Organisational Culture of an NSI: Strengths and Weak ...¸ren Schiønning Andersen... · Many NSIs...

THE ROLE OF STATISTICS IN SOCIETY • SESSION A

Organisational Culture of an NSI: Strengths and Weak-

nesses in Times of Change

Marius Ejby Poulsen,

Head of Human Resources, Statistics Denmark

Søren Schiønning Andersen,

Director of Business Statistics, Statistics Denmark

Statistics Sweden | scb.se/nsm2016 | [email protected]

Organisational Culture of an NSI: Strengths and Weaknesses

in Times of Change

Marius Ejby Poulsen and Søren Schiønning Andersen

Most NSIs face substantial and steadily increasing challenges these years. They relate to new or increasing user needs, competition from private information providers, declining response rates, difficulties in regard to utilizing new technologies, difficulties in regard to attract-ing the most talented candidates etc. At the same time the NSIs face shrinking budgets.

Many NSIs adopt comprehensive multi-annual modernisation or transformation strategies in order to meet these challenges, and there are many common denominators to these national strategies. They include closer cooperation with users and academia, higher levels of analysis in the statistical products, increased use of secondary data sources (admin. and big data), strategic alliances with key data pro-viders, and standardisation/’modularisation’ of processes and IT sys-tems. In short, efforts to ‘do more (and better) with less’.

A popular idiom states that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. In Danish this can be phrased as “vaner vinder over planer, og kultur vinder over struktur”. Against this background, this paper takes as a point of departure that successful execution of modernisation strate-gies requires NSIs not ‘only’ to increase their efficiency and innova-tive capacity, but also to some extent to ‘redefine’ themselves and their organisational cultures - their values, habits and behaviour - which are deeply rooted during many years characterised by high stability.

On the basis of theory about organisational culture and change - to-gether with empirical observations about the organisational culture in Statistics Denmark and experience from our recent project to train our ‘change competence’ - the paper discusses strengths and weaknesses (and paradoxes) with a view to describe the ‘cultural challenge’.

The ambition is that readers/participants will learn about:

- Key cultural characteristics of official statistics organisations. - Important paradoxes and dilemmas between the need for agility

and change vs. the need for stability and continuity. - How Statistics Denmark has worked with change competence.

Key words: Organisational culture, corporate values, change manage-ment, change competence, strategy implementation


1. Our current challenges: What are the strategies?

Statistics Denmark dates back to the ‘birth of democracy’ in Denmark and is closely linked to this. Meaningful and impartial statistics are critical for the functioning of democracy and the economy. Our long history has brought us the core organizational values independence, user-orientation, trustworthiness and data security /confidentiality.

Whilst these values are deeply embedded in our ‘organizational DNA’, we need to ‘move with the times’. Our Strategy 2020i sets out a new vision: “In 2020 Statistics Denmark is trans-formed into a ‘generator of data and knowledge’ which is strongly oriented towards our external stakeholders and which strengthens the general understanding of socio-economic phenomena”.

Today’s society is characterised by a number of developments which put new and higher demands on official statistics: an accelerating technological development, growing globalisa-tion, increased focus on new social phenomena and, not least, consequences of the financial crisis.

• The technological development hugely increases the quantity and types of data which can be new sources for statistics. Our data providers expect us to exploit these data in or-der to reduce response burden, and our users expect us to use new technological plat-forms in order to make our dissemination more dynamic. At the same time, there is a risk that the development in the information technology will drive an ‘information overload’ where official statistics ‘drown’ in a hectic news flow. Finally, digitalisation of the public sector boosts the generation, integration and usage of data, including statistical data, as part of ‘evidence based policy making’ and ‘data driven public management’.

• Economic globalisation implies that an increasing amount of data is needed for analysis of cross border activities and phenomena. Also, the growing mobility of people across countries (e.g. migration) leads to new demands for statistical analyses. Such analyses, together with more international comparisons and benchmarking make further interna-tional harmonisation of statistics important.

• Recent years have seen new topics with increasing user interest and importance, such as environmental and social sustainability, e.g. in relation to the UN Sustainable Develop-ment Goals (SDGs), which will require statistical monitoring. Similarly, there is a grow-ing interest in statistics about ‘soft areas’, e.g. quality of life, social capital and health.

