Getting Clear on Organisational Culture

Knowledge workers have adapted to working away from their colleagues much faster than anyone could have imagined.

Far from productivity going down, it’s mostly stayed the same or gone up (see Management Today’s Will Hybrid Working Ever Work or our own episode WLP255).

Given the suboptimal conditions that some employees are dealing with at home, the results of the “suddenly working from home” workforce are impressive.

While most business leaders are confident that productivity won’t be affected if their employees continue to work remotely, they are concerned about employees losing their sense of belonging and feeling emotionally (as well as physically) dispersed. They are openly asking, “How do we sustain our culture, which we love, in a new remote/hybrid set up? How can we prevent our company’s culture, from turning into a culture of disengagement, silos, and disconnection?

Back to Basics

Before we come up with solutions involving watercooler channels in MSTeams, emojis and pub quizzes online (all perfectly valid practices to keep the social spirit alive), let’s recap what culture is.

As always, let’s go back to the key concepts of leadership and organisational behaviour, and then adapt them to “remote”. 

Culture is built on assumptions, about ourselves and how we see the world.

Those assumptions lead to values (sometimes articulated, others not) that result in visible behaviours. 

Symbols and artifacts reflect those values and sometimes enable those behaviours.

Rituals and shared experiences develop which reflect those values.

Let’s revisit Edgar Schein’s Onion:

Schein’s Culture Onion

Schein’s Culture Onion

In trying to “keep their culture”, some organisations are starting with the outer layers of the onion. But if you want to maintain the culture you had, you need to start closer to the core of your culture. Values are a good place to start, as they are easier to articulate than assumptions, and you might even have articulated your aspiring values.  

Going back to our values can help us imagine how they might be expressed in the online space - which might be different to how they were expressed in the office.

You will need to adopt new behaviours and practices to live your organisation’s values in the online space.

Some previous behaviours might need adapting. 

Some might even need scrapping. 

Don’t take it from me. Let me quote Jesper B. Sørensen from MIT: “Change can render existing organizational routines inadequate or inappropriate.” (The Strength of Corporate Culture and the Reliability of Firm Performance.)

Context has Changed

If your values are important to you, if having the “right” culture in your organisation is important, the transition to remote can provide the space to rediscover what your values mean to people in the new context.

How does your team engage with those values when they’re apart in space, and even time?

For example, once upon a time, employees felt free to run errands during the day, or to come into the office mid-morning with no one batting an eyelid, or to work from home when they had to finish a tricky piece of work. It was part of that “flexibility and autonomy” valued in the workplace. 

To continue living up to that value as an organisation, where remote work is truly integrated, could mean paying for membership of co-working spaces, delivering training both online and off, making it ok to add “time offline” in your calendar with no one asking what that means. 

Take a snapshot of your organisation’s current culture

Take a snapshot of your organisation’s current culture

During the forced transition to remote, many organisational leaders have discovered what’s important to them. Many employees can now pinpoint the behaviours that help them feel connected and the activities that help them remember who else is in the organisation.

 It’s time to do what leaders of distributed teams and organisations do: they are explicit about their values, and deliberately integrate them into their operations: from recruitment, through onboarding, decision-making and communication. And those organisations who embraced remote work many, many years ago, have made sure of sustaining a “remote friendly culture” (one where remote employees feel as involved and engaged as those permanently in the office) in the same way.

We can continue talking about “building a strong culture”, but it will be easier to build if you take time to reflect on the values that drive people’s decisions, and what behaviours - whether online or off, depending on where you’re heading - would help you achieve your aims.

What are the values that guide our behaviour in the organisation?
(It’s time to take out that document you worked on during your last retreat!)

How are those values being expressed right now?

Connect With Others

Talk to others in the organisation to gain visibility into parts of the organisation you rarely interact with. Look for examples online. For example, how are people communicating on Yammer? Or how have they adapted to talking to clients online? What practices are working in teams when integrating new hires, that reflect your values?
(For more on onboarding onto remote teams, check out this thorough, multi-voice episode.)

How can you adjust the current context to help those desired behaviours to flourish? What might get in the way?

What Has Changed? What Has Stayed the Same? Cartoon sketch of person looking at Edgar Schein’s Culture Onion.

Finally:

How can you share this in the organisation? What different channels and mediums (both synchronous and asynchronous) can you use to amplify your culture, so that employees can experience it even in small doses, from wherever they are?

Distributed organisations have deliberately and gradually shaped their culture, and they have been sharing their methods to provide others with guidance or inspiration. We’ve been lucky enough to talk to some of these thoughtful leaders on our podcast. So here are some episodes you might want to check out. And remember that they all have show notes you can read if you’re not up for listening.

And be in it for the long run. “Culture” wasn’t built in a day.

A sense of connection and the opportunity to share what’s going on for people in your organisation doesn’t need to be done in online meetings. We believe in the power of podcasting to keep people together. If you would like to explore how in-house podcasting can help you foster a sense of belonging in your organisation and help you amplify your culture, get in touch here.

Team Culture, Leadership, Visible TeamworkPilar Ortiorganisational culture, hybrid working, remote teams, Edgar Schein’s Onion, leadershipComment