Adaptability skills There are very few successful people or organisations who got to where they are by simply doing the same thing. Employees who were eventually terminated were those who had been unable to adapt to the culture. is it so important to be culturally adaptable? Clare specialises in reviewing HR practices and supporting clients through challenging HR situations, ensuring values, integrity and inclusivity are at the heart of decisions. It’s in all of our interests to be culturally adaptable, both in our work and personal lives. Google is just a fun place and doesn't feel like work. Culture is easy to sense but difficult to measure. Someone with this skill can work independently or in groups, or perform tasks not designed only for a single individual. Again, consider Netflix: Although “multicultural” employees contributed to the company’s diverse culture and drove innovation, the culture was nonetheless anchored by core shared beliefs, such as the importance of radical transparency and accountability, which help employees coordinate and work efficiently. By studying the language employees use in these communications, we can measure how culture actually influences their thoughts and behavior at work. Among the benefits of operating in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, it’s important to acknowledge the potential conflicts that exist when different teams (with potentially very different cultures) work together. This is where the importance of employees having an awareness of cultural adaptability comes in. When it comes to your diversity and inclusion agenda, having an awareness of cultural difference is also important. New research analyzing email, Slack messages, and Glassdoor postings are challenging prevailing wisdom about culture. (a.k.a. Employees in a leadership role often have to manage unusual circumstances where there are no explicit instructions. That is difficult to achieve … People who see the world differently and have diverse ideas and perspectives often bring creativity and innovation to an organization. Managers should encourage employees to experiment with different ways of working—extensive collaboration for some tasks, for example, and intense competition for others. That’s because misfits need the trust and support of colleagues to be seen as quirky innovators rather than outlandish outsiders. In our work, we maintain strict employee confidentiality, meaning that neither we nor the organization is able to link any employee to any specific communication used in our studies. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. You can find out rather quickly which category you fall into by listening to other people are saying or have said about you. These results suggest that an effective hiring strategy should strive for a portfolio of both conformists—or at least those who can rapidly adapt to a company’s changing culture—and cultural misfits. Cognitive diversity helps teams during ideation but hinders execution. June 22, 2020 August 29, 2017 by Albina Ziatdinova. Jean-Pierre Attal/Courtesy of Galerie Olivier Waltman. Your diversity and inclusion strategy might require global leadership buy-in, for instance. So bringing teams together and helping them work cohesively should be a focus for management. Copyright © 2020 Harvard Business School Publishing. Although their written and spoken English is perfect, they feel at times excluded in casual conversations with their new colleagues as they don’t always understand idioms and colloquial language used around the office. Instead it looks at how we can respect and value difference whilst identifying ways to overcome potential challenges. Such a culture is composed of multicultural employees who each subscribe to a variety of norms and beliefs about how to do work. to the different cultures and environments in which we work. These include understanding and being aware of deadlines when we work with teams that operate in different time zones or perhaps with alternative working patterns (such as Dubai having a working week of Sunday to Thursday according to religious tradition). We also look at how workplace cultures can form within different teams (even in the same country and perhaps even in the same office) and how potential conflicts can arise due to a difference in style. Employees who could quickly adapt to cultural norms as they changed over time were more successful than employees who exhibited high cultural fit when first hired. It’s the consideration and understanding that others may have different styles, approaches and attitudes depending on their cultural background. Our half-day training course can be bespoke and personalised to focus on the cultural pressure points of your organisation – maximising your team’s ability to overcome cultural barriers which they may have already experienced first-hand. An important distinction is warranted here. Our research focuses on a new method for assessing and measuring organizational culture. Subscribe for access to leading-edge diversity practice, opinion, insight and exclusive event invites. Language is an obvious aspect to consider when we work across new and different geographies. Adaptability Interview Questions and Answers with Explanation. Her client list ranges from The Houses of Parliament, Health Education England, London Ambulance Service, K&L Gates LLP, to a variety of Universities and Social Housing Providers. During middle stages, when the team is most likely to be engaged in ideation, diversity increases the likelihood of team success. So how do you make adaptability part of your company’s culture? We’ve seen that there are trade-offs associated with diversity in teams, but how does it affect the performance of entire organizations? However, we also identified a set of individuals who benefited from being cultural misfits: those who did not have networks spanning disparate groups but instead had strong connections within a defined social clique. In a separate study, two of us analyzed the content of Slack messages exchanged among members of nearly 120 software development teams. 