On Organisational Culture and The Individual
Organisational values are not a new concept — as most concepts. They are embedded in mission and vision statements, policies and employee handbooks of organisations all over the world. They might have stronger roots in the corporate world, but charities and NGOs all over the planet are learning just how useful sharing some formalised set of values is. Organisational values become important tools in the hands of recruitment teams, marketing departments and senior management. They help pitch an organisation to current and future employees, sell products and services to consumers and forge relationships with business partners. But it is hard — questionable, even — to claim that organisations quaorganisations “have values”. There is always a difference between how a value is held — or, at the very least, communicated — by an organisation and how it is ultimately perceived by an individual. In this post, I focuse on the employee. I suggest a mechanism whereby informal norms become part of formalised organisational cultures, and I try to emphasise the role of individuals in both shaping and defining their employers’ culture.
Employees and Organisations
Businesses often speak of having “a culture”. That “culture” might be qualified as data-driven, adaptable, energising or any of a wide range of more or less gimmicky terms. But exactly what is being referred to by the term “culture”? To take this conversation forward, let me propose a definition of “culture” in the context of organisations:
Organisational culture is the compendium of mission and vision statements, policies and informal norms within organisations, as designed by the very organisation.
Let us settle the first question this (unserious) definition raises: how does an organisation design “informal norms”? Indeed, their very informality pertains to their emergent nature — they are not decided upon, but result from complex employee interrelations. Examples of informal norms might be how employees generally work in groups of three, use certain terms within the office that make no sense to anybody from outside, arrive five minutes late to meetings, or follow a more lenient dress code on Fridays. And yet the above definition places the onus on the employer as an organisation to “design “ its culture. But “the organisation” can only really influence mission statements and policies (among other things). To this effect, I suggest that employers “design informal norms” in retrospect. There is a feedback loop between employees, the norms that emerge from their actions and interactions, and the policies and statements that influence organisational culture. Let us use an analogy to illustrate.
Imagine Sam, a manager of a regional marketing team. One Tuesday, after a few difficult weeks within the team, Sam brings a box of cupcakes to the office and shares a short break with the team at 4pm before taking on the final hours of the usual workday. The short break goes really well and is deeply appreciated by the team. The following Tuesday, some jokes are exchanged about doing it again and a team member, Taylor, surprises everybody by bringing in doughnuts. The crew share a break again at 4pm and it’s becomes a norm in the regional marketing team. However, as they do not reply to emails during that time and the staff have discussions with other departments, word goes out that “the marketing team take 4pm breaks with treats on Tuesdays”. The message makes it first to fellow marketing teams, but then also to other departments that rely on them responding to emails. These other departments and teams like the sound of the breaks and begin to do the same. After a few months, there is hubbub higher up in the chain of commandment. A director was unimpressed by this unauthorised break and brought it up in a senior leadership meeting. “They are eating on our time!” The fellow directors controlled their laughter and a consensus was reached: some petty cash would be made to teams, according to size, for them to spend on weekly “cupcake breaks”, as defined in a new clause of the employee handbook. This would allow more teams to take part, spread the joy of partaking in such breaks, but also have some control over what was spent and how often — it became policy.
Now, I for one would happily work at a place with enforced cupcake breaks, but the point of the above is to illustrate how policies can be designed in response to informal rules and habits. The “culture” that crystallises within this organisation is then fun, caring, agile, exciting — whatever adjective best suits the cupcake breaks policy. There is a feedback loop mechanism that has worked as follows:
Organisational culture feedback loops occur when, provided employees have some manoeuvrability within organisational policies, the organisation responds, under some pretence (e.g.: to improve fairness, decrease costs, increase control, etc.), to norms that emerge amongst staff by embedding versions of those norms into formal policies.
But there are consequences to the formalisation of informal norms. If it is found that the marketing team started it all, people might think they had a more fun, caring, agile, exciting — whatever — culture to start with. Some teams might find it impossible to even have enforced cupcake breaks. Call these no-cupcake teams. No-cupcake teams, then, would believe more strongly in marketing’s fun and caring brand as a team. In the meantime, staff in the no-cupcake team become relatively unhappy. What’s more, they lobby the organisation to have the petty cash made available after hours, so they can go out for drinks together after work on Fridays, which would work with their schedules. This is denied by senior management, who see a liability in “paying staff to drink”. Tension grows within the team, morale plummets and disinterest in the organisation — which is meant to be fun, caring, agile, exciting (whatever) — grows among the members of the no-cupcake team.
