Knowing Where We Stand: The Key to Shaping Our Work Culture

Before you can build the work culture you envision, do you truly understand the culture you have now?

In this episode of Relationships at Work, we explore the importance of taking a hard look at your current organizational environment before setting future goals. Using real-life examples, we discuss why leaders often fail to transform their teams and how tools like employee surveys, cultural audits, and direct observation can provide the crucial insights needed to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be. 

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Transcript

 Welcome back to Relationships At Work – Your guide to building workplace connections and avoiding leadership blindspots..  I’m your host Russel Lolacher 

I’m a communications and leadership nerd with a couple of decades of experience and a heap of curiosity on how we can make the workplace better. If you’re a leader trying to understand and improve your impact on work culture and the employee experience, you’re in the right place. 

This mini-episode is a quick and valuable bit of information to shift your thinking for the week ahead. 

Inspired by our R@W Note Newsletter, I’m passing on to you… 

The Leadership X-Ray: See & Understand to Rebuild Your Work Culture

"What kind of work culture do we want?"

It's a great question to ask an organization, a team….and a great opportunity. It allows us to explore possibility, set goals and reflect on the kind of environment that will help us move the organization, our branch, our division, our team forward.

There’s just a HUGE piece of information that we don’t always have: Do we know the organizational culture we have now? I ask this because so many leaders focus on a future-state vision without really understanding the world they live in now.

Unfortunately trying to build a future-state culture, most often than not, is wasted effort if we don't understand how amazing or horrible our current culture is. How do we know we're even prepared or capable of achieving this future state? If we have the right people? The right training? The right mindset?

I remember going to a small leadership conference where they talked of the transition of political power in Australia. The Prime Minister of the day was someone who liked to have control and to make all the decisions, so they surrounded themselves and their public service with people that diligently executed his vision. Basically "yes" men and women who were hired to focus on and deliver what the Prime Minister wanted. 

Now when a new Prime Minister was then elected, they were a far different leader. They wanted new ideas, they wanted innovative thinking and they wanted shared visions for the future. The problem was the organization he inherited wasn't that organization. That wasn't what they were hired to do. They executed. End of list. They didn't innovate or think strategically because their former boss did that for them. It wasn’t their skillset or mindset to do anything else. So this new leader got exceedingly frustrated and blamed the organization for failing to do what he wanted them to do. He talked of how broken the organization was and that he couldn’t get anything done. 

He didn't know his culture. He had a vision of the culture he wanted and had no concept of the organization he was trying to build that culture from.

We can’t arrogantly assume we’re in a place to create something new. FYI – I’ll be talking about arrogant assumption in an upcoming episode. 

So how do we know where our culture currently sits?

·       Employee Surveys and Feedback Tools: It’s one of the most direct ways to assess the work culture.  Employee surveys - covering things like job satisfaction, work-life balance, management effectiveness, and feelings of inclusiveness and respect. Make sure to include open-ended questions too. Regular feedback like suggestion boxes or regular one-on-one meetings, can also help us get insights.

·       Observation and Participation in Daily Activities: Just watch. Don't hide in our offices. Actively observe and participate in the daily activities of our teams, including attending meetings, participating in after work or less formal get togethers, and watching the work environment during different times of the day. And pay attention. Look for how employees interact with each other, how they approach their work, and how policies and practices are actually implemented. We’re getting to see the culture upclose and it’s a great opportunity to note that gap we talk about on the show - the discrepancies between what we say our values are and actual behavior.

·       Third-Party Cultural Audits: Getting an outside group to come in and do an assessment can help with objectivity. Especially if there’s any issues with psychological safety. It's still those surveys, interviews, and observations I mentioned, but with less baggage. They can also provide a bigger picture, benchmarking the organization's culture against industry standards or better practices, providing a more unbiased view of where the culture stands and where there might be room for improvement. It’s a gap analysis that we can't do, being a part of the culture ourselves.

In the end, it's about knowing where you are to get were you want to go. 

And if we truly want to drive our organization to a new corporate culture destination, we really have to understand the kind of car we're driving, who’s in the car and who’s not and if we have enough gas to get there.

Yep. The metaphor works!