• In addition to requirements for new statistics, higher quality and more documentation, the financial crisis has resulted in new demands for coordination between NSIs and oth-er official authorities producing official statistics (ONAs). Also, countries face new de-mands in relation to ensuring political independence. And last – but not least – the re-sources available for official statistics are diminishing.

To remain relevant we must meet these challenges. And to actually make it happen we need to change behaviour in certain areas. Seen from outside the office we must, firstly, extend our contact with our stakeholders – with key users, with respondents and with academia – to form stronger partnerships and to learn better how we can meet their current and future needs.

Secondly, we must deliver our products and services in a way that generates more knowledge and value for our users than previously. Our services must be directly relevant to the political agenda and the public debate. Our task is not ‘only’ to present figures, but also to put them into perspective by means of comparisons, in-depth analyses and explanations, and by ‘tell-ing stories’ that are coherent across domains. Seen from inside the office many more ‘ena-bling changes’ are needed to deliver this.


In our efforts to change behaviour, our core values, remain necessary, but they are not sufficient. We see a need to cultivate and incorporate three additional values: to become more agile (ready and capable to change), holistic (favouring transverse perspectives over silo perspectives) and transparent (primarily towards our external stakeholders, but also internally).

The reason why we need to extend our core organisational values is that e.g. ‘stronger inter-action with external stakeholders’ and ‘products with more analytical content’ is ‘just the tip of the iceberg’. Underneath the surface is a deeply rooted organizational culture – with all its norms, structures, habits etc. formed during many years characterized by a high degree of stability – an aspect which in itself is considered a quality criterion for statistics. It is in our DNA.

A popular idiom states that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. In Danish it can be phrased as ‘vaner vinder over planer, og kultur vinder over struktur’. In other words: if we do not under-stand and work persistently with our organisational culture – with its strengths and weak-nesses in relation to our vision and strategic objectives – then we will most likely not achieve our new strategic objectives sufficiently.

2. Organisational culture

2.1 What is organisational culture?

The theory of organisational culture is manifold. Among the leading scientists in the field is Edgar Schein, who defines culture as ”a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration (…) A product of joint learning”ii. He identifies three levels of culture - from the tangible manifestations down to the underlying subconscious assumptions, which are at the core of the culture:

• The artefacts are the most visible and comprise the physical and social environment cre-ated by the members of the organisation. Among examples are the designs of products, technology, dress code, written documents etc.

• The underlying values represent a mosaic of preferences and ideas of ’how things should be done’ in the organisation. It is not the organisation itself who processes these values, but the individual members of the organisation. However, the leaders and man-agers play a critical role in the shaping of the corporate culture.

• The basic assumptions are at the deepest and less visible level. They comprise the core assumptions which individuals in a group have about the organisation and how it func-tions. When a basic assumption is strongly rooted in a group, then its members will find behaviour founded on a different basis incomprehensible. Thus, we are talking about the implicit assumptions, which actually determine behaviour and tell the group how things should be understood.

Any organisation has a corporate culture – irrespective of whether it is aware of it or not. Most often the culture has strengths as well as pitfalls. Also the culture may differ across different parts of the organisation, indicating that they may not be working towards common goals. Many organisations, not least organisations meeting an increasing pace of change, have a big challenge, firstly, in understanding (consciously) its culture and, secondly, in af-fecting (or ‘moving’) its culture in a direction where it will better support the realisation of organisational change and new strategic goals.

It is possible to change a culture, but the organisation needs to (re)consider its underlying values and basic assumptions against its vision for the future. Thus, (re)creating a culture is


closely connected to the strategic development of the organisation as such, and the values are – together with the mission – the foundation upon which the organisation’s development builds to realise the visioniii. Having said this, it is also obvious that ‘culture changes slowly’.

2.2 ‘Why soft is so hard?’

When we work with a complex and intangible phenomenon as ‘organisational culture’ we have moved out of our managerial comfort zone and into the ‘soft areas’, but researchers are increasingly being aware of the need to integrate and balance what we could call objective factors (goals, strategies, structures, organisation, systems and measurable results etc.) and subjective factors (attitudes, norms, traditions, language etc.) in order to develop organisations successfully and deliver sustainable change.

It reflects a change in the understanding of an organisation: From a traditional western and industrial perspective in which an organisation is a structured, mechanistic instrument in which people are controlled to a perspective where an organisation is seen as a living social system where human beings – with relationships and emotions such as trust, motivation and commitment - constitute the organisation and not least its ability to thrive, create, learn and develop.