Of course, this is all for illustrative purposes, but the analogy is not outlandish. And the point is simple: organisations quaorganisations do not have unique cultures but numerous subcultures and sub-subcultures that vary in relation to the few aspects of the organisation that senior leadership can control. A question might be raised by senior leadership at this point: must every informal norm be made policy? Turning the question around: provided the inevitability of more-or-less unintended consequences for different teams, does it even make sense to formalise any habit that emerges amongst staff? The response to both questions will be a straightforward “no”. This is because they offer two extremes to a continuum of approaches to the design of organisational culture. In either case, this is only the tip of the iceberg. In what follows, I ask for how individuals relate with their employer’s culture.
Interpreting Culture
We have so far introduced the organisational culture feedback loop that allows front line staff to influence norms and policies. This loop relies on a responsive leadership team who embed informal customs in formal policies. But policies and statements are just a part of the vast number of tools at a leadership team’s disposal. Consider the physical workspace, IT infrastructure, office location, budget allocations, staff benefits, and so on. All together, these diverse factors shape an organisation’s culture. The problem for senior management is that different subcultures can emerge. For example, some section of the workplace might always be used by the same team at certain times, some budgetary constraints might affect how teams that usually travel for work decrease in productivity, and so on.
There is an even greater degree of complexity for any conception of an organisation’s culture — it is interpreted and lived by individuals. What might this mean? For one, members of staff are — wait for it — human persons. As such, employees perceive the world through their own self-reflective natures. In other words, to engage with that which one senses, humans compare what they perceive with the vast array of experiences they have already lived. Consider an apple. Perhaps you have had tasty apples throughout your life and you consider the apple to be a rather wonderful thing. However, I may have never had a tasty apple — or maybe I don’t like their texture because they are too hard to bite into, or I once tried out a terrible apple-based diet and apples bring back bad memories. We have different conceptions of apples and, thus, interpret apples differently. Now, we might agree on certain attributes of the apple — the frequency of the light that bounces off it, the length of its stalk, its weight, its volume, and so on. But, overall, for you it is something to eat, for me it is something to avoid.
Now apply this thought to organisational culture. In particular, you are in the regional marketing team from earlier on and I am in the no-cupcake team. Our conceptions of the organisation’s culture starkly contrast with one another’s. This is because of the different ways our teams have interacted with organisational policies — your team feels it has shaped them for the better, my team feels we have been deprived of the benefits they promise. What’s more, we have very different lives. On the one hand, maybe your life has provided you with a worldview that allows you not only to appreciate the culture that senior leadership design, but to also navigate the sort of landscape the organisation provides. On the other hand, perhaps my experience frustrates my engagement with the premises of the organisation’s culture. Certain aspects of the particular workplace also seem bizarre and even questionable. This more individualistic approach to conceiving the organisation’s culture means we can view it differently even if we are in the same team. If we are both in the no-cupcake team, it might be that you can shrug off the fact that morale is low so long as there is a monthly paycheque, which might be an attitude I cannot get on board with. All this to say, quite simply, that individual members of staff engage in different ways with the cultures they interact with.
Let us break down the journey organisational cultures undergo from their conception in the boardroom to their perception by individual members of staff. First of all, the culture is given a form in a myriad of documentation and (often quite literally) furniture across the organisation. Secondly, it is perceived through a particular lens — that of a team’s subculture. Thirdly, the organisation-wide culture is interpreted with the backdrop of individual employees’ own past experiences and current worldviews. I call these the stages of cultural interpretation:
- At conception-by-documentation, a culture is already up for interpretation. Engaging with one policy and not another will give you only part of the picture that is the organisation’s formal culture. Engaging with a certain workspace will also prompt different reactions.
- At perception-through-subculture, the experiences of a team will shape what any one of those policies actually mean in practice — the policies may become distorted or be seen as rather meaningless, which is certainly not the intention of a boardroom designing some “culture”.
- At interpretation-by-worldview, things become inevitably fuzzy. One’s past experiences cannot help but shape what one interprets within the subculture they have had some role in shaping. Problem: not just staff.
