CONTENTS

Eating Soup With Forks
Why Engagement Is Different To Culture
12 Questions Every Organisation Should Ask Itself About Its Culture
Five Lores For Creating A High Performance Company Culture
End Of Year Company Culture Review

EATING SOUP WITH FORKS

SOMETIMES WE HUMANS GO ABOUT A TASK WITH TOOLS AND METHODS THAT ARE CLEARLY OUTDATED OR MISALIGNED WITH OUR ACTUAL OBJECTIVES.

Rather like eating a bowl of soup with a fork.

Forks are great, forks are awesome – especially when you wish to pierce something solid on your plate or perhaps when you want to hold a piece of food in place so that you can cut it up into manageable portions. However, forks are just a waste of time when it comes to eating soup, especially soup that is predominantly liquid and not filled with delicious chunks of vegetables or meat.

Do you know what else is a fork? Using employee engagement surveys to measure and learn about company culture. The aim? To interpret the results, eventually using them to determine how to provide higher levels of employee fulfilment, enhance customer experience and lift business performance. But it’s inefective. A fork has a set number of prongs, which can only stab at a specific range content to achieve the objective of obtaining and tasting the desired food. In the same way, a survey has a set number of questions that assume to be the right ones to ask. Then all of a sudden, you’re the king of culture.

It’s time to put down the fork and pick up the spoon of culture understanding and engagement. The spoon of culture is the rather obvious approach when educating the people who inhabit the culture about its make-up and function. In this way, “the spoon way”, people can delve deep into the subject and gather a collectively wider knowledge and understanding about culture. In this way, they can determine for themselves such vital information for working with culture as being aware of:

• How culture forms
• Who actually owns culture?
• What are daily rituals vital for keeping the culture alive and effective?
• How culture can be seen and used to boost job satisfaction and customer experience
• The daily function of culture and how it delivers the level of performance to the organisation
• Who leads culture and when do they do this?
• How culture aligns to support or sabotage a business strategy

Understanding culture for the first time begins to rapidly position people within the culture to navigate and curate it to its optimum advantage. Benefiting employees, customers, suppliers, the business owners and leadership.

WHY ENGAGEMENT IS DIFFERENT TO CULTURE

MANY ORGANISATIONS CONFUSE STAFF ENGAGEMENT WITH CULTURE. IT’S AN EASY OVERSIGHT TO MAKE GIVEN THEY ARE SO CLOSELY INTERCONNECTED.

Without a clear understanding of the distinctions between engagement and culture, it’s easy to assume that they’re one and the same.

So what are the distinguishing factors? Well, if culture were a movie and engagement the audience’s response to the movie, it would look a little something like this:

The movie consists of the plot – a story being told through the characters’ motivations and actions – the time, the setting and location. The artefacts within the movie (think James Bond’s Aston Martin, Indiana Jones’s hat and whip, Mary Poppins’ umbrella, the Lone Ranger’s horse and so on). The values are embodied by the hero’s journey such as courage, service, revenge, love, learning etc.

Culture involves similar elements. A setting, timing, characters motivated to act in a particular way, artefacts and symbols, values and action or behaviour.

THE AUDIENCE’S REACTION AND OPINION OF THE MOVIE.

Whether the last movie you watched evoked enthusiasm, fear, compassion or boredom, the chances are you probably had some sort of reaction and then, based off that, formed an opinion.

But how do you choose to express this view? For many, social media is their go-to vehicle. In fact, the movie industry relies so heavily on the use of social media to share reactions and opinions that they use the likes of Facebook and Twitter to gauge whether or not the initial release of a movie will increase or decrease in audience numbers over the following weeks, based off the feedback or comments generated over the opening weekend.

THE EMPLOYEES’ REACTION AND OPINION OF THE CULTURE.

Engagement surveys act in the same way as the social media response of an audience to the movie. They enable the audience to comment on the experience of culture. Things become a little more complicated and even blurred by the fact that, in the case of engagement surveys, the audience is acting in the movie. Think of this as the equivalent of the actors rating their experience of working in the movie. This overlap of participation and observation is the reason for the confusion in many organisations between engagement and culture.

ENGAGEMENT SURVEYS MEASURE PEOPLE’S OPINIONS OF CULTURE.

Culture is what they are actually practising and believing on a daily basis. Employee engagement surveys have their place but until the employees have an understanding and awareness of the nature of culture, it is difficult for them to assess effectively the quality of their experience. For example, many employees do not recognise or acknowledge that they themselves own the culture! This will often lead them to blame HR or leadership or management for their own ineffective culture. However, simply by ensuring the employees are aware they own the company culture will immediately elicit different responses to the engagement survey questions being asked of them. Ideally, an organisation should at least begin with putting a major emphasis on educating employees at all levels of the organisation about company culture including such vital elements as:

• How culture functions
• Who owns culture?
• How culture forms
• How culture is structured
• Who leads culture?
• How culture delivers performance
• How performance delivers strategy

At that point, there is a very high likelihood that the questions you are asking people in the survey will need to be adjusted from the original and generic survey as your employees are likely to have a deeper understanding of their own culture than the people who designed the generic survey.

