June 2024: Organizational Culture Refresh

By Connie King , Workforce Development Director, PMA

Ogres Are Like Onions

If you’ve seen Shrek, you know that’s a famous line from the movie. “Ogres are like onions. It's not that both might be stinky, make you cry, or get all brown in the sun. Rather, it's that 'we both have layers.'” Well, all or some of that may be true about your organization! Social scientist Edgar Schein described organizational culture as an onion with three layers:

1. Outer layer consists of the artifacts and symbols that you observe in an organization;
2. The core of the onion consists of deeply held, often unconscious, assumptions that people make about each other and their work;
3. And in between are the beliefs and values that are actively espoused by people when you ask them.

An example of Schein’s thought process is an onion diagram—a chart that shows the dependencies and relationships between the different parts of a process or organization. It helps show the layers of your system in one visual and easily determines relationships between stakeholders and goals. Try it!

I found this fun relationship between onions, organizational culture and the weather to be a good start to June’s Metal Minute. Summer is around the corner, and with a bounty of outdoor fresh food markets opening, it can also be a good time to parallel that to your organizational culture and freshen it up. An inexpensive yet fun workshop you can run is “Measure and Improve How Your Environment Supports Your Team”. Although most of us are not always aware of this, the environment we work in shapes how we behave and feel. And like an onion, this workshop is often called “the smell of the place” and it gives you a sense of the culture of your company.

12 HR Compliance Questions Every Manager Should Know

Your HR team must be aware of all the compliance regulations and practices involved in running your business.

After all, failure to grasp key compliance issues leads to fines, lawsuits and headaches for employers. Last year, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) collected $27 million from employers—just one aspect of federal compliance.

Your frontline managers interact with employees every day; they need a solid understanding of compliance risk, too. Why not invite them to peruse these core HR compliance questions and ensure they have the foundation they need? The better your frontline leaders understand these, the more compliant your organization will be. Provide them this list.

“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” - Benjamin Franklin

A project is defined as any set of tasks with a beginning and an end. Therefore, we’re all project managers, even if it’s not in our title! Whether it’s a family vacation, your weekly shopping trip or scheduling your team’s work week...you and your team leads are managing projects and applying principles without probably even thinking about it.

But imagine if you all had some proper PM training or tools...Wouldn't that make life much easier and work more productive? Let’s start with one of them: A Work Plan. As the name suggests, a work plan is an action plan that helps project teams achieve their goals. Work plans factor in key project planning elements such as tasks, milestones, deliverables, resources, budgetary requirements and a timeline to weave it all together.

Work plans are not as comprehensive as project plans, and rather than focus on a large high-level view, they focus on helping your teams achieve smaller goals.

There are seven easy steps to start and a template to guide you. Find out more here.

The State of Learning & Development in 2024

Today’s leader is not just a decision-maker anymore. He or she needs to be a mentor, a facilitator and a growth-enabler too. Traditional classroom-based training is only one piece of the puzzle, and more experiential learning experiences, including on-the-job training, continue to prove extremely valuable. Why? Because leaders need to be flexible in today’s increasingly complex environment. However, the road ahead is not without its challenges.

The Morning Brew surveyed more than 1000 HR professionals and found four themes surfaced around the challenges and opportunities for learning and development this year.

1. Leadership development is a top priority: an overwhelming 60% of respondents pinpointed leadership as the most significant gap in current employee development.
2. The discrepancy between priority and practice: it’s said to be the #1 priority, but the fact is that roughly half of the organizations with 100-499 people offer formal leadership programs for new managers, and for those with <99 people it’s only around 34%.
3. Getting more out of learning and development: adaptability in leadership.

Go more in-depth in the Morning Brew report here.

The Complete Management Toolkit

From welcoming new team members to tough termination decisions, each employment lifecycle phase requires a balance of knowledge, empathy and legal diligence.

• Interview questions to ask (and some to avoid)
• The first 90-days
• Legal considerations of terminations
• And more

Get it here.

Two Quick Fixes to Help You Get Organized and Make Life Easier

1. Transformation Planner: The Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center has created a planner to help you use your company’s financial and operating data to model the financial impact decision making will have on your profitability. Check it out here.
2. The Smart To-Do App for Busy People: Get to-dos out of your head. Get reminded, anywhere. Get things done, together. Everywhere you go. That’s the MO of “Remember the Milk”. Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. Remember The Milk was created so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper or the back of your hand.

Have questions or topics you want to learn more about? Contact a member of PMA’s workforce development team: Connie King , Mary Onders Pramik , Dean Phillips , DTM SME? or Scott Rieg .