The concept of marginal loss and it's impact on organizational culture

You may or may not be familiar with the concept of marginal gains, personally I resonate with the example of the British cycling team and Team Sky.?There are however many other variations on this from the “one percenter” in football, to the Japanese "Kaizen" or the latest read "Atomic Habits".?The concept is that, by focusing on small improvement of small details, over time, they will collectively have a substantial impact on the performance of friendships, family dynamics, business outcomes, and sports results.

Today we will raise the concept of marginal losses within an organizations culture. Marginal losses is the theory that by ignoring the small things in an organization, which individually seem unimportant, we have a significantly negative impact on the culture of the workplace that compounds over time.

Small details start with basic workplace interactions. From work friends becoming real friends, instant feedback after meetings to structured mentoring, coffee chats to work sports, are all drivers of a company culture.?Individually these interactions are not so important to a culture.?Collectively though, what happens when all these interactions are missed? How about when it is multiplied by 1,000 people over 3 years...?At the same time in many cases we have not improved the structured feedback process due to many individual excuses, which always seem to be "too many zoom calls" to have time. This is when we start to experience marginal losses in our culture and a disconnect from our teams as a result of social and structural changes in our working relationships.

For us to begin reversing these marginal losses in our organizational culture we must again focus on the marginal gains we had spent years fostering, pre-covid.?The starting point is to focus on being present again for the wider team.?This means meeting people in person again, talking to them on the phone not messaging, leaving your video on during calls, even having that coffee chat after work.? These smalls steps, or hundreds of other examples, will begin the process of re-building the culture of the organization.

As we increase the social interactions it becomes imperative to also provide more structured feedback for personal growth.?Some of the more traditional HR processes around Performance Reviews, KPI's and OKR's should be used. But results based feedback should be combined soft skill observations and training opportunities which are more important today than ever before. This will allow a 360 degree view of our teams development and ensure they are aligned on the organizational goals along with how they can grow individually and contribute as a team member.

No matter how your work environment has changed in the last 3 years re-creating those historic marginal gains by being present, communicating socially and structured HR processes are key to rebuilding your company culture as a great place to work.