Creating a Healthy Work Culture in 2021

Every week, I host a live interview show for Newsweek called "Better" - this week we will talk with broadway producer and author Vivek Tiwary about cultivating resilience in business and life while taking questions live from the audience. Join us on Thursday, January 14th, at 12 PM EST/9am PT/5pm GMT. For an easy calendar reminder to join us, click here.

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Last week we had some great insights into company culture and remote management with author David Burkus offering advice from his new book Leading from Anywhere. After the huge transition from leaving the office to working from home, we learned a lot about how work environments might progress moving forward. Here is a selection of David’s thoughts from our session last week, and if you’d like to see the entire interview, you can watch the replay here. 

Identifying your company’s current culture:

“I look at culture as [three things] - shared understanding, shared identity, and psychological safety. For shared understanding, you can ask them, ‘Do you understand the roles and responsibilities? Do you know how to ask for help if you need to ask for help?’ Shared identity has to do with the sense that people feel like they're actually on a team, in the sense of purpose and meaning that they draw from their work. Psychological safety is actually really pretty easy as a leader to judge: When was the last time one of your people disagreed with you? If it's greater than a week, you don't have the right level of psychological safety on your team. If it's greater than a year, you messed up a long time ago.”

Hold people to an individual standard, not a company policy:

“I used to say, ‘Look, I don't know which of the policies in this book you should adapt. Here's what I know - you should figure out what is keeping your people from doing their best work and remove it.’ For most organizations, there's a distinct lack of trust and autonomy caused by what I often call policy creep. One person disrupts our trust and as a result, we make a 14-page expense reimbursement policy to make sure that this never happens again, instead of thinking, ‘Well, we fire that one person and we trust the rest of you until you give us a reason not to.’" 

Create a team working agreement:

 “For your team, you need to be having a conversation about ‘how and when we can work together.’ We need to work on things like the team working agreement, or the social contract of a team, or what I sometimes call the declaration of interdependence. This is a document that we come up with as a team that outlines how we are going to work together. Where we define, say, a reasonable response to an email, for example, or this is where we agree to use Slack versus email versus a Zoom call. Sometimes people make requests for help that are so passive, we don't actually know and a week later they're frustrated because no one is helping them. In coming up with that agreement, you end up learning about the context that people are working in, and you start to figure out what works for your team.”

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Please leave a comment and share, and have a fantastic new year online and in person! For additional useful tools and resources, join my email mailing list here - which has new content different from this newsletter!

Wishing you health and success - 

Dorie