Anthropology & Corporate Culture: The Employee Point of View

The Problem

Standard approaches to corporate culture assessment and consulting are, let's face it, company-centric. Most culture initiatives seek to engineer certain types of social behavior and or to engineer a desired share price. Survey "tools" ask a battery of questions that funnel employee responses into various "culture types" or orientations, often cleverly color coded, which forms the basis of understanding. Culture consultants will then step in to help the company close the "gap" between the culture it has and the culture it wants.

This scenario is great for the consultants, but no so much for companies. For 60 years employee engagement rates have hovered around 30%. Seventy percent of corporate change programs fail to achieve their stated objectives. And 70-90% of M&A's fail to achieve their targeted goals, often because of 'culture problems.' Undeterred, companies continue to avail themselves of standard approaches to culture and culture change. Putting square pegs into round holes will never work. Einstein said something about trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, but I won't digress into psychoanalysis here.

The Values Ruse

As an anthropologist, the widespread embrace of the culture concept in business, beginning in the late 70's and early 80's, is curious. For the most part, people content themselves with seeing culture as 'the values, beliefs, and behaviors that bind people together in groups.' Such a notion is not wrong. However, the question is: Whose values?

Companies are famous for creating and promoting values statements and culture statements. Most aspire to things we all agree on. We believe in integrity, honesty, and hard work. We have a culture of performance and accountability. We have a customer-first culture. We believe in the power of collaboration and innovation. Who would disagree with any of these?

However, there is a Grand Canyon size chasm between words and deeds in many companies. It is one thing to utter such phrases during a trust building exercise in Conference Room D, but those phrases and values aspirations can often be far removed from the experiences that real employees are having.

For many public companies, the overriding corporate value is Shareholder Value. Not that companies aren't into integrity and honesty, but their North Star value is often shareholder value. When an employee attends a culture building workshop espousing various high-minded notions of shared values and then returns to work with their manager who is harping on about cost cutting and the sanctity of next quarter's earnings reports, a certain cognitive dissonance occurs. That chasm, between what employees often hear and what their lived reality consists of, undercuts corporate change efforts time and again.

What About Employees' Values?

I fully understand that businesses are in business and that there needs to be a clear direction in which employees are rowing. And I understand that the engineering approach to culture change is all about rowing the boat in the same direction. However, by starting the values funnel at the top, with the corporate perspective, which, let's be honest, is very often about Shareholder Values, companies miss an opportunity to actually understand culture and nurture it from the ground up.

I am not suggesting that companies alter their core strategy or change direction in terms of their strategic goals. Rather, I am suggesting that those strategies can be more effectively executed by people (employees) who are allowed to express their own values rather than being obliged to ape the values that their managers (and shareholders) are handing down.

The Ethnographic Opportunity

What would it look like if culture was researched and understood in the corporate context the way it is by anthropologists in the world at large? Rather than starting with abstract types and categories, the way standard corporate consultants do now, what if employees were understood ethnographically with eyes wide open? What are their values, beliefs, and goals?

This is of course not a new question, as many have conducted ethnography in companies for years. It is, though, still comparatively rare as a mainstream form of cultural inquiry inside companies. Ethnographic research is used extensively in the consumer research space, but that is another conversation altogether. What I am talking about here is internal ethnography, not customer-facing ethnography.

There are many reasons why this is an uphill battle. Ethnography is time consuming, and thus expensive, and can be quite messy compared with the scientism of surveys, numbers, and data tables. I get all of that.

If one wants to conduct a proper cultural analysis of an organization, though, doing it anthropologically (via ethnography) is a proven path forward. Such an approach will reveal what employees' actual experiences are like, and what their values are. That process can also be a catalyst for greater levels of self expression and self organization.

The Power of Self Management

I think many corporate leaders fear the ethnographic approach because they think it will undercut the execution of their strategy. That it will break the six-sigma approach to engineering culture and behaviors. But that is upside-down thinking. We know, as I explore in my forthcoming book, that employees who have massive amounts of autonomy and freedom-- up to and including full self-management-- often outperform their more culturally engineered peers.

Companies such as Chobani, Patagonia, W.L. Gore, Morningstar Tomatoes, and Haier Electronics, are leaders in their industries, and build culture from the bottom up through hands-off management. Culture is what employees do and believe. We know this works, because we have the evidence. For companies that want to break from the top-down and consistently unsuccessful approaches to "culture transformation" that consultants have been peddling for the last forty years, I suggest an experiment in ethnography to empower employees to be themselves, express themselves, and to define the culture from the bottom up. We recently created Culture Partners to help companies tackle this exact challenge, as there seems to be a growing appetite for anthropological insight into seemingly intractable culture problems.