension between the two.

Common reasons for culture gaps include poor communication of desired cultural traits, competing subcultures within departments, lack of role modeling by leadership, and failure to reinforce desired cultural norms. Unaddressed culture gaps lead to wasted resources, decreased agility, and lack of strategy execution.

The Role of Leadership in Cultural Coherence

Bridging the gap between desired and actual culture falls within the critical responsibilities of organizational leadership. Executives and managers must clearly communicate cultural aspirations while also listening to employee experiences that reveal the true organizational identity.

Leaders who role model desired cultural traits through their own behaviors and decisions create integrity between principles and practices. By hiring and rewarding based on cultural fit, providing resources to enable desired behaviors, and creating feedback channels for employees, leadership drives cultural cohesion from the top-down. Consistent messaging and demonstrated commitment to desired cultural norms are essential to unify employee behaviors around strategic goals.

What is the gap between two cultures?

A culture gap refers to the differences between an organization's desired culture and the actual culture experienced by employees. This discrepancy can hinder a company's ability to foster engagement, retention, innovation, and other elements crucial for success.

Analyzing culture gaps enables organizations to:

Identify areas where the current and desired cultures are misaligned
Pinpoint specific issues driving the divide
Craft data-driven strategies to close the gap

Effective analysis examines factors like:

Leadership: The values demonstrated by managers often permeate the organization. Surveying leadership actions and attitudes can reveal if a gap exists between espoused and actual priorities.
Policies and practices: Formal processes that don't align with desired cultural traits—such as collaboration or transparency—can undermine those goals. Evaluating how policies are structured and implemented can uncover conflicts.
Employee perceptions: Gathering input from staff at all levels provides visibility into how they experience the culture day-to-day. This helps determine where gaps exist between intended and real impact.
Emotional energy: The mood and mindset of teams offers meaningful insight. Low energy levels often indicate a culture not empowering employees to thrive.

Strategic analysis of the gaps between current and aspired-to cultures allows organizations to make data-driven improvements. This facilitates greater alignment between organizational values and employee experiences for superior performance.

What is an example of a culture gap?

A common example of a culture gap is the discrepancy between a company's desired culture focused on innovation, agility, and transparency and the actual culture employees experience day-to-day.

For instance, leadership may aspire to create a "fail fast" culture that encourages experimentation and progressive thinking. However, middle management accustomed to hierarchical approval processes could inhibit this desired culture from taking hold. Employees become frustrated from mixed messages, unsure if they actually have autonomy to take risks.

Another example is a gap between an espoused customer-centric culture and one focused predominantly on shareholder returns. Public messaging conveys that customers come first, yet internal policies clearly prioritize cost reduction and short-term profits over service quality or customer satisfaction.

Ultimately, the magnitude of culture gaps relates to alignment between values, practices, processes, and incentives across all levels of an organization. Identifying where breaks exist is the first step toward bridging them.

How do you identify a culture gap?

Identifying gaps between a company's desired organizational culture and the actual culture experienced by employees is critical for leaders seeking cultural transformation and evolution. Several methods can reveal when misalignment exists:

Conduct Anonymous Employee Surveys

Annual or quarterly surveys gather crucial insights directly from staff. Include questions that gauge:

Emotional engagement levels
Trust in leadership
Comfort voicing concerns
Perceptions around core values
Views on innovation, collaboration, etc.

Compare results against the aspirational culture defined by executives. Discrepancies highlight potential gaps needing realignment.

Analyze Employee Churn and Exit Interviews

Trends in turnover rates and feedback shared during off-boarding interviews offer tangible data points:

Churn - Does higher churn exist in certain teams or generations? This could reflect culture gaps.
Exit Interview Content - Look for common themes around burnout, lack of growth opportunities, feeling undervalued, etc. These strongly indicate a disconnect between real and ideal culture.

Assess Productivity and Performance

Culture gaps can manifest in measurable ways:

Missed Deadlines - Consistent timeline failures suggest poor collaboration, engagement issues, lack of innovation, etc.
Output Quality - Declining quality shows employees aren't invested or empowered within the culture.

Carefully tracking these metrics provides actionable signals when gaps emerge.

Listen to Informal Employee Leaders

Engage authentic informal leaders to gain qualitative insights about ground truth issues impacting company culture and morale. Their perspectives expose blindspots leadership may have around cultural gaps.