The point, as illustrated by Ravi Pradhan in the figure belowiv, is that an organisational change process must integrate both objective and subjective factors as well as both individual and social factors to be successful.

I We

What

- goals - tasks - problems How

- process - learning - development Who - way of being - culture - values

Behaviour Plans

Performance Reports

Structure Processes

Policies / procedures Equipment Money

Objectivity

Attitudes Motivation / mood

Commitment Beliefs / perception

Norms Values

Language Traditions S

ubjectivity

3. What characterises Statistics Denmark’s culture?

Against this background, the Business Statistics department (approximately 110 persons) took on the task to map and describe its organisational culture, and it is safe to assume that this is representative of Statistics Denmark as a whole. The method we employed was a vol-untary ‘two step self-generating survey’:

• In the first step everyone in the department was invited to formulate openly (i.e. without predefined categories) aspects which they saw as characteristics of our organisational culture and indicate whether they personally perceived these aspects as either ‘strengths’


or ‘weaknesses’ (areas for improvement). This resulted in 277 examples of ‘strengths’ and 254 examples of ‘weaknesses’. Obviously, there was a lot of overlap in the examples, so before step two of the survey the examples were grouped in to 22 different aspects of ‘strength’ and 34 different aspects of ‘weakness’, i.e. there seemed to be more consensus about our strengths than about our weaknesses.

• In the second step everyone was invited to select which of the 22 aspects of ‘strength’ and 34 different aspects of ‘weakness’, respectively, they personally considered most im-portant. The participants were free to choose as many aspects as they liked.

The results were highly interesting – and some were quite ‘eye-opening’. The results were used as the point of departure for a seminar for the whole department. The purpose was, firstly, to discuss openly which aspects of our culture that enable us to meet our strategic objectives and deliver real change (i.e. strengths we should maintain and nurture), and which aspects that limit our ability to deliver change (i.e. attitudes and behaviour we need to work with or abolish). Secondly, we discussed how we concretely could do this.

The insights from the culture survey were manifold – not least when the results were broken down by staff categories (clerical, IT, academic, managers) or by divisions in the department. Only a few overall results can be mentioned here, but the top-5 strengths, which were all selected by a majority of participants, were:

1. “We have a high degree of professional freedom and direct influence on how we solve

our tasks”

2. “We can organize our working hours, incl. home-work, flexibly in order to have a good

work/life balance”

3. “Our work place tolerates many different types of people”

4. “We feel a high degree of responsibility for our work”

5. “We have a good tone at the workplace – it is friendly, informal, relaxed and people treat

each other well”

Interestingly, these aspects were in the top-5 or top-6 for all staff categories – except for the managers. Instead, managers had selected aspects such as ‘opportunities to make a differ-ence’, ‘commitment to the tasks’, ‘willingness of management to pursue changes’ – i.e. as-pects more narrowly related to the tasks – as the most important strengths of the culture. In other words, the results revealed very different perceptions of corporate strengths.

The top-5 weaknesses were:

1. “Silo syndrome: We do not cooperate sufficiently across statistical departments, divisions

and domains”

2. “Many are reluctant or negative towards change - preferring business as usual”

3. “We waste too much time on meetings with too many participants, unclear objectives

and too little structure”

4. “Managers avoid conflicts and do not sufficiently address uneven workloads, breaches of

internal rules etc.”

5. “IT systems are implemented before they work sufficiently well”

The results confirmed that perceptions of weaknesses were more diversified and none of the 34 categories were selected by a majority of participants. Among the more clear results were, maybe not surprisingly, that the dissatisfaction with the ‘silo syndrome’ increases with the level of responsibility in the organisation.

Many more results could be mentioned, but in short two overall results summarize our main cultural challenges: Firstly, the analysis revealed quite a gap between the aspects considered important and appreciated by the staff in general vs. the aspects and new strategic guidelines emphasised and pursued by the higher management. The first perspective is primarily about


‘what makes the everyday work good for me and my colleagues’, whilst the other is about ‘how can we deliver new and better services to our users? How will that change our ways of working? How can we do more with less?’

Secondly, the analysis revealed a number of paradoxes – i.e. aspects where our perceived strengths also involve pitfalls:

• ‘Security’: As individuals we have a strong tendency to seek security in the well-known – i.e. ‘doing what we are used to do - in the way we are used to do it’. But when the organisa-tion decides to change its products, or change its processes in order to reallocate human resources to other areas, then we may actually make ourselves more vulnerable by seek-ing status quo. The question we now ask ourselves is whether we could see curiosity and security as two sides of the same coin?

