The phenomenon of wanting employees who can “fit” in the organization is called culture fit. It is a widely celebrated concept even in recent times. Culture fit helps to create a homogenous culture, which was an ancient approach before the evolution of our cognitive culture in our societal structure. Globalization automatically penetrates, increasing our cultural diversity all over the world. And at this stage, ‘culture fit’ has a tremendous disadvantage towards our society and organization by impacting:
- Unable to identity systemic bias — organisational blind spot
- Stifling progress and innovation
- Undermines the capability for argumentation and critical thinking
- Produces anti-intellectualism, intolerance, crudity, and brutishness
- Inconsistent with truth and justice
- Opportunity is only for the people who are like us.
The concept of ‘culture fit’ fundamentally challenges and opposes diversity and inclusion in the organization. We need an alternative approach to increasing cognitive-cultural and demographic diversity, and the answer is ‘ Culture Add’. It is a positive term to add to the team people with various backgrounds, experiences, and mindsets to add different cultures, thinkings, and skills in the group rather than collecting on similarities. This embraces inclusion and diversity and opens up broad scopes for personal as well as organizational development.
How to build a culture of ‘culture add’?
- Define a clear intention about ‘why to build a culture of culture-add?’
- Seek for leadership buy-in regarding building a culture of ‘culture add.’
- Communicate with the existing employees
- Integrate it in the core organisational processes of:
- Hiring: It starts from knowing how to write the job description to train the whole talent acquisition team (both recruiters and hiring team) in inclusive sourcing, interview process, salary estimation and decision-making.
- Performance appraisal, promotion process, compensation review: All involved in the process should know how to mitigate the biases while reviewing and also at the same time create a strategy and system that helps to make a decision purely based on performance and competencies.
- Adapt company policies — audit and adapt them to be more inclusive
It will take years of meticulous strategy to transform the culture of ‘culture add’. Which will require continuous focus and clear intention to create awareness and practice on behavioural change of having inclusive ways of working.
