Workplace culture can make or break an employee’s experience of your organisation. When organisations get it right, their employees stay the course. But when they get it wrong, it can lead to headline news.
Widely reported stories around the negative culture at large organisations like Uber and the Metropolitan Police have focused attention on the concept of workplace culture.
Recentering your values at the heart of your workplace is good for all stakeholders – and your bottom line. There’s no off-the-shelf pattern to creating a positive workplace culture. So, how do you make effective changes to your workplace culture?
In this article we’ll walk you through the basics:
- What is workplace culture?
- What influences workplace culture?
- Is there an accepted workplace culture definition?
- Why is a positive culture important?
- What is a workplace subculture?
- Do remote organisations have a workplace culture?
- How long does it take to change a workplace culture?
- Ways to improve workplace culture
What is workplace culture?
Each organisation has their own unique workplace culture. Your culture is made up of the history, traditions, values, aims and behaviours of everyone in your workplace. It’s not a straightforward concept that’s simply written down and obeyed. It’s the multi-layered, living personality of your organisation. It needs to be clearly identified and continually nurtured by all its participants.
Workplace, or ‘organisational’, culture is often thought of – and defined by Gallup as – being ‘the way we do things around here.’ It’s the reality of how people experience working in your organisation.
It’s also about psychological safety. As the CIPD notes, its an environment where “employees…feel that their voice matters in driving the business towards a common purpose.”
Culture is collaborative – meaning everyone is responsible for building a healthy, positive workplace culture. But since the pandemic, employees’ priorities have shifted. They now want to work for companies that do more than say they have a great culture – they have to be able to show it through their actions.
If you’re looking at how to change workplace culture, organisations need to adopt what Denise Lee Yohn describes as a “culture building approach.” In her Harvard Business Review article she explains, “this model doesn’t relegate culture-building to an amorphous concept that everyone influences but no one leads or is accountable for,” but one “in which everyone in the organization is responsible.”
As Cath Bishop says in this article for the Guardian:
“As outcomes and results have become the chief metrics, leaders pay less attention to how those outcomes are achieved. And if you don’t value or measure “how” something has been achieved, corruption and poor behaviour follow. If you’re never rewarded for upholding values, you quickly learn what matters, what has currency, what the “real” values are.”
What influences workplace culture?
Several elements influence your workplace culture, including:
- Values and mission: What do you stand for as an organisation? What do you collectively believe in and how does this impact on how you do business?
- Policies and processes: How do you treat all the stakeholders involved in your organisation? This is about putting those values into practice within your workplace culture. How do you measure performance, hire people and define promotion?
- Leadership: Does your leadership team consistently model your organisation’s values to the rest of the team through their behaviours?
- Employees’ attitudes and behaviour: How do your people treat each other? Is this in line with the workplace culture you want to create?
Nothing influences your workplace culture more than the people within it. Using Yohn’s definition of workplace culture, the main influences on a company’s culture are the people that work there, and every level has its own set of responsibilities.
If you’re working to bridge the gap between the culture leadership wants to see and how things actually are, everyone has to commit to their part. But what might this look like?
Board of directors: Members of the board are in the unique position to guide definition and delivery over time. Among other things, you can influence improvements to company culture by frequently putting it on the agenda, keeping discussions with other leaders alive, and delving deeper by seeking action from the results of internal culture audits.
CEO and leadership team: Define measurable aims and the roadmaps that guide everyone towards your desired workplace culture.
HR: HR professionals use their expertise to bolster the desired culture in creative ways that lead to better people processes, systems, training and communication.
Middle managers: Employees primarily experience role-modelling of the desired culture through the middle managers of any organisation. Their behaviours and reinforcement of culture-building processes are crucial.
Employees: Employees need to give their honesty to the other members of the organisation. Real feedback about current workplace culture, the impact of any changes and their ideas for improvement are essential. Employees’ other main responsibility is to demonstrate behaviour and attitudes that are appropriate to the desired culture while at work.
As James Timpson, CEO of Timpson’s, said in a recent podcast interview: “We haven’t invented culture but we’ve put it into our own language and made it work for us… I want my colleagues to shine and I think that’s what leadership is – it’s about the idea that you are no more important than anybody else in the business.”
Is there an accepted workplace culture definition?
There isn’t one accepted definition of a ‘good’ workplace culture, because different businesses all have their own identity. The culture at MI5 is likely to be completely different to that of Innocent Smoothies – and that’s as it should be. However, Quinn and Cameron’s framework provides a good model for how different types of culture can look.