• ‘Friendliness’: We all appreciate an informal ‘atmosphere’ and a polite tone at the work-place and a strong sense of community. But at the same time many staff members feel that we tend to avoid conflict (both horizontally and vertically) when things are not working properly. The question to ourselves is whether we sometimes are a bit ‘too friendly’ - focusing too much on ‘individual and collegial well-being’ and too little on the contentment of external stakeholders?

• ‘Freedom’: Professional freedom and influence on our day-to-day work is considered the most important asset of our organisational culture, cf. above. In many ways this is posi-tive – it ensures ownership, responsibility and job satisfaction, and it builds on a high degree of mutual trust. And diversity is a corporate asset - if new ideas are identified and deployed throughout the organisation. However, the spreading of new ideas and best practice actually proved to be the weakest aspect of our culture due to insufficient coop-eration across the organisation. ‘Silos’ prevent ideas from becoming reality. Thus, a high de-gree of ’local freedom’ may limit ’global efficiency’ and development. This has been phrased as a ‘frozen freedom’. Our question is whether we could find a new optimum with common solutions that increase organisational efficiency without losing the individuals’ job satisfaction?

• ‘Caution’: It seems a fact that we (at all levels) are oriented towards stability and status quo. Our risk appetite is very low. Errors are to be identified and corrected; preferably prevented. It is deeply rooted in our ‘statistical DNA’, and to a large extent rightly so; it reflects a deeply rooted quality commitment. But if are not ready to take any risks, e.g. in relation to a higher analytical profile in our products and more active communication, then we are certain to loose opportunities for playing a more visible and relevant role in society. So we ask ourselves, how to increase our risk appetite without making too many and too big mistakes?

• ‘Navel-gazing’: We undertook to analyse our organisational culture because we wanted to understand our underlying strengths and weaknesses in relation to pursuing new stra-tegic objectives vis-à-vis the outside world. But afterwards it really struck us that ’we had looked at ourselves, from our own perspective, focusing on our own needs’. So we ask ourselves how to turn the perspective around and look at our culture and need for change from the perspective of the surrounding world – our users, data providers etc.?

4. Change management strategy and leadership

Every quarter more than 100 new titles are added to the massive academic literature about

strategic management, and many different highly sophisticated approaches could be taken.

We, along with many other organisations, found inspiration in the widely acknowledged

‘synthesis’ model developed by John Kotter in his eight-step model for leading changev:


1. Create a sense of urgency: This is often referred to as the need for the organisation and its members to acknowledging that they are on a ‘burning platform’, and that change is necessary for the organisation to survive. However, the situation in Statistics Denmark is not that severe, and instead we communicated the (less imperative) ‘burning ambition’.

2. Build a guiding coalition: In addition to the directors a number of middle managers and other key staff with a high degree of professional responsibility push the reform agenda and process – among others via their role in the steering committees of the current re-form projectsvi and in the preceding ‘reform groups’.

3. Form a strategic vision and initiatives: See section 1 above about Strategy 2020.

4. Enlist a volunteer ‘army’: Recent year’s reform efforts in Statistics Denmark have to a large extent built on input from groups of volunteers who – on the basis of broad direc-tions from the National Statistician – produced substantial analyses and developed nu-merous proposals for reform initiatives via ‘bottom-up’ collection and processing of ide-as in the reform groups, cf. point 2 above. A recent example of volunteers who took a role in implementing change is the group of ‘enthusiastic frontrunners’ (ildsjæle), cf. section 5 below.

5. Enable action by removing barriers: A number of barriers for change are being tackled: First and foremost the ‘financial squeeze’ that Statistics Denmark is in, and where the portfolio of reform projects consists of projects that drive costs (e.g. creation of an ‘Analy-sis division’ and more dynamic dissemination) and projects that will free up resources (e.g. reduction of office space, modernisation of validation, and centralisation of IT). A second example relates to our internal confidentiality rules, which prohibited us from fulfilling urgent needs of important users. Rethinking of rules and technical solutions has enabled new ways of data sharing which is being very positively received by users. A third ex-ample relates to our underlying ‘change competence’, which has been addressed in an of-fice-wide project described in more detail in the remains of the paper.

