Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is something that is very important to consider when you are looking for an employment opportunity. Organizational culture can drastically effect how much you like your job and how long you will stay with your job. I have worked in the Campus Visits department at the Office of Admissions for a little over a year now and have a good understanding of the organizational culture that we have. The organizational culture of this job suits my needs, wants, and expectations very well. Sociability within our office is very high. Approximately 50 students are employed in the office and most students know most or all of the other students working there. Many of the students in my department get together on the weekends to do various social events. Sociability is not limited to the student workers. Every Friday a department is responsible for bringing in snacks and drinks to our break room where everyone in the office is welcome to go back to the room and enjoy them, while socializing of course. It is not uncommon for both student workers and full time staff to sit and talk about non-work related subjects for up to hours at a time when things are slow and there’s no work to be done. The power distribution and job autonomy of the office is clear-cut with many different levels. The student workers, of course, are at the bottom power level. Every department has one or two students who are “undergraduate assistants” and have authority over the other students in that department. There is a single “director of admissions” who is in charge of the whole office. The power level directly beneath the director of admissions is the assistant director of admissions. There are a total of eight assistant directors of admissions, one for each department. The departments include the following: New Student Enrollment, Campus Visits, Processing, Honors Recruitment, Eastern Recruitment, Western/Central Recruitment, National Recruitment, and Minority Recruitment. In our department, the assistant director also has her own assistant, who ranks directly above myself and the other undergraduate assistant, Todd. Todd and I have fifteen students that we are responsible for delegating responsibility to. As a mentioned earlier, there are titles and certain responsibilities given to employees, but the degree of structure isn’t as high as it might first appear. Crossing over “department lines” is very common and somewhat necessary. One example of this is Red Letter Days. Red Letter Days are the responsibility of our department, Campus Visits. Though we are the largest department with about 20 employees, it would be virtually impossible for us to host the 800 or more people that attend any given Red Letter Day. All of the recruiting departments help us out on these days by simply filling in the gaps where we need help. In return, we help them with their work when they need help. The degree of structure is much higher when it comes to certain policies. For example, a student in our department may have to look at the computer records of 60 different students when preparing information, but if just one student’s information is accessed without purpose, the student employee would be fired without further explanation. Achievement awards is an element of our office’s culture that could use some improvement. Monetary awards do not exist at any level. Our boss is pretty good about giving praise where it’s due, but she can’t do anything about our pay. Every student starts at $5.65 per hour, and, regardless of job performance, won’t receive a raise until they have worked for a full year. The final element of organizational culture I will discuss is tolerance for risk and change. Our work environment is not only tolerant for change, change is highly encouraged. We are constantly evaluating and changing our procedures for doing things. Every visitor to the campus is asked to fill out an evaluation, which is in turn used to help us improve. An example of a fairly recent change just took place this semester. We used to have about eight students come in at about nine in the morning. Maybe two or three of these would give a tour, and the rest would all be around the office doing many different, random tasks. It is now more structure so that certain individuals are assigned specifically to give tours, answer the phone, or work on making folders. We have found this to be more efficient and result in fewer mistakes.