The Era Of Cultural Maturity In The Future of Work

A Cultural Assessment That Helps Close the Gap Between Corporate America and The New America

One to one employee engagement
We live in an era where medicine is personalized, where marketing is 1:1, and where tech platforms make personal recommendations commonplace. And yet, we’ve failed to fully apply this logic to our employees and the workplace.

For the first time ever, technology and content are providing workplace professionals the means to easily move to more personalized and individualized engagement programs.

In our prior posts, we’ve identified areas for opportunity outside of the workplace. We’ve focused on the general problem at hand and how the workplace is two generations culturally behind the new marketplace. We’ve also touched on how to build the 1:1 relationship between a brand (marketing) and its total addressable audience.

We believe, however, that to fully #closethegap between the workplace and the new marketplace, that we must first start within the workplace. We must make the workplace new marketplace ready.

The key involves turning around the equation, employing the same effective marketplace practices to equip and better educate our employees.

Assessing our organization to understand the level of cultural maturity
To address organizations we must first begin by identifying the cultural gaps that are unique to our employee base. To do so we must start at the enterprise level by sampling employees across different functional areas, and seek to fully understand their level of cultural maturity.

Once we’ve assessed the enterprise, we can then leverage the practice of segmentation to build a system that is scalable. In doing so, we aim to uncover a collective result – or score – which represents the organization’s true level of cultural maturity; its new marketplace readiness. This cultural maturity score allows us to better discern where to apply the resources we have at our disposal and which we need to acquire.

So what’s next?
Given the macro shifts of a generationally, racially-, ethnically-, religiously- and gender-diverse new majority, it is no longer good enough to be a diverse and inclusive organization. Organizations should evolve from the ambition of wanting to be a diverse and inclusive organization to aspiring to become a culturally mature enterprise.

For many organizations, this will take the form of an evolution. For example moving to a hybrid model of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and Employee Relationship Management (ERM) initiatives. Or, employee communities that enable us to measure the true level of maturation and outcomes in real time.

To help your organization become more culturally mature or new marketplace ready, we’ve through years of research and development, we have resources (which you may find here) and have created a system for both assessing the enterprise cultural maturity and taking action. We’re launching a multi-part series that will outline the steps required to overcome change barriers in your enterprise organization. To learn more, you may also choose to speak directly to a Reframe advisor by clicking here. Or you can email contact@getreframe.com.