By combining quantitative data and qualitative feedback from both formal surveys and trusted staff, HR leaders can accurately identify and measure discrepancies between the intended and actual cultures. This enables data-driven action planning to close gaps through revised strategies targeting engagement, realignment, and transformation at organizational and team levels.

What is a cultural gap analysis?

A cultural gap analysis compares the actual culture employees experience day-to-day in an organization to the desired or "aspirational" culture leadership aims to create. It identifies discrepancies between the real and ideal to inform strategic plans for cultural transformation.

Key aspects of a cultural gap analysis include:

Surveying Employees on Current Culture: Anonymous employee surveys gather perceptions across factors like leadership, communication, collaboration, recognition, innovation, etc. This reveals the authentic informal culture at all levels.
Interviewing Executives on Goals: Stakeholder interviews outline executive visions for cultural identity and values. This defines the formal aspirational culture from the top-down strategic lens.
Comparing Datasets: Powerful analytics contrast survey trends and interview themes to quantify gaps around behaviors, mindsets, processes, etc.
Strategizing Around Gaps: The delta between real and aspirational culture spotlights priority areas for change management plans, leadership development, employee engagement initiatives, and more.

Cultural gap analysis is invaluable for organizations undergoing growth, digital transformation, M&As, or realigning around new values. It makes "culture" tangible for data-driven strategic planning.

Common reasons for cultural gaps include outdated legacy culture, poor change management, lack of role modeling by leaders, and inertia around transforming bold visions into reality. Ongoing analysis sustains alignment.

Conducting a Comprehensive Cultural Assessment

To determine the extent of divergence between desired and actual culture, organizations must conduct thorough cultural analyses using surveys, interviews, focus groups and observation.

Designing Surveys for Cultural Diagnostics

Well-designed surveys with open responses distributed across roles, teams and locations provide quantitative and qualitative data on the actual lived culture. Surveys should aim to assess key aspects of culture like values, norms, behaviors and emotional energy. Both rating scale and open-ended questions should be included to quantify cultural dimensions and capture authentic perspectives. Surveys must be carefully designed to eliminate biases and allow honest feedback.

Leveraging Interviews for Deep Cultural Insights

In-depth interviews, particularly with long-standing staff, offer perspectives into how culture has shifted over time and during periods of change. Interviews can uncover complex cultural dynamics that surveys may miss. It's important to interview a diverse range of employees at all levels to get a holistic view. Interview questions should probe into alignment of espoused and enacted values, peer-to-peer interactions, leadership accessibility and modeling of desired culture. The qualitative insights gathered enable targeted culture shaping initiatives.

Observing Organizational Behavior in Action

Ethnographic observation of both formal interactions like meetings as well as casual settings reveals subtle cultural dynamics not captured through surveys alone. Trained organizational development professionals can objectively document cultural patterns through observation. Key behaviors to note are communication norms, conflict resolution, decision making processes and displays of authentic informal leadership. Observation also allows benchmarking of culture pre and post-transformation to track progress.

Engaging Authentic Informal Leaders in Cultural Change

Identifying and collaborating with genuine informal leaders who can influence the cultural transformation journey is pivotal. Informal leaders exhibit qualities like integrity, care for others, commitment to excellence that earn them respect. They role model desired behaviors and can sway peers through their social capital. Informal leaders should be looped into culture initiatives as change agents. Their perspectives and emotional energy must align for interventions to permeate the broader organization.

Analyzing Cultural Gap Assessment Data

Once sufficient data has been gathered from employee surveys, focus groups, and behavioral observations, structured analysis comparing leadership's cultural aspirations against employee perspectives enables meaningful insights.

Coding for Cultural Alignment and Misalignment

Utilizing qualitative analysis software, we can code for recurring cultural motifs like collaboration, recognition, accountability that surface across the various data sources. This allows us to identify patterns and themes related to organizational culture.

Identifying Key Areas of Cultural Divergence

With cultural codes defined through the software analysis, we can systematically tag areas of strong alignment and divergence between the desired cultural traits set by leadership and the actual lived experiences described by employees. This indicates where there are gaps between the aspirational and reality.