3 A resilient organizational culture: Supports flexibility and adaptability in a changing environment. Employees who left voluntarily were the most fascinating: They quickly adapted culturally early in their tenures but drifted out of step later on and were likely to leave the firm once they became cultural outsiders. Cultural adaptability teaches us to have an awareness of our differences: empowering us to work around these potential challenges to find the best outcome. We found, as expected, that a high level of cultural fit led to more promotions, more-favorable performance evaluations, higher bonuses, and fewer involuntary departures. How can these findings inform leaders’ understanding of culture as a tool for improving the performance of employees, teams, and the broader organization? “At the workplace or any other areas, if one encounters challenges and changes, being adaptable will help them find a way of doing away with such setbacks,” he adds. In today’s competitive markets, it’s important for companies to have people in their workforce that are able to adapt to changing work environments. Interviewers are looking for qualities that make you successful in a job. The evidence supporting this thinking, however, is scant and inconclusive. The term “diversity” is often used to connote variation in the demographic makeup of a firm’s workforce. Adaptability in the workplace   means being able to change in order to become successful Adaptability is a soft skill that employers seek when hiring candidates. As we pointed out earlier, demographic and cultural diversity are related, but a demographically homogenous group may be culturally diverse, and vice versa. We believe that with appropriate measures to safeguard employee privacy and minimize algorithmic bias it holds great promise as a tool for managers grappling with culture issues in their firms. These cultural “adapters” were better able to maintain fit when cultural norms changed or evolved, which is common in organizations operating in fast-moving, dynamic environments. An example of that is adaptation. When might it better to hire a cultural misfit? Some leaders might view D&I as more or less important due to the narrative around equality in their cultural zone. The best cultures encourage diversity to drive innovation but are anchored by shared core beliefs. Flexible working: successful practices to unleash the benefits, Ethnicity pay gap in the UK: statistics, impact, and action, Five employee retention strategies for diverse workforces. Why do we need to be culturally adaptable? Managers must be vigilant about keeping metadata anonymous and must regularly audit algorithmic decision-making for bias to ensure that the use of language-based tools does not have unintended adverse consequences on culture itself—for instance, by breeding employee distrust. Entire countries and industries have been forced to pivot on nearly no notice. But being adaptable is not just about embracing change. Components of Adaptability… The workplace has evolved into a project-led environment where employees are expected to change focus from one priority to another, much quicker than any time in the past. For a work environment culture, it connotes being opened to new ideas, innovations, or alterations. Culture is easy to sense but hard to measure. A Fun Environment. What is Cultural Adaptability? We are all adapting and creating flexible conditions to make work-life a bit easier. Cultural differences can cause friction – to the detriment of an organisation and the people who work … When there is no merchandise in the market, we change our needs in replacement products. Redefine your motivation. Diversity becomes an obstacle again toward the end of a project, when the team is deep into execution. Encourages setting healthy boundaries and models those healthy boundaries, which must start with leadership. They can be wellsprings of creativity and innovation. We used big-data processing to mine the ubiquitous “digital traces” of culture in electronic communications, such as emails, Slack messages, and Glassdoor reviews. We identified instances when team members discussing similar topics used diverse meanings, perspectives, and styles, and then analyzed the impact of that diversity on performance. Dysfunctional teams can have a major impact on productivity, company culture and the ability to recruit. We examined the diversity of thoughts, ideas, and meaning expressed by team members and then measured whether it was beneficial or detrimental to team performance. We then measured the organizations’ level of intrapersonal cultural diversity. Being culturally adaptable also means that your team can work