It is not easy to get to the bottom of an organization’s culture. Culture cannot be decided and is therefore not easy to discuss. Fortunately, organizational sociology provides a heuristic that helps to investigate the relevant phenomena. We call them the searchlights of organizational culture.
In this series, we present these searchlights. This article discusses contact structure.
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We understand the contact structure to be the actual distribution of contacts among members of an organization that are formed independently of formal expectations in the course of their work. Through this searchlight we can illuminate when and how employees exchange information on certain subjects, prepare decisions, or test the validity of ideas.
Contact structure: The de facto distribution of contacts
among members of an organization.
After all, it is all too often the case that decision-making paths do not follow defined processes, an organization chart or committee structures but rather zigzag through an organization, one step forward and then two back, before a decision-making paper is fed into the official channels or a new project is presented to the responsible committee.
What function does contact structure perform for
an organization?
Anyone in an organization who wants to perform their task well will find ways to do that. If the formal paths are not or only partly suitable to enable a good job to be done, new trails will be cut through the communication undergrowth. These are often one-off or seldom-used paths that emerge from a novel situation, a bungled vacation schedule caused by the department next door,
or a person being totally overburdened.
Nevertheless, well-trodden paths and unofficial routines are repeatedly formed in this way and become firmly established and embedded as expectations regarding the way people interact. You are then dealing with de facto contact structures that form part of an organization’s culture.
Then, information from the Steering Committee is no longer passed on in a random way at the coffee machine, but distributed in targeted fashion to departments in the organization that are not formally involved but nevertheless relevant for a project’s success. Decision-making papers for a Board meeting are routinely discussed in advance with other departments as an up-front meansof preventing individual escalations and avoiding foreseeable conflicts.
Recurring constellations of these advance discussion or “pre-cooking” practices can be found in many organizations and cover a wide range of topics. They are prime examples of contact structures arising from the work’s de facto requirements, but cannot be found in any work regulations or PowerPoint presentations.
Another advantage is that the de facto contact structure can enormously speed up processes for which complex formal regulations may well exist. Decisions are prepared with the relevant actors before being presented to the formally responsible people, thus reducing the time subsequently needed for discussions once a decision has been made. Colleagues are given an information lead so that they can present convincing arguments to the committee meeting and do not first have to form an opinion. Or in complicated manufacturing operations, an experienced colleague is simply asked whether a component is likely to pass quality control tests despite slight nonconformities, thereby avoiding lengthy consultations between quality assurance and engineers.
What consequential problems does this entail?
Something that seems to make sense in the routine of everyday work is often a problem from an organizational point of view. After all, the very purpose of rules that govern information flows and involvement in decision-making is to create predictability about what information should be available in which parts of the organization, possibly even at what time, and who should formally
influence decision-making.
De facto contact structures often conflict with this formal definition. For example, if formal authority holders have practically very little to do with a department, they may be uncoupled from the information flow. A quality manager who only gets to see one in every five dubious components will be unable to identify regular faults in a new machine until a late stage.
When analyzing the organizational culture, it is worthwhile taking a look at de facto contact structures for two reasons: first, it enables informal processes to be discovered that are already well ahead of formally established ones in terms of speed and stakeholder management (and may possibly make planned process optimization projects superfluous before they even start); second,
it also reveals the points at which de facto work processes frustrate reasonable responsibilities and information flows and thus regularly cause friction.
These questions should be considered:
- What short official channels have been established?
- What experts are consulted, even outside their formal roles?
- What indirect routes does information regularly take?
This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Nail the pudding to the wall! How to analyse, discuss – and successfully influence – your organization’s culture”. The full whitepaper is available to download free of charge here.