The C word – Debunking the Myths Around Workplace Culture and Why It Matters

The introduction of Non-Financial Report Requirements (NFRR) means that in many cases workplace culture is now categorised as yet another regulatory compliance requirement. While adherence to regulation is necessary, a concentrated view of the reporting aspects of culture takes a very surface-level approach; it risks interpreting human behaviour as nothing more than mechanical data points with little effort to understand or change the underlying dynamics. Martina Doherty, discusses.

In the course of my work I have regular conversations with heads of business about various people-in-the-workplace related themes.  Inevitably the topic of culture comes up, and one recent conversation – from a global head – has stayed with me, for all the wrong reasons.  It went something along the lines of…

Mr X:   “We have a very good culture here.”

Me:      “That’s great to hear. How can you tell?”

Mr X:   “We have no regulatory breaches”.

Me:                                 (i.e. no words!)

Mr X:   “And we have a head of culture who looks after it all”

Me:                                  (still no words)

For a global head to assess the culture of an organisation, department or team in terms of regulatory breaches and assume it is the responsibility of the head of culture is just staggering. Equally as staggering is that I also know he is not alone in his thinking as I have often heard the view that ‘culture stuff’ sits with head of culture or HR..

In a regulated industry, meeting regulatory requirements will always come first – and I get that; the financial and reputational risks of not adhering to regulation is organisational suicide. There is no business for a non-compliant organisation, and because Non-Financial Reporting Requirements (in the UK at least) include employees, social impact and human rights, it’s easy to see how culture has now evolved into a compliance priority. This means, however, that many decisions around people and culture are now based on risk-based judgements or hard metrics rather than the humans involved; and in my view that’s where it’s all wrong.

But let me take a step back and start with the best description on culture that I have come across – from American novelist David Foster Wallace. “There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit. Eventually one of them looks over at the other and says “What the heck is water?” Organisational culture is exactly that – the water in which people work. 

We swim around in culture every day. It’s pervasive and influences everything we do, and it’s so commonplace that it’s not always consciously obvious. Although there is no universal right or wrong, saying that you have a good culture because there are no regulatory breaches is akin to saying that our oceans are healthy because they don’t have toxic spillages. 

You don’t have to have a regulatory breach for an unhealthy culture to exist; in fact, that’s the point of crisis that you really never want to reach. There are far more subtle indicators of cultural issues that should be addressed. These can be surfaced by doing a cultural scan to assess the following:

1. What people say about you – formal, informal, internal, external – from external media right down to the interns. One notable red flag might be if you are finding it difficult to recruit for open positions…what are past, present and future employees saying about you?
2. What you say and how you say it – the medium and mechanisms you use to communicate with your people e.g. email, town halls etc., video. Do they actually work? Does strategic information actually communicate its impact on employees or is it high level ‘corporate speak’ that means very little to the day jobs of most people?
3. Your leaders – What do they say and reward? Do they all look the same? We all know that a homogenous ecosystem is not a healthy one.
4. How you treat your people – Is there a “say-do” gap? Do you say you care about what employees think, yet fail to action anything from employee surveys?  Is there an effective way to call out bad or ineffective leadership that may be inhibiting team motivation and performance? Employee feedback should mean something.  It should be used to promote conversation, interaction and communication across the board with a view to improving things. So, unless followed by action, employee surveys are nothing more than a meaningless and time-wasting metric.
5. Your ways of working – the office environment, processes, systems and the workplace behaviours that sit alongside these.  What nurtures or impedes your ecosystem? Are impediments tolerated as necessary evils that need to be “endured” because it’s a regulatory requirement or “that’s how things are done here”?  Is there ever a discussion on other potential options that might create the same outcomes in a different way?

Answering even one of these questions will give good insight into the cultural waters that you and your colleagues swim in every day – and indicate where dangers may potentially lie.

Then there’s the question of responsibility. A workplace ecosystem extends way beyond guidelines, corporate values and training workshops, so it is absolutely not the hallowed domain of the people and culture team.

If you go back to my fish/ocean analogy, every creature in an ecosystem plays their part and it’s the same for corporate culture. Everyone has a role, with some people having a wider circle of cultural influence than others – and not necessarily always the senior leadership team. Anyone with responsibility for a team, process or way of working is a “guardian” of culture, since how they work, behave and interact with others sends unspoken signals and ripples wide and far. If that isn’t recognised, then many deeply ingrained cultural challenges can go unaddressed and unresolved.

Why does any of this stuff even matter?  Quite simply because culture is a strategic asset that can either elevate or hinder people and performance. Observable behaviours (both good and bad) are contagious and their fingerprints remain consistent over time, and that impacts how people feel about their work, how engaged and motivated they are, the type of talent that organisation attracts and retains, and how they behave.

While the need to provide metrics on people, policies and processes is an important regulatory requirement, the culture conversation still needs to look beyond these and recognise the underlying human dynamics that shape how people behave, grow and develop in their day-to-day work.

A company and its culture will only ever be as strong as the level of the honest conversations that happen – and if those conversations are not happening, how can anyone really understand the water they swim in? And that’s a conscious choice every organisation and its people need to make.

Martina Doherty is an independent business psychologist, coach and trainer, and founder of MD Consulting