6. Generate short-term wins: This aspect is important to generate support from staff, and it is one of our main challenges, because we need to implement projects that will increase internal efficiency (“the stick”) in order to free up resources before projects, which will improve services for external users (“the carrot”), can be initiated. Nevertheless, we try to seize opportunities to celebrate progress in the projects.

7. Sustain acceleration: To the extent possible, we try to align all management systems to the vision and the priorities of Strategy 2020, including our appraisal system.

8. Institute change: In addition to point 7 above, we aim to articulate whenever possible the connections between new behaviours, progress and successes vis-à-vis our vision and strategy. However, this hinges largely on our communication efforts – an area where we know that we ought to do more/better!

5. The ability to change: Can you train it?

As mentioned above the ability to change can improve – we can increase our capacity – per-sonally and organisationally! The good question is how to find the right approach to make the training effective and sustainable. Due to the circumstances and challenges presented earlier, Statistics Denmark has been training its ‘change competence’ throughout the organi-sation from late summer 2015 to late spring 2016. We have done it within a well-defined framework facilitated by an external consultant bureau (Resonans Apsvii). This is only the first phase – a training course – our intention is to continue working systematically with our ability to change.


It was relatively easy to decide on the overall scope and structure of the project. When mov-ing down the organisation and starting to fill in the overall structure a number of challenges started to occur.

The overall scope was to develop and improve our ability to change (‘change competences’) both as an organisation as a whole, as departments and divisions and last but not least as individuals. The reason for strengthening our change competences is to be sufficiently adapt-able to the changing demands and expectations that we face continuously. The overall struc-ture of the project is illustrated below.

Three tracks or relevant organisational levels were identified: Top management (direktion), department (afdeling) and division (kontor). On each level the starting point was a 3-hour workshop dealing with the specific challenges and opportunities when working with change competences and change management. The managers in charge had the opportunity to set the agenda, formulate scope and expectations and the employees had the opportunity to fill in with questions, remarks, ideas, suggestions etc. This was a very valuable start of the pro-ject.

The main activity of the project was to conduct so-called ‘100 days courses of action’ (100 dages forløb). Every division defined a ‘100 days task’ and trained the use of different tools; new ways of holding meetings, working with focus on possibilities/advantages instead of obstacles/disadvantages, working with focus on ‘things we want to move towards’ and ‘things we want to move away from’ etc.

In order to inspire, motivate and clarify the purpose of the project a considerable communi-cation effort was conducted. Posters describing purpose, targets, tools, etc. (and later on ob-servations from all the approximately twenty different ‘100 days courses of action’ in the institute in order to share knowledge) were posted all over the office. Interestingly, reactions ranged from “Is this really necessary – I understand the project” to “Wow – how interesting they are working with this. I’ll visit them later to learn more about it”). The variety of reac-tions shows clearly how difficult it is to impose large organisational changes and achieve a common, positive mindset.

An important part of the project, which was a new way of working for us, was the establish-ment of a group of employees (1 to 2 from each division), who had the role of being so-called ‘enthusiastic frontrunners’ (ildsjæle). The role implied focusing on the progress of the project,


e.g. assisting the manager and the colleagues in following the time schedule, using the tools etc. The experience differed very much - from ‘enthusiastic frontrunners’ who had a tough time due to low motivation in their division to ‘enthusiastic frontrunners’ who met high mo-tivation from colleagues and support from the managers.

The project has met other challenges. First of all the speed of adaptation has differed a lot across the organisation. Process orientation, meta-communication, reflecting on own mindset and behaviour, etc. are some of the keywords – aspects of working life which are not key qualifications and competences. This implies a second challenge – how to follow up and keep focusing on working actively with change competences. A working group with both manag-ers and employees is presenting suggestions to succeeding with this in September 2016. The third challenge was as indicated above to succeed with the communication needed for ex-plaining, maintaining focus and inspiring commitment. A fourth challenge worth mentioning is the importance of management focus, both from top and middle management.

5.1 The strength-based approach

A key element of SD´s approach for the ‘change competence’ project was the strength-based approach. The point of departure for this approach to management, cooperation and innova-tion is to focus on what we are good at, what motivates us and gives us energy and what works well in our organization – and then do more of that! This is contrary to the more tradi-tional ‘problem-oriented’ approach focusing on ‘what is the problem, which negative effects do we see, what are the causes of the problem, what can we do about it, who is responsible?’ Research demonstrates that the strength-based approach is a more effective way of creating energy, boosting creativity and innovation - and results! It also improves the well-being and job satisfaction for the members of organizations, because we can better develop when we start from areas where we are already strong.