Prioritizing Critical Culture Gaps for Intervention

Finally, through examining the qualitative data and frequency of specific culture codes, we can highlight the 3-5 major gaps between desired and actual organizational culture. These pivotal areas likely impact key outcomes like strategy execution, employee performance, or retention. Focusing change management efforts on these critical gaps can have an outsized impact.

Harnessing Emotional Energy for Cultural Integration

Understanding the emotional energy and engagement levels of employees is key to driving cultural change. By identifying the authentic informal leaders who model desired behaviors and have influence amongst their peers, we can channel their emotional energy to align the culture. This facilitates cultural integration and coherence across the organization.

Strategies for Cultural Transformation and Alignment

With priority gaps illuminated, targeted strategies for realigning culture become possible, ensuring policies, practices and leadership messaging convey consistent signals.

Re-evaluating Cultural Artifacts and Practices

To close gaps between desired culture and actual culture, a careful review of existing cultural artifacts and practices is needed to determine alignment with desired cultural attributes. This involves:

Auditing reward systems and incentives at all levels to ensure they actively promote and reinforce the desired culture. For example, if collaboration is a cultural priority but bonuses are based purely on individual performance, mixed signals are being sent.
Assessing whether training and development opportunities emphasize building skills and mindsets that enable the aspired culture. If creativity is desired but training focuses narrowly on technical competencies, alignment gaps persist.
Evaluating policies, procedures, and guidelines to guarantee they facilitate, rather than hinder, cultural aspirations. Rigid approval chains could constrain desired agility, flexibility, or autonomy.

Where misalignments emerge, interventions like incentive restructuring, training redesign, and policy evolution catalyze transformation.

Ensuring Leadership Consistency in Culture Messaging

Leadership modeling and communication greatly inform actual culture. Analyzing alignment requires:

Interviewing employees at all levels to diagnose how they perceive executive strategic messaging and vision as aligning with cultural aspirations.
Surveying staff to gauge the consistency between leader words and actions. Do they practice what they preach?
Using organizational culture assessment data to pinpoint teams or segments seeing substantial leadership misalignment. Then meeting to realign.
Establishing clear accountability for leaders to regularly communicate cultural vision while demonstrating desired mindsets and behaviors themselves.

Enabling leadership to inspire culture change through authentic, consistent action is key.

Targeting Subcultures for Cultural Fit and Engagement

Cultural integration is enabled by diagnosing and addressing distinct subcultures demonstrating misfit with larger organizational culture. Tactics involve:

Using culture discrepancy data to determine teams or locations with wide gaps between current and desired culture.
Conducting focus groups and surveys to understand root causes of this misalignment based on that group's distinct attitudes and experiences.
Partnering with subcultural leadership and members to co-create interventions addressing identified divergence drivers, leveraging subcultural insights.
Tracking progress regularly via pulse surveys and assessing leading indicators of cultural change like employee engagement.

Subcultural alignment enables organizational culture transformation.

Implementing Change Management for Cultural Coherence

A structured change management approach ensures cultural evolution initiatives cascade deeply and enduringly across all segments. This demands:

Clearly communicating the case for culture change, desired future state, and transparency around current misalignments and priorities.
Involving staff in co-creating cultural transformation plans to enable buy-in and psychological safety.
Providing continual reinforcement via training, leadership modeling, and community building to support adoption.
Using rhythmic assessments to diagnose adoption barriers and iteratively refine approaches targeting lagging areas.

With multilayered interventions and support structures guided by change management discipline, culture transforms.

Measuring and Sustaining Cultural Alignment Over Time

Continuously assessing alignment between intended strategy and actual behaviors builds accountability and momentum for culture change efforts.

Re-assessing Culture with Follow-up Analysis

6-12 months after initial review, re-run abbreviated cultural survey, interviews and observation to gauge progress. This provides quantitative and qualitative data to see where alignment has improved or if further action is needed.

Key steps include:

Survey sample of employees using reduced set of cultural assessment questions
Conduct focus groups and 1-on-1 interviews to gather employee perspectives
Observe meetings and events to witness real behaviors and interactions
Compare data to baseline to quantify progress made
Identify outstanding gaps between current and desired culture
Adjust change management plans accordingly

Regular re-assessment creates accountability and urgency for adopting an aligned culture.

