Everything that leaders say and do reveals something about their organisation’s culture. Every business has a company culture. You can’t choose not to have one. You just do. The question is, “Is it a culture that you’ve proactively shaped? Or is it a culture that has evolved because you’ve left it to its own devices?”
What is an organisational culture?
There are many ways to define culture. At its simplest, some say culture is just behaviour. However, we think there’s a lot more to it than that. Another way to define it is to say that culture is the underlying assumptions, values, beliefs and expectations shared by an organisation’s members. It can be positive or negative, proactive or reactive.
There are many models of organisational culture. The Johnson-Scholes model suggests that a culture is built on the following six factors:
- Control systems
- Rituals and routines
- Stories
- Symbols
- Organisational structures
- Power structures
We’re going to explore these factors to discuss how leaders can shape culture to achieve effective hybrid working.
Control systems
Organisations use different means to control employee behaviour, from pay to training to disciplinary systems, and many more. When employees work from home, this reduces the amount of direct control leaders have over them.
Leaders can either choose to trust the individual, give them clear boundaries and expectations, and let them get on, or not. If your people aren’t engaged and motivated enough to work productively, trying to micro-manage them won’t improve the situation.
Indeed, showing that you trust them will go a long way towards increasing their motivation. Most of us extend this level of trust regularly. When we hire a babysitter, for example. Or when we have a builder working on our house. So why wouldn’t we do the same for our people?
Rituals and routines
Hybrid working creates huge opportunities to change pre-existing rituals and routines. Many employees are now unfamiliar with the old routines or are new and never knew them in the first place. This enables leaders to establish new ones that would be more suited to the culture they’d like to develop.
At the same time, the continuation of full or part-time remote working brings with it the need for fresh approaches to how we work together. For some employees hybrid working materially improves their work-life balance and offering this flexibility is critical to attract and retain the best talent. If an employee values pausing work from time to time to attend to other activities e.g. exercise, family, domestic and then make up later on, then that too could be a valuable ‘benefit in kind’.
However this needs to be a two-way street. There is increasing consensus that certain actives are best performed in-person, together (Amazon – 3 day week) and variable hours are ideally a win-win for all parties concerned. Give and take is the name of the game. If it isn’t working then there are probably underlying cultural issues to address.
Stories
Stories are important because they tell us about who we are, where we come from, where we are going and why we are going there. Post-Covid, we have the opportunity to create new stories. However, this means consciously creating them, deciding who are the ‘main characters’ of the stories, and what morals, messages and questions do we want those stories to offer.
Stories are most effective when based around shared experiences. Look at Automattic Inc, the owner and operator of WordPress which supports this website and millions of others like it. Almost all of their 2,000 employees in 97 countries work remotely. In light of this geographic dispersion, founder Matt Mullenweg recognised the need to periodically bring the company together, create connections and, most importantly, make stories.
A few times each year all employees gather in one location for a meaningful amount of time. When they do, the company makes sure that alongside strategy presentations, project meetings and a multitude of business discussions, they create stories – because that’s what people remember. In this way, Automattic creates a cultural narrative based on a shared experience.
Symbols
In this sense, symbols are artefacts that hold the power of something important to the culture of the organisation. They act as a tangible resource that enables us to connect with something that is intangible. They can represent a memory, an idea, a value, a hope that is part of the organisational story.
The question here is – ‘What are the symbols of your organisation and what do they mean?’
Nations have flags, officials often have uniforms, sports teams have mascots. In our homes we have sentimental items that represent moments that matter to us. Symbols remind us of our place in the family of things.
Most corporations could do more to leverage the power of symbolism. As a result, many confuse symbols with their company logo and miss an opportunity to communicate the company culture.
At Goldcrest Partners, we believe that symbols are more important than ever with dispersed working habits. Since an office building is no longer the thing that binds us, finding other ways to share symbolic common ground is more important than ever.
Organisational structures
These are the formal structures and hierarchy of an organisation, as well as the informal routes to get things done. In our experience, many organisations can get bogged down looking to update or change their formal structures while not paying enough attention to the informal.
Formal structures are important to provide the infrastructure of an organisation, however they are by definition rigid, can take time to build and it can be disruptive and expensive to change them. They are well complemented by informal channels that fill in the gaps and get things done quickly.
Culture is a great way of encouraging informal engagement to support hybrid working. Things are changing more quickly than formal structures are able. Therefore we need to adapt and to get things done in the meantime.
Power structures
This refers to how people have the power and influence to get things done. Again, it is useful to consider both formal power, which accrues to a specific role, and also informal power, which is a more about influence and often described as “soft” but is no less effective.
Informal power structures reflect the non-hierarchical relationships that are valuable in communicating messages and accomplishing tasks. They are more important than ever when hybrid working and benefit from being nurtured and cultivated to align efforts and motivate others.
Another phrase to describe the most influential people within an organisation is “culture carriers”. If you can identify your “culture carriers” they can help you influence across your team or the organisation with their impactful voice.
Culture is key to effective hybrid working
Ultimately, organisations either have a culture the leadership consciously craft or ended up with one by accident. We believe that culture is key to effective hybrid working and will be on the agenda for all successful organisations of the future.