Thus, during their projects all divisions had the task to ‘identify and extend/enlarge’ (‘finde og forstørre’) examples of successful solutions and practice which could also be used to a larger extent, in other parts of the organization etc.

The strength based approach does not mean that we ‘turn our backs on problems’ and weak-nesses and pretend they do not exist. Instead, the point is to be aware of our weaknesses, and to overcome them by using our strengths – or by getting complementary help if necessary.

6. What have evaluations told us?

Traditionally, Statistics Denmark conducts Staff Opinion Surveys and ‘Manager Evaluation’ surveys every second year. As a consequence of the major changes which are applied these years it was decided to conduct these surveys annually in 2015-2017. We engaged with the company called Great Place to Work, who conducts similar surveys among many private and public enterprises in 24 countries worldwide.

As a supplement to the general framework consisting of 59 questions we decided to supple-ment the standard survey with 17 ‘local questions’, of which 7 were designed to measure the ability of implementing change.

The first of these surveys was conducted in September 2015, and the main results were:

� There was generally quite a gap between the staff’s assessment of Statistics Denmark in

general and their assessment of their own division - especially regarding ‘credibility’,

‘justice’ and ‘ability to implement change’. This gap is most likely a result of the many

changes and reforms that have been and still are being imposed and seen by many as

‘coming from the top’. It may also reflect that when staff feels frustrations, then these


frustrations are directed towards the more ‘distant’ top management, whilst staff to a

larger extent seem understanding vis-à-vis the difficult role of their ‘own’ middle man-

ager, i.e. the heads of divisions.

� A large part of the results underlined the importance of the managers taking the com-

munication task seriously and to prioritise the ‘change competence’ project.

� For a large part of the staff it needs to become clearer how they personally can contribute

to the realization of the Strategy 2020, i.e. ‘what’s in it for me? Where do I fit in? What

can I do, in practice?’

� The importance of focusing more on positive aspects – the successes – e.g. professional

pride, good behaviour, good local working environment, etc.

A follow-up plan to the results of this staff opinion survey was decided in January 2016 with suggestions for actions to improve the working conditions in Statistics Denmark. Just to men-tion a few:

1. ‘My contribution to the realisation of Strategy 20220’ was included as a mandatory

theme in the annual ‘employee development talks’ (Medarbejder-Udviklings-Samtale)

for all staff in the spring of 2016.

2. More events where we celebrate successes, both on local and global/’house’ level, are

held.

3. All papers discussed at the weekly Directors’ Meeting are now made available to all staff

via the intranet (i.e. more transparency).

4. A performance management will be set up in order to improve the basis for the continu-

ous clarification from manager to employee about expectations regarding working effort,

results, mindset, etc.

As mentioned, seven of the questions related to the ability of implementing change. As a follow-up to the Staff Opinion Survey the same seven questions were used in an office-wide evaluation of the ‘change competence’ project in May 2016. The scores (share of answers in the top-2 categories: ‘Agree’ or ‘partly agree’ in the two surveys appear in the table below.

Question: Sept. 2015 May 2016

1. We are good at implementing changes 33% 30%

2. The management is good at ensuring that Statistics Den-mark’s goals are accomplished

57% 50%

3. I have been well informed about the background and pur-pose of the planned changes in Statistics Denmark

57% 48%

4. I am motivated to contribute to accomplishing the planned changes

58% 59%

5. I am capable of accomplishing the planned changes within my area of work

72% 84%

6. In general, I am ready to cope with the changes I meet in my job

82% 92%

7. We talk open-mindedly about the challenges associated with the changes

57% 38%

In the first survey from September 2015 the evaluation of our ability to implement change was not impressive; possibly due to the fact that we were in the middle of a huge start-up of


many big, organisational projects with purposes of sustaining changes in the longer run (our so-called ‘reform projects’). Regarding the sufficiency of communication and the motivation and readiness of the employees there was also room for improvement. On the other hand, the employees’ assessments of their own capability and readiness for meeting and accomplishing the changes were rather positive.

Measuring the same aspects in May 2016 - where all the reform projects were now up and running, and the ‘change competence’ project was about to end – the results indicate a devel-opment that is partly encouraging and partly disappointing: On the one hand, the general perception of the individual capability to cope with change has increased significantly. On the other hand, the perception of the organisational capacity is a bit lower, and the information and communication is – despite considerably efforts - rated significantly lower. The results from the evaluation survey in May are yet to be discussed, but there seems to be a lot talk about and learn from!

