ARTICLES
The Business Case for Company Culture - Vol. 1
Discover the six motives to work on your company culture. The motivations can be divided into two group; Internal and External.
The first group comprises three reasons to work on culture that is all to do with an internal aspect of culture. In other words how culture is impacting events and understanding within the business.
The second group is again comprised of three reasons to work on culture that have connotations and connections to do with elements that lie outside of the organisation’s culture.
Consider the six motives to work on your company culture, and consider how many of the six currently relate to your culture. We will begin with the three internal motives to work on culture first.
Understanding Company Culture - Vol. 2
Every organisation has a culture, whether they know it and deliberately use it, or not.
Because an organisation’s culture forms organically (and often does so long before any official or formal work is conducted on defining the company culture) there is usually more depth and complexity within a company culture than most organisations understand or give the culture credit for.
The ability to understand company culture is, in fact, the number one criteria required to maximise a company culture. The more an organisation understands what culture is, how it forms and functions, and how it delivers performance, the better positioned the company is to leverage the culture for higher levels of performance, customer experience and employee fulfilment.
Eating Soup With Forks - Vol. 3
Sometimes we humans go about a task with tools and methods that are clearly outdated or misaligned with our actual objectives.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 ineffective.
Why Engagement Is Different To Culture - Vol. 4
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.
12 Questions Every Organisation Should Ask Itself About Its Culture - Vol. 5
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 its 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.
End Of Year Company Culture Review - Vol. 6
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 symptom 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.
Five Lores For Creating A High Performance Company Culture - Vol. 7
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.
Will Robots Take Over Your Job? - Vol. 8
WThis is the question two businessmen were discussing while sitting in an airport lounge.
I was sitting next to them and couldn’t help being intrigued by their thoughts.
I won’t bore you with their thinking here as they largely focused their conversation on which of the two of them was most at risk in their role being taken over by artificial intelligence or robots (one was an accountant, the other a national strategic planner).
They both each argued the other was most at risk. My view is they are equally at risk.
The topic of artificial intelligence and robots is very prevalent for organisations at the moment.
What Is Mankind's Greatest Invention? - Vol. 9
If you are ever in need of a great conversation started at a dinner party...
Then just ask the question posed in the heading of this newsletter and sit back and listen with fascination to the vast range of responses you receive back.
I have done this on many occasions and have heard all sorts of responses ranging from god, love, manchester united football club, family, chardonnay, holidays, music, the written word, the automobile, apple pie, the microwave oven, uber, the iphone, time, the aircraft, the four compass directions, peanut slabs, the piano, pineapple lumps, and of course, sliced bread.
Interestingly I have never ever heard anyone respond with the word ‘work!’
VUCA becomes BANI