Culture is complex

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Culture is a funny thing, people will tell you they can measure it, improve it, encode it, decipher it. I’m really not that sure they can. Culture is so many things, moving in intertwined ways throughout organisations, it is complex and ethereal and yet most of us will be able to say quite quickly whether we like or dislike a particular one without any real assessment or measurement.

For large organisations, culture also isn’t consistent teams working in the same location, business area or building can have overwhelmingly different cultural experiences. Sat different sides of the same office, employed under the same terms and conditions, with the same facilities, but totally different reactions to the experience.

Some people will immediately jump to the line manager as the determining factor, and whilst I believe that can be an important part, I think it provides an easy get opportunity to diminish our personal responsibility. I think the biggest factor is how people show up each day.

Having watched toxic teams over the years, my honest reflection is that they often choose to be that way. All the participants in the team have an active contribution and play an active role in creating the toxic environment. They choose to let it be so and reinforce it, When people join the team that have a different perspective or view they are either infected with the pervasive culture over time, or they choose to go elsewhere.

This isn’t about excusing management or organisational responsibility, it is about saying we all have a critical role to play in the culture that we experience. We can have a deciding factor on our working lives and that of those around us. Culture is complex, because we are complex beings, but it is simple because we are both the problem and the solution.

If you’re coming into work this morning feeling gloomy about your week, try to spare a moment not to think about what others are going to do say (or not do or say), but instead what you are going to do to make the experience of all those around you just a little bit better.

It’s ok to say, “I don’t know”

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If you were asked direction to a location you didn’t recognise, what would you do? You might get out your phone and go to a source of information – a mapping app – and see if that might provide the data you need. You might suggestion the person speak to someone with more knowledge of the local area. Or you might simply say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know”.

But what if you were asked your opinion? Well you’d have to have the answer, right? Because we all have an opinion on everything. But should we?

Anyone who has known me for a period of time will know that, in the past, I’ve not been short of an opinion or twelve. Whether it is age, fatigue or, (with a more generous filter) the advent of wisdom, I’ve found myself expressing fewer and fewer (in fact that’s one of the reasons I haven’t written on here for over a year). Perhaps needing to express fewer opinions is a more accurate description and yet it comes at a time when the world seems to be going the other way – particularly on social issues.

We are losing the art of intentionally not knowing and replacing it with mass produced “oven ready” positions shared by both social and traditional media. Not only does this place at risk one of the fundamental drivers of progress, human curiosity, but it also significantly impedes our ability to actually identify the root cause of issues or challenges that we are trying to solve and replaces them with a dumbed down artificial, and often polarised, “solutions”.

You can apply this to so many of the key challenges we have – immigration, housing, economic growth, creating fairer workplaces, even conflict. Deeply complex and complicated issues that are beyond the proper comprehension of most of us are reduced to soundbites as we seek not to understand but instead to apportion blame. And in a world where “cut through” is king, this feeds the approach that our politicians and the media take, creating a vicious cycle that gives a sense of action without going anywhere.

Another option is to take the same approach to our opinions on topics we don’t understand as to being asked for directions. We could seek out sources of information, we could seek out people with more knowledge of the topic, or we could simply say, “I don’t know”.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

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There’s no doubt that the pandemic taught as a lot about how we can organise ourselves differently at speed to continue to deliver for our stakeholders – whoever they may be. The pace at which organisations, especially the likes of essential services, retail, distribution and warehousing, adapted to the circumstances was a real lesson in agility. And of course, more widely across business and society changes were made to accommodate the restrictions and risks that were at large.

But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should and one of the overhangs from the pandemic are a whole range of practices that might have been appropriate at the time, but now just look like organisations, teams and individuals trying to have an easier life. A great example last week was the non-story that KPMG and Deloitte would once again be recruiting in person. It goes without saying that this is a good move for them and for the candidates, however, the fact that it is a story and that it has taken them this long to get there is a bit of a head scratch. I’m not proposing that technology has no part to play in the selection process, but as someone who has interviewed and been interviewed via video, it really isn’t the answer.

Similarly, organisations that moved to “virtual work experience” need to start complementing these with their previous in person work experience programmes to ensure that those people that benefit the most get real and proper access to those opportunities. Easy to deliver, yes. As beneficial to the participants? I’m not convinced in the slightest. And at the end of the day, something being easy was never a measure of success no matter how many happy sheet, participant outcomes you use to defend it.

It would be remiss of me to write a post like this and not mention remote working. How does that one play out? Well it is probably the biggest workplace experiment of our time and the reality is no-one knows. But clinging on to practices as a point of principle is never a good look and those people that have got themselves so dug into the “future of work” rhetoric are already starting to detune and those that don’t are going to look pretty silly if the experiment has a different outcome. That doesn’t make it right or wrong, one of the joys about having a hypothesis is you always have a null hypothesis too, it only makes it stupid if you don’t follow the data.

Don’t bring your whole self to work

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I’ve always taken issue with the idea of “bringing your whole self to work”. It’s a pretty meaningless statement that is normally espoused by the kind of sugar addicted character who will also bounce into a room and start a sentence with, “I know this is probably TMO, but..”

The first reason I dislike it is the base logic, or more the lack of it. There are many things that people do in their lives that would be highly inappropriate to share with most other people, never mind in the workplace. The second reason I dislike it is that it takes the kind of “radical candour” approach that many feel uncomfortable and suggests that if you don’t comply, then somehow you’re repressed or restricted rather than making a perfectly reasonable choice to keep things to yourself. If I don’t want to bring my whole self to work, then that should be entirely my choice and totally acceptable to others.

But over the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on some of the debates that we’ve seen about organisational behaviour and the stances taken on social issues and I’m starting to see a much more problematic issue with this approach. Some organisations are increasingly moving away from employment policies and are straying into social policy, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

Our job should be to create safe and inclusive workplaces, where people can come and perform their work without fear or intimidation and go home at the end of the day to their private lives. We should be creating environments that aim to reduce and remove discrimination, we should make sure that our workplaces are legally compliant and we should foster respect and understanding. But I wonder if making bold stances on our positions on social issues serves us, our employees and society well.

As we increasingly see “culture wars” break out on a whole range of topics, is the workplace somewhere that should provide a safe space away from them? A place where active positions intentionally aren’t taken, but that acceptance of all is a requirement. The alternative seems to me to be that we either risk alienating employees through stances that they don’t agree with but feel unable to challenge, or we engineer our organisations so that they only accept people with certain social views and beliefs.

Ultimately this means working alongside people who might have completely different views and beliefs to us, that will hold opinions that we do not agree with and will challenge us and who will maybe do things in their lives that we find difficult to accept. But we recognise that at work we don’t bring these aspects with us, that they our part of our private lives and we respect the right of everyone to have a private life, which is entirely separate to how we behave at work. In a funny way, that could actually be more inclusive.