We all aspire to work for a company that values our work and treats us like grown-ups. But what else do you want from the place where you spend the majority of your waking life?
Company culture is best defined as “the way things get done around here,” and it’s influenced by both deliberate choices and unintended consequences. Over time, a company’s culture can evolve into enviable greatness (such as Apple, Google, Southwest Airlines and Hubspot) which can help you attract amazing new talent. Or it can dissolve into pockets of dysfunction.
A major corporate event, like an acquisition or merger, can be an impetus for reexamining your company culture – and taking control of the dysfunction.
At my company, Sterling Talent Solutions, we seized the opportunity to reinvigorate our company culture as a result of a merger in early 2016. We began with a comprehensive employee-wide survey that asked a full range of questions about the company’s culture, from decision-making norms to dress code. We wanted to understand what employees liked about working at Sterling and what they didn’t.
The survey armed us with a raft of data points and about what our culture is today. But it didn’t tell us what sort of company culture we should aspire to be tomorrow. So we decided to take that question to employees directly.
With thousands of employees and offices across the globe from New York to Mumbai, starting a culture conversation with employees (and collecting their feedback in an organized manner) required an inclusive strategy to ensure we discovered high-impact initiatives that would influence the entire organization.
We started by constructing a repeatable workshop tailored to three stakeholder groups: employees, management and executives. Our objective was to include employees who enjoyed sharing honest opinions about the organization and who also had a desire to improve culture. In total, we hosted 18 workshops around the world and invited about 350 people (or 10% of the company) to join the conversation.
Each workshop was designed to be interactive and elicit as much conversation as possible. We focused on 16 cultural attributes (out of the 32 attributes included in the company-wide survey): social interactions, how decisions are made, how meetings are held and more.
In order to further define these 16 attributes, workshop participants were asked to use a “scale” to define the attribute in our target culture. For example in the decision-making attribute, the scale ranged from “top down decisions” at one end to “consensus decisions” at the other end. Employees had to decide as a group where to place our aspirational culture on the continuum – more top-down decision-making or more consensus building. WARNING: The middle of the scale is a glaring indicator that your organization and employees are not sending a clear recognizable message; you have to pick a side.
While it will be different for every organization, we discovered our employees cared the most about these five culture attributes:
These five traits might not always be top of mind when you think about culture, but we discovered they were crucial for our organization. And on an interesting side-note, dress code turned out to not be as hot a topic as we originally thought. The beauty of research is that you never know what you’re going to get!
As we created these culture workshops, we learned a lot. Here are five quick tips for developing your own culture workshop.
