Culture In The Workplace And Why It Matters
Forbes defines workplace culture as: “The shared values, belief systems, attitudes, and the set of assumptions that people in a workplace share”.
We all know that the culture of an organisation is critical to its success and leaders will often spend inordinate amounts of time defining their culture and then rolling out the fruits of their labour to their employees. This can involve numerous meetings for the leadership team, focus groups with employees and producing decks outlining the culture.
It is vital work however frequently employees struggle to explain their organisations' culture and worse, will post negative comments on social media deriding the culture. So what went wrong?
An all-too-common occurrence is that the defined culture of the organisation does not match the behaviours of its leaders which can result in cognitive dissonance for employees. Cognitive dissonance is the “emotional tension that arises when a person becomes aware of simultaneously holding two conflicting beliefs, or when the individual detects the existence of a marked lack of consistency between attitudes and behaviours”. In other words, leaders are saying one thing and doing another.
The McKinsey Health Institute’s work on employee well-being points to a strong correlation between leadership behaviours, a collaborative culture, and resistance to mental health problems and burnout. This means that leaders who align their own behaviours to the values they have defined as critical to the success of the business are most likely to not only be successful but also attract, engage and retain their talent.
So what steps can leaders take to reduce the gap between their defined culture and reality:
1. Walk the walk – whatever values and behaviours your business places importance on, the number one priority is to ensure that leaders are role models for those behaviours both openly but also behind closed doors. It is virtually impossible to stop employees from becoming aware of how leaders talk to each other and this can be the biggest source of cognitive dissonance for employees because they are getting mixed messages about the organisations values.
2. Create psychological safety – actively encourage employees to take risks, express their views and speak up when they see something that doesn’t feel right without any negative consequences. The Harvard Business Review states that people are 10 times more likely to quit their jobs because of toxic work cultures than any other reason so creating an environment where they feel supported will not only lead to improved business results but also reduce attrition.
3. Embed the culture throughout the employee lifecycle – defining and communicating culture is only the first step. For it to come to life and be something employees can explain, every people-related activity, policy and process must be aligned with the culture. For example, you can use your organisation's values to form the basis of how you measure your employees' success and how you reward that success. This way there is consistency and clarity across your culture, your people strategy and your business strategy.
4. Create feedback opportunities – Encouraging open and honest multi-way feedback through different mechanisms will help create the psychological safety mentioned above as well as ensure Leaders understand how employees feel about the organisations culture and give them an opportunity to make changes before it gets to the point where employees are expressing their concerns publicly on social media. Using a variety of mechanisms vs. just one or two will also promote inclusivity by appealing to the ways in which different groups of employees prefer to communicate.
5. Review and evolve – Finally, ensure defining your culture isn’t a one-off exercise, which if treated this way will ultimately result in it being tired and outdated. Regularly monitor feedback, review your activities and evolve your culture. Don’t be afraid of change, the world around us is constantly changing so an organisations culture should evolve with it.