in situations requiring them to be more versatile; such as your Sales team adapting to different clients and environments (where even normalised actions like handshakes are important to be aware of when working with individuals with different cultural conventions). We also tracked how employees adapted to their peers’ cultural conventions over time. Your HR department may, for example, have an entirely different work ethic and approach to the L&D team, yet they need to co-exist and work well together. Matthew Corritore is an assistant professor of strategy and organization at McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management. This has been particularly the case in recent years, as companies have tackled pernicious problems such as the underrepresentation of women and minorities in decision-making positions in organizations. Such tools can be used diagnostically to assess the cultural alignment between firms during premerger due diligence, as well as prescriptively during integration to identify where and how to focus managerial interventions. Let’s look at each in detail. For a workplace culture, this means that a person must be open to new ideas or changes, must be able to work individually or in groups, or perform tasks that are not just for one person. Adaptability is a critical quality that employers seek in early 21st-century employees. Having this cultural intelligence emphasises the benefit of being culturally adaptable as you can work more effectively and amicably with a diversity of clients and stakeholders. This is where the importance of employees having an awareness of cultural adaptability comes in. In a recent study two of us conducted with Stanford’s V. Govind Manian and Christopher Potts, we analyzed how cultural fit and cultural adaptability affected individual performance at a high-tech company by comparing linguistic styles expressed in more than 10 million internal email messages exchanged over five years among 601 employees. different styles, approaches and attitudes depending on their cultural background. The benefits of being culturally adaptable extend way beyond situations such as company mergers and acquisitions. We are studying the merger of three retail banks, and analysis of emails has revealed stark differences in the rates of cultural assimilation among individuals. For one, employers value employees that are successfully able to manage changes in the workplace. Create organizational collaboration in a remote workplace The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed organizations to find new ways of boosting workforce productivity and engagement. Boundaries can include work time limits, job expectations, Yet the tools available for measuring it—namely, employee surveys and questionnaires—have significant shortcomings. © 2020 Equality Works Ltd Terms and PrivacySitemapCSR, By submitting this form, you accept the Terms and Conditions and your details are processed and stored in line with our Privacy Policy. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the importance of workplace adaptability to the forefront. Algorithms make estimates, but it is ultimately humans’ responsibility to make informed judgments using them. Clare Cromarty is a Diversity, Organisational Development and HR consultant for EW Group, having worked across the sectors to build clients' understanding of practical commitments to diversity and inclusion through their approach to organisational development, HR practice and employee engagement. During a company merger, cultural conflicts can occur when two or more companies are brought together, which is why being capable of adapting to changes in management is so crucial for success and to minimize downtime and team disruption. Moreover, surveys provide static, or at best episodic, snapshots of organizations that are constantly evolving. Being versatile is a requirement for many job roles, including those working in client-facing situations being regularly in contact with different working cultures and individuals with various working norms. Cultural adaptability also has a positive impact on retention as adapters aren’t rigid and can change as the organizational culture changes. Teams benefit from learning how to adapt to different professional situations in a number of ways. He and Amir Goldberg codirect the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab. Interviewers ask 'Adaptability' interview questions to test a candidate's ability to change and adapt to varying environments, types of people and responsibilities. Introducing a new technology or strategy to a workplace might be … People who attempted to span boundaries but could not display cultural ambidexterity were especially penalized: They were seen as both cultural outsiders and social outsiders without clear membership in any particular social clique. your team’s ability to overcome cultural barriers which they may have already experienced first-hand. Cultural Adaptability is an individual’s willingness and ability to adapt their manner of communicating, motivating, and managing, across countries and cultures. We found that value congruence is predictive of retention—employees with it are less likely to voluntarily leave the company—but is unrelated to job performance. Google is just a fun place and does n't feel like work rigid... 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