I love LinkedIn.  I’ve blogged before about its value, especially considering it’s free except for your time (though there are fees if you want to post jobs there).  In the past I’ve used the business-themed social networking site to gather opinions on Zappos’ "leaving bonus," and I referenced its Group feature as a lead-driving tool.

One of the best ways to use LinkedIn is to ask and answer questions.  I particularly enjoy going to the Small Business and Organizational Development sections and seeing what company leaders, managers, and other employees are talking about – and occasionally offering my opinion.  I did so last month in response to organizational culture consultant and speaker Marcella Bremer’s question asking why building a productive workplace culture is often not on the agenda of CEOs, company board members, and other top executives.

My response sparked an email conversation in which Marcella and I compared notes on our Provigil online No prescription respective firms devoted to leveraging employee engagement and team building strategies to improve companies’ bottom-line results.  The enterprise she co-owns, OCAI online, is based in the Netherlands (people practices advancement is truly a small world!).

When I went to her site I learned what OCAI stand for: Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument.  Developed by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, the OCAI operates based on what’s known as the Competing Values Framework.  Here’s what this looks like:

As you can see, as you go up on this graph you transition from core values supporting stability and control (some would say, command and control) to flexibility and discretion.  From left to right, the focus changes from internal and integration to external and differentiation.  Where a company lands on this graph determines its balance among four Organizational Culture Types: clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market.

What I find amazing is that when I go to OCAI’s page explaining these culture types in greater detail, I find that, generally speaking, Winning Workplaces’ Top Small Company Workplace award honorees fall within the area of the graph I highlighted below:

That is, they have:

• workforces who say they feel like a family;
• leaders who see themselves, and are seen by their people, as mentors;
• strong emphasis on teamwork, participation, and consensus; and
• employees who take risks, within a culture that promotes individual initiative and freedom.

However, I think our honorees are also a hybrid – they might have cultures which generally fall within the area of the graph I indicated, but when you read their applications for our award, they have succeeded in using staff engagement activities representative of a clan or an adhocracy to propel their business squarely in the market sector of the graph.  This is another way of saying, they don’t just treat their people well because it’s the right thing to do – they integrate these practices into the "vaue drivers" OCAI talks about of increasing market share, goal achievement, and profitability.  I discussed this a bit more in posts in January and June.

So…where does your company’s culture fall on OCAI’s graph?  I think leaders would find it an insightful and useful exercise to survey their management teams and other employees on what they think, and see how it compares to their own assessment.

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One of the more recent blogs I’ve started following to help me glean insights to share here is Achieving Business Excellence by John Spence.  In fact last week I retweeted (shared, for those not versed in Twitter-speak) Spence’s post on three keys to employee engagement.

Spence is author of Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action.  In an earlier post from September, he explained how he boiled his 10,000+ pages of research for the book into a one-page "strategy map," and then inputted that into Wordle to create a word cloud – an at-a-glance visualization – of the key strategies for creating high-performance organizations.

Here it is:

It’s reaffirming to what Winning Workplaces believes and does with respect to helping small firms build more productive workplaces to see that people and culture are the largest-sized strategies, meaning they are most meaningful in Spence’s research.  They rank higher than leaders, communication, transparency, and even customer[s].

For me, the bottom line of Spence’s research-based word cloud is that it’s not just lip service to say "People are our greatest asset" – and, there is opportunity for business leaders in creating work environments and implementing people practices which support that claim.

My thanks to Becky McCray at Small Biz Survival for pointing me to Spence’s blog and post.

Related: Longtime readers may remember me mentioning Wordle; I used the free tool to create our own word clouds on the value our Top Small Company Workplace award applicants get from the experience, as well as the prevailing industries and business conditions of our 2010 award applicants.

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