In other words, ask your employees what questions they would like to see in the engagement survey!

In terms of measuring culture, it is best to look at what performance deliverables your culture is providing and how this impacts on your results and customer experience. This means looking at and evaluating how culture links to performance in things such as:

• Punctuality
• Productivity
• Customer experience and feedback (nett promoter scores)
• Creativity and problem solving
• Collaboration and idea/knowledge sharing
• Leadership ability to foster goodwill, energy, enthusiasm and line of sight (people can see how they contribute to the overall effectiveness of the organisation’s ability to serve others)
• Pride in the brand work and service offerings
• Celebration
• Learning and development (both motivation for and quality of the performance changes the results generated)
• Respect and recognition
• Social safety (i.e. the lack of bullying, sexism, racism etc.)

…ask your employees what questions they would like to see in the engagement survey!

12 QUESTIONS EVERY ORGANISATION SHOULD ASK ITSELF ABOUT ITS CULTURE

AFTER WORKING WITH ORGANISATIONS FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS TO ENHANCE THE PERFORMANCE OF THEIR WORKPLACE CULTURES, A SIMPLE AND TELLING TREND HAS EMERGED.

It has become very obvious that the more awareness an organisation possesses of the nature and function of company culture, the more likely it will be able to optimise it’s culture.

As a professional Corporate Anthropologist, I have noticed that the vast majority of clients I have worked with initially lack anywhere near the necessary knowledge of culture to ever stand a chance of optimising theirs. This is not surprising, as of course most business people aren’t educated in the performance aspects of human culture as anthropologists are, or understand how these dynamics apply in the workplace.

TO HELP ORGANISATIONS ESTABLISH THEIR CURRENT LEVEL OF AWARENESS, I DEVELOPED A SHORT 12 QUESTION SURVEY TO ESTABLISH WHERE PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS SIT IN THEIR LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING OF CULTURE.

I have developed the questions from my research into what knowledge of culture best supports an organisation to optimise the performance of their culture. The fewer questions a client can answer yes to, the less likely the company will have the necessary understanding of how culture actually works to curate their culture to deliver high levels of performance.

I ASK THAT YOU CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ON BEHALF OF YOUR ORGANISATION.

Please note: There’s a special approach I’d like you to adopt.

I’m not looking for you to answer the question itself. Instead, as you read each one, I’d like you to ask yourself, “Could most people [members of your leadership team or your people and culture team] answer this?” and then put down a simple yes or no answer.

Here’s a quick example:
Question: What is culture’s function?
Answer: Yes

The answer therefore means that you think most people in your organisation would in fact be able to ofer an actual description of how culture forms.

FIVE LORES FOR CREATING A HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPANY CULTURE.

FOR THE PAST 60,000 YEARS HUMAN BEINGS HAVE CREATED CULTURES AS THEIR PREFERRED WAY OF BEING IN COMPANY TOGETHER. NO OTHER SOCIAL OPTION HAS EVER REPLACED CULTURE. IN THE HISTORY OF OUR SPECIES, THIS IS NO SMALL THING. UNLIKE RELIGIONS OR POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES OR FASHIONS, CULTURE STUCK AS OUR PREFERRED WAY OF BEING ‘US’.

Culturing didn’t prove to be just a passing trend. It wasn’t popular for a few hundred years and then given up in favour of a new and better way of socialising together. Culture stuck. Culture worked. Culture prospered. It didn’t matter how big a people’s population became, culture proved to be scalable and durable.

It didn’t matter how isolated a human community became, human beings generated a culture.

Be it the Inuit people in the frozen northlands of the arctic circle of Canada or Siberia. The Aboriginal people of the burning sands of the central Australian desert. The Polynesian inhabitants of the most isolated Pacific atolls or the pygmy people of the northern Ugandan rainforest. The Kogi people of the magnificent mountain range the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of Colombia that overlooks the Caribbean ocean. The nomadic peoples of the grass seas of Mongolia.

No matter where you look on the planet, if human beings inhabit a geographical area, then you could be assured they will have created and relied on culture to provide the necessary social cohesion, and sense of identity and belonging to lift each individual performance to a level that contributed on the whole, to the whole. No matter where we look it seems that cultures that optimise human performance are the rule and not the exception. The demise of any culture was more often than not as a result of environmental factors (climate change, floods, eruptions, earthquakes), or culture clashes with other, often more powerful or advanced technological societies.