Quinn and Cameron’s ‘competing values framework’ identifies four different types of workplace culture, defined by how the different values are prioritised.
Within this typology, the four types of workplace culture are identified as:
- Clan: Family-like, friendly atmosphere. High engagement based on loyalty and tradition. Success is openness to customer needs and care of their people.
- Hierarchy: Formal structure and rules. Efficiency is essential. Success is about reliable, smooth delivery.
- Adhocracy: Risk taking, entrepreneurial. Innovation and trendsetting are key. Success is pioneering new products or services.
- Market: Competitive, focused on doing the work and achieving the goals. Winning is the aim. Success is measured in market share and market penetration.
They are categorised according to being inward or outward looking, alongside how they value stability or flexibility.
None are inherently better, they’re just better suited to different business structures. The CMI lists four other theories of workplace culture classification in their ‘Understanding Organisational Culture’ document.
If you’re leading discussions about how to change workplace culture, using these frameworks can be a helpful guide to establish what you most value.
Why is a positive workplace culture important?
A positive workplace culture is important at an individual level, ensuring that everyone has everything they need to thrive.
But it’s also about better business. It’s increasingly apparent that improving workplace culture is crucial to business success in a number of ways, including:
- Increased employee engagement leads to increased productivity. A 2023 Gallup report shows that businesses with more engaged employees make 23% higher profits than those with “miserable” workers.
- Happy staff don’t leave. Don’t lose your talent to the competition. Increased retention means decreased spend on recruitment and training. A 2023 survey by The Cengage group found that 31% of employees left their jobs because “the company’s mission no longer aligned with my values.”
- A positive culture attracts the best recruits to your business by having a well-known positive workplace culture. According to a report by Employ, in 2022, 23% of people looking for a job said company values and culture were top priorities in their decision making.
- HR spends less time addressing employee issues and more time helping to move the business in the right direction.
- A great culture can also protect your brand reputation by the absence of ammunition ex-staff can publicly fire.
- Customer satisfaction increases when they interact with staff that project their positivity.
Improving workplace culture is essential for your overall growth strategy to build longevity and success.
What is a workplace subculture?
Subcultures are usually groups of people within an organisation that share particular experience, like: shift pattern, physical location, expertise, function, department or project. They work together in an independent mini-environment.
When they’re a positive experience, these groups can add to feelings of belonging and engagement, within the overall workplace culture. New people are welcomed openly and there’s a total transparency to any quirks of ‘how we do things.’ Sometimes friendly competition between groups can help to boost morale, innovation and productivity.
Unfortunately, workplace subcultures can become toxic and work in opposition to the aims of the company culture. In the same way as you would if this was a widespread issue, action needs to be swift and effective to protect all your employees.
Most workplace subcultures are just part of the usual way that humans create connections and are nothing for leadership to worry about. But it’s wise to be alert to any negative changes, so leadership can course-correct as necessary.
Do remote organisations have a workplace culture?
All organisations have a workplace culture, remote or not. Decisions about transitioning back to the office, to full remote working, or figuring out a hybrid option are a major part of your workplace culture transformation. And there are many complexities to consider, as Danielle Harmer, Chief People Officer at Aviva, confirms on the CIPD podcast,
“Every organisation that was home based has had to row back from it, well, has chosen to row back from it because you no longer have to force people to be at home. I think organisations that get it right, you know, obviously I’m going to think that we’re doing a reasonably good job of it are the ones that say look, or try and understand and start to use the data, although it’s still pretty early in terms of the data that we all have, to say what is it that being together brings as a benefit, when should you do it, what’s the impact on performance for the organisation and productivity and, actually, engagement and wellbeing of people being together or being apart.”
The global pandemic made organisations question how their culture existed when we all worked apart. One of the key leadership fears during this time was that culture would become eroded, but the exact opposite was true. Remote working can actually make employees feel more understood and valued because it prioritises inclusivity, flexibility and keeps the focus on results.
Interestingly, most of the worries around culture are from leadership and management. In a 2023 Gallup survey, 27% of leaders think workplace culture would be worse if long term remote work was the norm for many employees. Only 13% of employees thought the same thing. In fact, they found that 6 out of 10 employees (US) didn’t think that there would be a negative long term impact on their culture if remote work was the norm.
Another survey by Employ, shows that this isn’t because people have just stopped caring about workplace culture because they’re working from home. They discovered that, when working remotely, 52% employees believe that company culture is just as important as ever. 12% think it’s less important and 36% feel it’s more important.
