Some research I undertook produced an interesting discovery. I had interviewed 10 of an organisation’s staff and customers during the covid lockdown to find out where value creation occurs when experiences are limited to an online environment.

After the interviews had been transcribed, they were viewed from a far perspective for overall themes and then combed over closely for detail looking at them in the light of behavioural theories, then also seeing if anything unsought for popped up.

During the close level analysis I noticed a pattern where some staff were using the first person singular “I” and “my” to describe their own work experiences and the department’s role whereas other staff used “we” and “our” – thus extending their identity to embrace the department and the organisation as a whole. So what was causing the different approaches? In the course of the interviews it had been disclosed that those people using only “I” and “me” had been onboarded virtually to their new jobs and despite being in post as long as nine months they not met any of the other department members in person. It appeared that the virtually onboarded staff lacked Organisational Alignment.

What is Organisational Alignment?

Alignment with an organisation is defined in terms of a social identity theory, that is, organisational identity is a sense of “oneness” with the organisation.

A well-distributed, deeply rooted organisational identity has been shown to confer competitive advantage, including better employee outcomes, job satisfaction, cooperation, organisational citizenship and customer service. Another purpose of organisational identity is that it helps evaluate and maintain in-group/out-group differences.

In the literature on this topic it is asserted that it is the need for self-esteem that drives organisational identity.

Deprived of the means or learning and assimilating their new organisational identity the new employees in my study were not having their need for self-esteem met through an organisational identity channel so they may not have been engaging fully in behaviours to reinforce and enhance the organisational identity. They, of course did not state this as they were not fully aware of lacking what they didn’t know existed. This was another motif - a paradox which turned up again and again in this piece of research; the unknown unknowns.

How is Organisational Alignment achieved?

It has been posited that the transfer of organisational identity from to person to person takes place in three ways: through identity congruent behaviours and emotional contagion and consistency. It appears that this wasn’t achieved effectively in an online-only environment by this department. It so happened that another of my interviewees was the very person responsible for onboarding the new staff and was convinced that online working represented no problems that could not be overcome by shiny new technology.

So this was one of the many findings that qualitative research can reveal and they can be realisable things or only unconsciously expressed. Evidence of where value is created for employee and customer through using objectively conducted qualitative research can lead to improved design of product/service experience, targeting, messaging and branding and to the recruitment and retention of better talent and customers.

   ©️2023 Alexandra Stacey