Human beings it seems, are masters of culturing, no matter what the location circumstances and time. That is of course, until we look inside a modern organisation.

Research indicates that around the world most organisations’ cultures struggle to optimise the performance of their people. In fact, the majority of people in a modern organistion’s culture are more misaligned with their organisation than they are aligned. Despite our ancient ancestors’ ability to master culture, it seems our modern organisation’s cannot. Why is that?

As a corporate anthropologist I have pondered this question for decades. It seems remarkable to me that every organisation is populated by the same species (human beings) as all other cultures on the planet and yet somehow organisational cultures that optimise human performance appear to be the exception and not the rule.

It’s not as though some organisations have cultures and others do not, because of course every company has a culture, whether they know it or not, but proportionately very, very few have a high performance culture.

After much observation, inquiry, reflection, and research I have arrived at a number of key attributes that I believe many traditional and contextually high performing cultures seem to embody. In this article I will share what I consider to be five of the most important attributes.

(I should point out that not all five are embodied by all high performance cultures, at any given time. Yet at all times, enough of them are actively apparent within the culture to make a difference in human performance.)

Most of these attributes are typically missing in low-performing company cultures.

I refer to these attributes as “lores”, as in folklore – traditional beliefs, customs and stories of a community passed through the generations.

I’ve done this as an alternative to the usual business reference to five laws/principles, because I want to reinforce the organic and embodied nature of what is to follow. In other words, traditional cultures don’t just know about these attributes, they embody them to such an extent they have even forgotten that they live them, so familiar have the lores become in their culture.

FIVE LORES OF A HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPANY CULTURE

LORE 1 – CULTURE AWARENESS
Without question, the first and most noticeable difference between a low and high-performance company culture is that high-performance cultures invest in learning about culture. When I say invest, I mean time, energy, and if necessary, money. High-performance cultures develop a high level of awareness about, and an in-depth knowledge of culture. It is, of course, impossible to enhance and improve a culture if you don’t really and truly understand what a culture is – and more importantly, what it does.

LORE 2 – CULTURE OWNERSHIP
In a traditional society, culture is seen as the very essence of a people’s collective identity and the ultimate source of their ability to live and work together. In this way, every member of the clan sees culture as their personal responsibility and feels accountable to and for the culture.

In many modern organisations, culture is all but an afterthought, as indicated by the fact so many of them only pay attention to their culture in any focused manner when it comes time for their annual engagement survey. In modern organisations, culture is also seen to be the responsibility of others. Culture is deemed to belong to HR or the senior leadership team. This disassociation of ownership and responsibility for culture makes it impossible for people to feel the necessary levels of accountability to contribute and enhance the culture in their daily work.

LORE 3 – CULTURE ELEVATION
Because traditional people are in touch with their culture they are quick to spot (and are incredibly sensitive to) the early warning signs that their culture is drifting or stagnating. Every member of the tribe is expected and willing to share their observations daily on indications that the culture is exerting into entropy or collapse. Through the simple vehicle of nighttime fireside chats, stories are shared about the day’s activities and outcomes. In this daily check, culture is constantly being discussed, monitored and guided to ensure every possible opportunity is seized to optimise the culture – which of course optimises the group’s potential to survive and thrive.

Similarly, in modern organisations performance is regularly discussed on a daily basis – but I have noticed that very few organisations have the cultural awareness to consider or reference the role culture has contributed to uplifting or sabotaging of that performance. In other words, organisations seemed overly focused on the end (performance) and overlook the all-important means (culture). The exception to this situation is, as mentioned earlier when it comes time for the annual organisational culture or engagement survey. In traditional society, culture is a deliberate and prioritised daily topic of discussion. In organisations, it is an overlooked and annually referred-to topic.

LORE 4 – CULTURE STABILITY
I find it amusing to think that the world’s most popular value when it comes to organisational values, is integrity. Not that there is anything wrong with integrity. In fact, if only organisations would truly commit to embodying the value, it would be wonderful. However, many of the organisations that have been associated with malpractice or corruption over the past two decades listed integrity as one of the highest values. What many organisations seem to fail to understand (unlike their traditional culturing counterparts) is that the word “integrity” doesn’t refer to honesty per se, but rather is in reference to the word “integrated”. Your word is your bond because the word is so integrated into the way you see and act in the world that it could be no other way.

When you say you will do business in a legal manner you do because your people fully integrate the value into their culture. Too many (I’m tempted to say most) organisations speak with forked tongue in regards to both the topic of culture – and especially in regards to integrity.