Tracking Leading Indicators of Cultural Shift

Early signs of culture change like participation rates in new programs can indicate if efforts gain traction. Useful metrics include:

Program enrollment and completion rates
Utilization of new collaboration tools
Adoption of desired behaviors by leadership
Employee participation in culture building events
Sentiment analysis from employee feedback

Tracking leading indicators makes it possible to course correct early if culture change initiatives fail to take hold.

Evaluating Long-term Outcomes of Cultural Realignment

Over longer-term, track retention, engagement, performance metrics to judge cultural realignment impact. Relevant measures include:

Employee retention and turnover rates
Employee engagement and satisfaction scores
Productivity and performance benchmarks
Promotion rates and career progression
Recruiting metrics such as offer acceptances

Sustained improvement would signify initiatives successfully realigned culture.

Fostering Continuous Employee Engagement and Feedback

Creating mechanisms for ongoing employee input ensures cultural initiatives remain relevant and effective. Tactics like:

Embedded pulse surveys with open feedback
Focus groups to share experiences
Suggestion boxes for improvement ideas
Crowdsourcing inspiration for new programs

Continuous engagement demonstrates culture is a living process, not a fixed end state.

Conclusion: Synthesizing the Journey from Cultural Discrepancy to Harmony

In summary, by regularly diagnosing gaps between intended and actual culture using surveys, interviews and observations - then addressing misalignments with targeted interventions - organizations can drive strategic success.

Recap: The Critical Role of Culture in Organizational Success

The actual values and norms demonstrated by people across the company dictate whether intended strategy gets implemented. Having alignment between desired culture and actual culture is key for organizations to achieve their goals.

Regular assessment of the gaps between intended and actual culture can uncover areas where misalignment is hindering strategic objectives. For example, a company may state innovation is a core value, but observations of daily work practices could reveal risk aversion and lack of collaboration that stifle new ideas. Uncovering these discrepancies allows leaders to course-correct through transparent communication, modeling desired behaviors, incentives, training, and other initiatives aimed at bridging this gap.

Ultimately, culture determines the likelihood of successfully executing business strategy. Assessing and addressing gaps between aspired and actual culture is thus an essential activity for organizational success.

The Imperative of Continuous Cultural Assessment

Ongoing cultural analysis and adaptation is essential as external pressures and internal dynamics constantly shift. Organizational culture is not static, but rather a dynamic concept impacted by internal and external forces of change. As such, regular assessment through pulse surveys, focus groups, anonymous feedback channels, and observation is key.

For example, growth through mergers and acquisitions can dilute or distort an organization's culture. Or turnover in leadership or changing market conditions may impact cultural alignment over time. Conducting bi-annual or quarterly cultural reviews allows detection of new gaps as they emerge, enabling prompt realignment efforts.

In this way, cultural assessment must be an ongoing exercise to maintain coherence amidst flux. Only through continuous diagnosis can interventions evolve appropriately to bridge emerging divides between aspired and actualized culture in today's fast-changing business landscape.

Strategic Focus on Subcultures for Widespread Cultural Impact

Focus cultural realignment efforts on critical groups demonstrating the widest gaps to enable broad impact. While assessing overall organizational culture is important, a tailored approach focused on sub-cultures may provide more actionable insights.

For example, the sales department may exhibit different cultural gaps than R&D. Targeted realignment efforts for each group can enhance efficiency and impact. Furthermore, identifying informal leaders within subcultures as change agents can accelerate cultural transformation initiatives.

By taking a strategic, subgroup-focused approach, cultural realignment initiatives can achieve greater traction across all levels of the organization.

Final Thoughts on Leadership and Cultural Coherence

The commitment and consistency of leadership are paramount in bridging the gap between desired and actual organizational culture. Leaders must embody the espoused cultural values for these principles to truly take root across the company.

Authentic informal leaders at various levels also play an integral role in spreading and reinforcing cultural norms. By regularly assessing alignment of leadership behaviors and informal influence with desired cultural attributes, steps can be taken to ensure greater coherence.

Ultimately, culture flows from the top-down. So leadership commitment to transparency, communication, modeling desired cultural standards and dedicating resources to address misalignments are imperative. With concerted leadership focus on cultural alignment, the gap between aspired values and actual behaviors will gradually diminish.