The Company Culture Reality Check - What You Say Your Values Are and What Your Staff Experience Are Often Two Different Things

4 Minutes Read

Company culture means "this is acceptable behaviour, this is what we prioritise around here".

If you claim your company has a culture of openness yet your executives never admit in front of staff that they don't know something or that they were mistaken at some point, there's a gap between what you say your company culture is and what it actually is in reality.

A vast majority of the people I have worked with said they were told when they joined a tech company:

"There are no egos here, we are all learning" except when it comes to testing this out in a real life conversation and they speak up - they get the look, and the interruption and often the telling off, afterwards. It's quickly very clear that this was just a statement of what they think they are like but not what they are actually like.

All tech companies I have come across, with no exception, have their company values or beliefs some variation of:

• Continuous improvement
• Inclusivity
• Consensus and collaboration.

One of the most cited reasons why people leave companies is because the culture they thought was in the company they joined is not reflected in the reality of day to day interactions.

What I have observed happens:

• Companies come up with lovely statements about what it's like to work for them
• They design company values (or beliefs)
• They deliver presentations and talks about these values internally
• These values are cited in job descriptions, strategies and company websites and so on
• But...

...there is little (if anything!) done in terms of real, day to day, "this is it what it means in terms of our behaviour as executives and your behaviour as staff when you work with others"....

And so people adopt the unconscious view that "everyone else needs to change or be like this, except me".

Somehow staff are often magically expected to translate for themselves what these values mean for their day to day interactions.

Just because those value statements are out there, or just because someone in leadership says "this is a flat hierarchy" it does not mean that genuine feedback and real consensus are indeed practised or welcome. And testing out that statement could potentially cost you your job.

Self awareness is needed to implement the culture and translate it into real behaviours or inclusivity, consensus and receiving feedback so they can continuously improve.

Combine this with the fact that tech companies are mainly made up of engineers who don't necessarily see the relevance of these company values to how they work day to day. In fact, if you ask most engineers, they think company values are some fluff the HR Team came up with because they have nothing better to do.

Engineers are usually practical people, they like to know, black or white, what does this mean to me.

Most companies are not doing sessions or training or talks or internal articles on what do those company values mean for you, in your day to day behaviour, as an engineer, as a director or as a toilet cleaner who works for this company.

I am a practical person who gets bored very quickly by big abstract statements. I love to translate abstract things like company values into algorithms or day to day formulas and responses staff can use so they can indeed live and breathe the culture companies claim they have.

How do you know you have this problem (i.e. if your culture does not reflect your stated values)?

• Are staff able to pull people (of any seniority!) up on things without fearing it will backlash or they will lose their job?
• When no one is watching, when the leadership team are alone in a meeting room, are those values still upheld? Or do people speak over each other and get offended by constructive feedback?
• What is your leadership team's body language towards others? Even something as simple as taking over the sofa as their own and putting their feet up so no one else can sit there is a sign of lack of inclusivity and self-awareness.
• How self-aware are your leaders and your staff? Do they become curious and wanting to listen to learn when someone gives them constructive feedback or do they shut people down and then tell them they were not a team player for speaking up?
• Do the leadership team have shared work experience which they bring up constantly in meetings and have an attitude of "we know best because we're all connected in a way you are not connected to us". Do they have history together that they're now using as an asset which is an unfair advantage that no one else in the business can replicate? (This is usually common in scale-ups more than in corporates.)
• Do your leaders listen to genuinely understand rather than just listen to respond?
• Do your leaders practise silence, know when to shut up, listen and then speak only at the end in a meeting with people under their management?
• Is there a double standard for rules? One rule we say we have and one rule the senior leaders/certain special staff have? Do the most senior people not follow the rules but expect everyone else to follow them?
• Do experienced members of staff get told "listen to what he says, he's really experienced" about another senior person who is the buddy or an old friend of key senior people in the team?
• Is there a feeling of "don't challenge the fact that I'm endorsing him" coming from senior leaders?
• Do some staff have the attitude of "It doesn't apply to me", a right of seniority which means they can pick and choose which rules to follow?
• They say "it's flat hierarchy, anybody can come and talk to us", but would they? How did they treat the person who last time raised constructive feedback?

If a company really values its values, you'll see it in how senior management act, and in how employees are rewarded and recognised before it becomes embedded in the culture.

If we have big statements of values or what your culture is like, but there is no benchmark of behaviour attached to this, it's just lip service. Don't think that's the culture you have. It's the culture you want to have.

What can you do about it?

1. Translate the value statements into black and white statements of "what sort of behaviours are acceptable and what behaviours are not around here". Be as specific as possible. Have these put into every meeting room, on every wall in the cafeteria or hallways. Here's a decent example.
2. Top statement about "what is acceptable around here" should be about listening to understand not listening to respond. Any leader who doesn't listen to understand can not be a good leader. (If needed, add simple techniques of how to listen to understand as part of the statements of acceptable behaviours.)
3. Acceptable Behaviours should at the core be about promoting psychological safety. Encourage and actively praise those who report errors. Reinforce that poor performance happens when people don't report errors. Don't just have an open door policy, but leaders should actively talk to people at all levels in your organisation. Leaders should be the first to open up about times when they didn't know something, were wrong or failed. Show from the top there is no shame in admitting you made a mistake. Encourage people to ask and receive feedback or help and praise publicly and actively those who do. Ciaran Dunne from Arm is a leader who does this exceptionally well.
4. The top leadership team should be the first to take on and uphold these behaviours, pull each other on it and remind their own senior teams about what these are. Again, Ciaran Dunne does this regularly with his own senior teams.
5. Offer practical internal workshops on the acceptable behaviours and how to create psychological safety to help people not only understand how to practise them themselves but also how to challenge colleagues when they don't uphold these behaviours.

To me, psychological safety is all the culture traits you need.

This is why I write articles like these to help people understand how to uphold behaviours which create psychological safety as well as tools to use even when psychological safety is not there:

• How to Convince Leaders/Management to Take on Your Ideas? Tips For Engineers
• Why Executives Become Confrontational during a Project Update and What You Can Do About It
• Challenged and Interrupted by Your Boss, by Slide 3?
• Why Engineers Distrust Leaders and What You Can Do About It
• Did you Have a Fight in the First 30 min of Your Meeting and THEN Agreed a Way Forward? Here's Why and What You Can Do Instead.