To truly embody a value, be it integrity or any other value, a culture needs to be fully integrated into and of itself. The culture has to be structured comprehensively. The beliefs, rituals, symbols, values, language, ceremony, rites, lores, totems, artefacts and places, are all interwoven in a carefully thought-through mosaic of interlinking, interconnecting social cohesion. They all contribute to a wider narrative that explains and declares who we are as a people. Whereas most traditional peoples have spent generations mastering this cultural integration, many organisations attempt to do so in the time span of a project and with the depth of a to-do list. The end result is that the culture lacks full comprehension, full conviction and any real integrity.

LORE 5 – CULTURE CONTINUITY
Cultural continuity is often a hallmark of traditional cultures. The passing of on tribal knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next is the very memes through which survival can be largely guaranteed. Traditional societies invest heavily in the time patience, thoroughness and repetition required to transfer culture to the next generation. Great companies attempt to replicate this process through induction and unbarring programs. Poor performing organisations leave this all to chance.

Traditional tribal chiefs are usually and even traditionally incredibly respectful of the existing culture. The leaders recognise the role culture has played and will continue to play in the people’s lives and in the contribution, it will make to their ongoing survival and prosperity.

On more than one occasion I have seen that all it takes for an organisation to radically change its culture (for better or worse) is something as common and as simple as a change in senior leadership. Often even the changing of one person such as the CEO is enough for a whole culture incorporating thousands of employees to shift. This can be a good thing if it leads to increased business performance, employee fulfilment and of course customer experience. Often it does not. I know this to be true as on countless occasions I’ve been invited into organisations to try to restore the culture they had before the CEO departed.

Of course, history shows us that this scenario of a new leader overhauling an established culture has played out in traditional cultures too (Shaka, king of the Zulu, being one well-documented example).

There are not too many CEOs I’ve encountered, that prior to accepting a role in a new organisation bothered to make an in-depth inquiry into the fundamental nature of the organisation’s cultural performance dynamics. At best they briefly checked on the last engagement survey results. Given culture is the major driver of any organisation’s performance, you would think it wise for any leader to be fully invested in ensuring the culture delivers continuous levels of high performance for the business, by way of ensuring culture continuity, as and where it is deemed to be a positive and significant contributing factor.

Cultural continuity is an unconscious capability of most traditional peoples. For organisations, it’s a symbolic and social art that is largely underplayed, to the detriment of ongoing and sustainable performance.

END OF YEAR COMPANY CULTURE REVIEW

AS WE DRAW TO THE END OF THE CALENDAR YEAR, NOW IS A USEFUL TIME TO STOP AND REFLECT ON WHETHER YOUR COMPANY CULTURE HAS HELPED OR HINDERED YOUR BUSINESS PERFORMANCE, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND EMPLOYEE FULFILMENT OVER THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS.

In our Culture Planning Program, we highlight the core symptoms of an under-performing culture and how to address them.

The most common of these symptoms are listed in the following pages.

I invite you to consider them in relation to your company culture. If many of these relate to your company, perhaps the new-year is the perfect time to become proactive in creating a high-performance culture. If most of the following does not apply to your company then perhaps it’s time to pause and celebrate the fact you have curated a workplace culture worth belonging and contributing to.

SYMPTOMS YOUR COMPANY CULTURE IS IN TROUBLE

1. High staff turnover (especially if your competitors keep stealing your best people)
2. High absenteeism
3. Your regulary miss achieveing key performance business indicators you should be capable of achieving
4. Your people regularly complain about a lack of communication in your organisation
5. High accident / incident levels
6. Regular customer complaints about your people’s attitudes and levels of empathy
7. High rates of wastage
8. Employees regularly describe their roles as boring
9. Low productivity levels
10. Reluctance to change
11. People seem to lack the capability to behave in alignment with your company values
12. Leadership vacuum (you have people called leaders but they don’t act as such)
13. Fearful perspectives dominate people thinking
14. People in your culture consider a difference in opinions as a threat to their status
15. Distracted (rather than focused) performances are the norm
16. Sarcasm and cynicism are normal and even acceptable ways of communicating to one another
17. Silo mentality is the norm
18. People blame others first before they take accountability for their contribution to the negative environment or situation
19. People are reluctant to contribute and share in meetings or focus groups
20. The energy feels low (we have all experienced at some time walking into an environment where we can immediately sense the people aren’t happy or don’t like each other)
21. People prefer to share their point of view rather than listen and understand others’ opinions
22. Victim mentality dominates visionary mentality
23. Customers are referred to as being a nuisance or inconvenience
24. Managers refer to their teams as a problem. Employees refer to their managers as a problem
25. There is a strong and persistent reference to the ‘past’, the ‘good old days’ or, ‘the way things used to be’ rather than focusing on the here and now and solutions.