While many companies believe their corporate culture reflects their mission and vision, culture is actually the group norms and behaviors of the company, which do not always align with its mission and vision. In fact, there is almost always some disconnect between a company’s vision and its culture, which can, in turn, affect talent management.

Improving Talent Management Through Vision-Culture Alignment

A disconnect between a company’s vision and its culture can result in employees being dissatisfied with their jobs and leaving the company to go elsewhere. This is because employees are generally recruited in keeping with the company’s vision, then are confronted with a culture that is different than what they expected. For instance, the company’s vision may focus on superior customer service, but when employees are hired, they find out that there is no management support for actually resolving the more difficult service issues and that customers are basically told there is nothing anyone can do to help them.

An alignment between company vision and culture will lead to fewer dissatisfied employees and give new hires a more accurate view of what they will encounter in their careers with the company. Getting a company’s vision to reflect its actual culture and vice versa, however, is a challenge for most companies.

Inclusion as a Way to Align Vision and Culture

It is an unfortunate fact that a company’s culture is influenced and reinforced in countless small ways of which executives and upper management may not be fully aware. These small acts and messages combine to create a culture that may be quite different from the official vision of the company, yet is quickly perceived and understood by employees.

One effective way to begin to align vision and culture is to include employees in the envisioning process. Instead of corporate executives and leaders enforcing a top-down vision for the company, an inclusive process allows the best ideas to come forward and be implemented by leadership. Furthermore, employees who have had involvement in the envisioning process are far more likely to buy into the need for corporate culture to align with that vision, and to share that need with their colleagues and other employees with whom they come in contact.

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Talent Management in a Well-Aligned Company

A company whose vision and culture are well-aligned will be able to conduct talent management efforts honestly and with greater simplicity, which will make efforts more successful. When a company’s culture mirrors its vision, new employees will not get mixed messages that can turn into negative messages that drive them away from the company.

Instead, communication will be clearer and employees will soon learn that their managers and leaders mean what they say, rather than having to decipher what the acceptable norms and behaviors are from contextual clues when they differ from the official messaging.

A clear alignment of vision and culture will even make tools like Thrive TRM work better by ensuring that everyone from leadership to the hiring team is on the same page when it comes to recruiting and hiring. Contact us for more information about Thrive TRM software and its capabilities for talent management.

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