However, with many organisations going fully remote for good, remote working has thrown up new challenges for culture building. Boundary-setting, maintaining good mental health and effective communication have come to the fore.
How long does it take to change a workplace culture?
Workplace culture transformation doesn’t get ticked off a list. It evolves with the organisation and the people within it. The very nature of its constant change means that it’s really difficult to measure how long systemic change actually takes – and absolutely crucial that monitoring and nurturing it is prioritised in any business planning.
It falls to the different leaders to specify any particular changes they would like to see in their areas. These are things that can be measured, so improvement can be shown over time.
For example, employee engagement questionnaires reveal that many people are unhappy about the disrespectful attitude shown by a few members of the sales team. Middle managers have felt that they have to turn a blind eye to their ‘banter’ because of their high sales achievements. After expressing this to senior leaders and receiving some specific training, managers now feel empowered to call out all behaviour that doesn’t meet the desired culture.
Some changes to an extremely toxic workplace culture can be eliminated very quickly. But the underlying culture that allowed that to exist may need time to embed real change.
Ways to improve workplace culture
Everyone’s workplace culture is unique to them, so your improvement plan won’t look like everyone else’s. But if you’re about to embark on a workplace culture transformation, there are some considerations that will apply to every workplace.
Start with where you are
You need to know why you’re investing time and resources in this change. Usually, organisations have discovered a gap between the ‘desired culture’ leadership thinks you have and the actual culture your employees are living. Before you go any further, you need to make sure that all the elements of your vision for your desired culture are clear. It’s also crucial that you share this vision to everyone else in your culture building team.
As the CIPD point out, “the small number of people involved in initiating change take time and care when doing this and can therefore easily justify their decisions. Those hearing about change for the first time, however, do not share this privilege. Organisations need to ensure employees connect with the vision and need for change and understand its benefits, rather than feeling the negative effects of an upheaval.”
Listen, properly
You can only lead from your perspective, but you need to understand where everyone else is coming from if you want to successfully take them with you on this transformation. Effective and active listening is the only way to really understand. And it’s often more challenging than people expect.
As John Morgan, NED, Pentland Brands Ltd, said: “One of the biggest barriers to culture is a lack of honesty, people telling you what you want to hear.”
This doesn’t mean your CEO needs to go full ‘Undercover Boss’. But leadership visiting different sites and talking to employees at all levels can be very powerful – if there’s a level of trust that engenders honesty in the replies. Leadership needs to dive into the current cultures in different departments and locations with the primary purpose of listening and learning. This means implementing feedback mechanisms like surveys, focus groups, suggestion boxes, all hands meetings, and manager one-to-ones to gather information.
At this stage, outside HR and market research consultants, and Trade Union representatives can really help an honest sharing of opinion. Talking to a third party can give individuals reassurance of anonymity when they’re in the vulnerable position of speaking truth to power.
Transparent communication
As leaders, you need the honesty of your employees, in order to create and maintain a positive workplace culture for everyone. This means open, transparent lines of communication. You need to model this by being open with your workforce. If you want a workplace in which people feel bold enough to share their mistakes and concerns, you need to share yours. If you want to encourage employees to support each other – publicly share the positives you see in them. And make sure that everyone, at every level, has the information they need to do the best job possible at all times.
Go gently
Making changes to your workplace culture shouldn’t come with the bells and whistles of a product launch. Any type of change can be uncomfortable, challenging, and makes people feel vulnerable – especially when it involves their livelihood. It might be driven by excitement in the leadership team, but that doesn’t mean it will be met with the same emotion. Take your time to put support systems, like training, in place, make sure everyone understands why the changes are happening, and calmly take one step at a time.
Continuous measurement
The only way you can know how your culture is performing, is by keeping track of everything. This means recording key data and analysing it at regular intervals. There are several main metrics that help you see how your culture is developing, like: employee engagement surveys, attrition and staff turnover figures, and hiring data. This gives you information about how your current employees feel and how attractive your culture is to those considering joining your organisation.
We’re here to help
Working out how to improve workplace culture is a complex task. You don’t have to tackle it alone. Fitzgerald is full of experienced experts that can support you, from creating employee engagement surveys, to aligning your HR policies and procedures with your desired workplace culture aims.
Please contact our team on 0330 223 5253 or office@fitzgeraldhr.co.uk. We’re here to help.
