Do you need to review your organisational culture?
If you haven’t done so since you started working hybrid then, yes, you do!
Going from all working together in a shared space (or a number of shared spaces) to most people working from their own space most of the time changes things.
It fundamentally changes how your teams experience being part of your organisation.
It means you cannot take culture for granted. It means you have to be completely intentional about how you talk about your culture and really clear about what you expect from individuals.
I know how busy leadership meetings can be. There are a lot of figures to review and urgent issues to address. But if you haven't made time lately to sit together and think about the culture in your organisation, then you are overlooking a crucial element of your organisation's success.
A good place to start is to ask two crucial questions.
Firstly: What type of culture do we need?
Culture and strategy should work hand in hand to ensure business success. If you are espousing a culture that doesn’t fit your strategy, it will feel at best disingenuous and at worse dishonest. If you are trying to implement a strategy that your culture is not set up to deliver, it will fail.
Your strategy should also provide a shared purpose – so that everyone in the organisation knows what they are working towards and understands how they contribute.
Working with senior leadership teams on culture, I start with the big picture questions about culture:
What do we want our employees to feel about working here?
How would we want people to describe the experience of working here?
But then we need to dig deeper. We need to ask more questions about the type of organisation we are and how we want our teams to work together. This isn't neccessarily about what we as individuals want to see, but is about how the organisation needs to function in order to deliver.
Here are some examples:
Are we internally or externally focused? Which is most important to us - staff satisfaction or customer service?
Do we want to innovate or do we want to avoid risk? Is it important to keep up with trends or to adhere to sector guidelines?
Do we want to reward teamwork or individual brilliance? Do we want individuals to collaborate or to compete?
Are we building a culture of learning or high performance? Is it ok to fail, and if people do fail how to we address it?
These are all potential paradoxes. It is inherently self-contradictory to say you are “an innovative and safe investment fund” or “a high-performance sales team that gives our staff space to learn and develop”.
So many organisations try to have it both ways. The outcome is, inevitably, confusion and often managing to achieve neither. As a leadership team, it's important to be clear about what you are trying to build.
Secondly: What type of culture do we have?
How do you know what type of culture you have? It can be even tricky to understand. Things just aren’t visible to senior leadership in the way they might have been when they could “walk the floor.”
There are more and more micro cultures across a hybrid organisation, as the risk of silos developing increases.
A top-down communication of purpose, values and expectations is crucial. However, there are also elements of culture that are developed from the bottom up – as people’s experiences shape the stories they tell themselves and others about working here.
Team leaders will often have a good insight into what is going on in their teams, so talking to them is a good place to start. Staff surveys can also give you a good indication of potential issues.
However, if you really want to understand what’s going on then a proper piece of internal research might be necessary, with interviews, focus groups and anonymous surveys. If you feel as if something isn’t working this could be a worthwhile investment.
Finally: Mind the gap
The third step is then to honestly assess the gap between the culture you want and the culture you have. Where are the experiences of staff not matching what you'd like to see? What levers can you pull to shift that? Where do you need to be clearer? Where can you provide the support and training that might be needed?
An effective culture isn't just a 'nice to have'. It drives so many core aspects of your business - productivity, performance and, crucially, employee engagement.
If you'd like to have a chat about how I can support you with culture change: book a call
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