Provided the above, it should be clear how an organisation’s culture is hardly in the control of any “leadership team”. After all, one’s experiences shape what the culture is in their mind’s eye. This is an inevitability unless senior leadership prioritise one thing above all else: hiring for “cultural fit”. This practice would mean interviewing potential employees to discover whether their worldviews are congruent with those of senior management. The problem with this is two-fold. On the one hand, the organisation perpetuates whatever shortfalls its culture brings about to a workforce who comply with a series of policies and formalities either because they agree with them fully or because they feel powerless. There is a form of oppression of “employee voice”. On the other hand, and quite relatedly, staff who become disenchanted by the organisation’s culture — after interpreting it through their own and their team’s lenses — eventually have to leave. The upshot of this second case is that it becomes rather easy to measure “cultural shortfalls” if the data and data analysis skills are available. An analysis of staff retention, along side information from exit interviews, can reveal those “shortfalls” of an organisation’s culture. This requires a third factor, though: that senior management be interested in the testimonies of disillusioned staff. If not, they can continue reinforcing an exclusive and unkind organisation of similarly-minded drones. If they do care, they can improve their organisation’s culture to be more diverse and in-line with an ever-changing society. To this effect, it is up to the senior leadership team to decide when employee voices feed into the organisational culture feedback loop: is it when staff join, as they climb the ranks, as they become disinterested or once they leave? One way of putting this is in terms of the speed of the cultural feedback loop:
The speed of the organisational culture feedback loop describes the ease with which an organisation’s culture responds to employee voice. This will be in light of senior leadership’s empowerment of their staff.
Some simplifications
There are a number of simplifications made in the description of the three stages of cultural interpretation. At the stage of conception, there is a question of consistency. Knowledge on the part of senior leadership about internal policies and procedures tends to be incomplete — this is understandable, as policies are often delegated to, or simply created by, specific departments, such as legal, human resources or finance. To this effect, it is unlikely that even the most capable director is aware of each and every formal rule in place. With this, new policies might not fit perfectly with old ones, or old ones might become outdated because of evolving norms. There is a likely difference, in other words, between the content of an individual policy and that of the organisation’s culture as a whole. It is no mean feat, but it is a task of those in charge to make sure that policies do fit with one another — that they are consistent.
The point made in the description of the first stage earlier on sidesteps this complex question of consistency on the part of leaders by focusing on the relationship between a culture’s “whole” and its formal “parts”. The point made might best be illustrated with the example of furniture in the workplace. Imagine a company spread out on several floors. and throughout several buildings. Each floor and each building has its quirks — perhaps the ping-pong table on the second floor is a sitting area with beanbags on the fourth. Maybe one building has a larger lobby area for guests and the other is a bit more “cozy”. Any member of staff on the floor with the ping-pong table will see the workspace in a different light to those who work on the floor with the beanbags area. And so on and so forth. So, whilst the organisational culture seeks to be a consistent, unique entity, it can only be interpreted in light of what we interact with. We can interact with certain workspaces, staff benefits, legal policies, etc.; but we cannot interact with the organisation as a whole.
Another major simplification made in this essay is the talk of teams as rather formal structures — such as the regional marketing team, the leadership team or the no-cupcake team. However, members of staff rarely fit in any one structured team — they tend to take part in various communities, which might be more or less structures. One might be a part of different committees, working groups or even book clubs. One can have groups of friends with staff from beyond their teams and so on. To this effect, the second stage — perception-through-subculture — is a lot richer than the one described above. My being in the no-cupcake team might not be the only subculture I view the organisation from. Perhaps I also work with, say, the Christmas planning committee. This group will provide me with a different lens than what my team’s experiences have to offer. Our being part of different communities means having access to a kaleidoscopic lens through which to view the organisation. This further complicates one’s interpretation of their employer’s culture.
These two simplifications, if anything, conceal the strength of the overarching claim that interpretation has an effect on the nature of a culture. I wish to finalise this post by introducing what I call experiential culture:
Experiential culture is the effective form an organisation’s culture takes when interpreted by any one individual in light of (1) the formal manifestations they are exposed to (e.g.: mission statements, policies, etc.), (2) the conceptualisations their different communities provide of the organisation’s culture, and (3) their own worldviews.
Concluding
This post has focused on the role of individuals in shaping organisational culture as opposed to it being something senior managers can control. We have seen individuals shape organisational culture in two ways: through the “organisational culture feedback loop” and through interpretation. A great deal has not been said about the opposite direction of travel of an organisation’s culture. Indeed, do individuals not adapt in light of some culture? But this seems to be the normal understanding of employment; one is generally expected to fit or adapt, whist I have tried to emphasise the possibility of reacting (un)conventionally and affecting culture.
Hi there! This is a disclaimer offered out of caution: the above relates in no way with any of my current experiences at work. I write this because I believe“organisational culture” is an overly inflated concept in common discourse. Thank you for reading and keep safe!