7. Concluding reflections

Statistics Denmark has embarked into partially unknown waters and with some new ways of sailing. But - as many other organisation have experienced – it takes time to change the course of a ‘super tanker’ which has followed the same overall course for a long time. The journey has now lasted for about 2½ years and all in all we consider ourselves ‘well under way’; primarily because we are confident that Strategy 2020 is the right compass and because we begin to gain speed. And ‘well under way’ is in a way ‘half-way there’, because we are not aiming for a new status quo or ‘steady state’. We expect change to continue.

Against that background, it is too early to make firm conclusions. Rather, we would like to round of this paper with a few reflections on ‘why we are, where we are right now’?

• Change takes time: Especially the underlying cultural norms, perceptions, habits etc. move slowly. It seems plausible that NSIs are even more status quo oriented than most other types of organisations – it is in our DNA - and NSIs need to be more aware that this easily becomes a limiting factor in a world than changes with increasing pace. Having said this, we nevertheless claim that Statistics Denmark’s culture is changing as a direct result of the reform activities in the last 2-3 years.

• The ‘change competence’ project is part of a beginning – not the end – of initiatives to nurture the innovative capacity, add new tools to our tool box - and to ‘gently push’ our culture in a direction where for instance an initiative for competence building is seen as an opportunity to learn more – not as criticism against the staff. Maybe the disappointing results from the evaluation, cf. above, reflect that many changes have been launched at the same time, and that the ‘tree has been shaken’.

• The last 2½ years have seen involvement of staff at an unprecedented level (in Statistics Denmark). Yet, there are still barriers, including reluctance and resistance, especially in relation to the projects, which shall deliver efficiencies/savings. To the top management these projects are seen as necessary and highly interesting ’enablers’. The staff on the other hand feels that the projects deteriorate what they see as strengths of the organisa-tions culture: They affect their everyday work and reduce their freedom and flexibility. A large part of the staff has not yet seen concrete improvements for them and it affects their motivation and trust. And the middle managers are to some extent caught in between.

• It is quite clear that the communication must be strengthened, both in its magnitude and its clarity. In this regard it is important to recall that the top management will always ‘be ahead of the staff’ – simply because they have been working intensively with the change


initiatives before they are decided and communicated. The communication must allow staff to get the same level of understanding.

• It seems that the ‘big’ story: The overall WHATs, WHYs and HOWs – needs to be told again (and again). It must be comprehensible to all – also to those who may not fully agree with it (yet). One question is this regard is whether a ‘burning ambition’ is suffi-cient?

• Although a relatively large proportion of staff has been actively involved in reform pro-jects (cf. above regarding the ‘army’ of volunteers) most staff have primarily been in-volved in the own divisions ‘100 days course of action’. So is there an extra potential? There is a growing group who actively supports change, and a small group that remains quite reluctant or even opposed. But what about ’the silent majority’? How could we mo-tivate the ‘silent supporters’ to become actively involved? And how could we motivate the ‘silent opposition’ to voice their reservations and take active part in the discussions? And why are they silent in the first place? Is there a lack of trust? Or interest?

• These reflections again trigger questions about leadership and management. If the or-ganisational cultures of NSIs, in a particular extent, limit their ability to adapt to chang-ing framework conditions, which requirements will then that imply for the future leaders of the NSIs?

Acknowledgements

We thank National Statistician Jørgen Elmeskov, Deputy Head of Division Hanne-Pernille Stax and Head of section Poul-Erik Olesen for valuable review and input.

i http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/Publikationer/VisPub?cid=26415 ii Edgar Schein: Organisational culture and leadership. iii IntelleCap, Intellectual Capital. iv Why is soft so hard, Ravi Pradhan, 2005. v See e.g.: http://www.kotterinternational.com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change/ vi Our current ’reform projects’ are: Centralisation of IT; reduction of office space; Change competence; ‘Business Critical Enterprises’; Communication and Dissemination; ‘GDP at t+45 days’; Standardisation of metadata systems; Strategic cooperation with providers of admin. data; Financing of new EU requirements. vii http://resonans.dk/

Organisational Culture of an NSI: Strengths and Weak ...¸ren Schiønning Andersen... · Many NSIs...

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