What is organizational culture and how do we change it? Those basic questions are very important for the fire service. For example, how would we create a better safety culture? How would we create a public service culture? And how would we create an organizational culture that integrates emergency response and prevention/mitigation strategies?
Creating Culture
First, it’s important to understand that organizational culture is not the negative phrase some assume it is. I’ve heard some firefighters mistakenly grouse “you’re trying to shove some cultural competency down my throat again.” According to the University of North Carolina’s business dictionary, organizational culture is, “The values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. (It)… includes an organization’s expectations, experiences, philosophy, and values that hold it together, and is expressed in its self-image, inner workings, interactions with the outside world, and future expectations. It’s based on shared attitudes, beliefs, customs and written and unwritten rules that have been developed over time and are considered valid.”
So why would we want to change an organization’s culture? I mean, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? The fire service is far from broken, but we all know change is in the air. We should look at making organizational cultural changes to survive, to thrive and meet new challenges (like the ones that ask us to do more with less).
As I’ve written extensively about community risk reduction before, I won’t attempt to defend the need for it again here, other than to say it’s important our firefighters understand they have more than one tool to solve public safety problems. Emergency response is our primary function in the fire service, but we have other safety tools (e.g., engineering, enforcement, education) that may be more efficient and even more effective at providing for public safety. Integrating them is our collective goal and need.
How then would we change organizational culture to reflect that reality? In research I conducted, I uncovered six basic steps to changing organizational culture. We do so through recruitment, hiring, training, visioning, modeling and rewarding.
Six Steps
Recruitment and hiring go hand in hand. If you have the values and skill sets in mind that you’re looking for, then you actively recruit and hire people with them, similar to the way we started looking for people with emergency medical skills in the past.
Training occurs after we hire people and continues throughout their careers. If we want to promote certain values, norms and behaviors, then we must train people. If we talk and don’t train, it’s just lip service, but providing regular training will help everyone take the values we are trying to shape more seriously.
Visioning is what happens when the chief and the leadership can articulate the organizational cultural values they want to see from everyone. It is communicated from the beginning of an employee’s career, and repeated often. But visioning alone isn’t sufficient. It requires modeling from the highest ranks. To express a particular vision is meaningless unless those in high positions are willing to “walk the walk.”
Finally, rewarding is one of the more fundamental ways we institutionalize organizational culture. Public recognition is valuable and can help an organization recognize the traits they want to promote within their department. It can be done for safety, firefighting skills, medical skills or a broader community risk reduction model. But beyond a plaque, the way we determine who will advance to leadership in the organization is a critical tool for managing organizational culture.
If I promote you because you’re a good fireground commander, of course there’s value. But what about the skills necessary to manage people, budgets or politics? If we continue to promote people in the same way and for the same reasons, we’ll get the same results no matter how many times we say we value community risk reduction. Unless we change the promotional process to include the values and behaviors we really want to see, we’re going to get stuck perpetuating an old way of thinking.
Final Thought
Is all this easy? The answer can be found in additional questions: Was it easy transitioning to emergency medical services? No. Was it worth it? Yes it was, and remains a matter of survival of the fire department.
We’re facing challenges in the public sector that a fire hose, a ladder and a strong body won’t fix. We have to find new ways to develop and maintain an organizational culture that will allow us to successfully use alternative safety tools to more effectively provide for public safety.
