Developing Our Workplace Culture; Why Workplace Culture Skills Are Just As Important As Career Skills

People prepare for their career by developing and practicing the skills related to their domain. Marketers practice writing; salespeople practice the challenger sale; software developers practice coding, etc. Sometimes people learn a second set of skills when they take on a management or leadership role because these skills are vital to performing that job.

Working on a team and supporting a healthy workplace culture also requires skill. So what are workplace culture skills? Workplace culture skills support the ability to be respectful and inclusive (no sexual harassment or bias), and make good ethical decisions. These three skills, working in tandem, create a healthy workplace culture which benefits the company brand, recruitment, retention, and productivity. But these three skills don’t just happen. They actually take intention, practice, and development.

Core Workplace Culture Skills

Let’s start with being respectful. It sounds pretty simple and it’s easy to think that any decent person could easily be respectful with co-workers. But that’s a bit simplistic. What happens when a “decent” person is stressed and out of patience? Or letting off steam with co-workers after work? Or is socially unaware of situational context, power disparities, and people’s emotions and perceptions? All of these are nuances that impact a situation.

There are plenty of “decent” people that act disrespectfully—sometimes unknowingly; sometimes carelessly; sometimes recklessly. People need to be consciously respectful when they interact with co-workers. Consciously respectful means we learn how to be patient and not react to difficult situations. Instead, we shift our perspective and see the situation through another person’s lens.

What about the ability to be inclusive? Again, being consciously inclusive means we slow down; rely on a neutral framework to help us make better workplace decisions and make an effort to switch our perspective to see a situation from another person’s shoes. This sounds easy, but it’s not. It takes practice. And just because you’re a smart person with good intentions doesn’t mean you’re automatically inclusive.

How about making ethical decisions? When people are emotional and excited at a personal benefit or scared about a negative situation, then anyone can rationalize anything! Any of us can tell ourselves a story that supports an intended decision—no matter how unethical.

What about when a good person finds a great business opportunity that benefits them personally, but maybe not their employer? Our emotions control our actions much of the time and sometimes, those emotions are counter-productive to a healthy workplace culture. So the ability to make good, ethical decisions comes from slowing down; identifying whether we have any personal motivations influencing our decision (either positive or negative) and then using a neutral framework to help us make better workplace decisions.  Making ethical decisions is a conscious, practiced skill… it’s not just an innate characteristic of “good” people. The same applies to respect and inclusion.

A Better Approach To Developing Workplace Culture Skills

To date, organizations have predominantly treated workplace culture skills (such as preventing sexual harassment; ethics; code of conduct; managing bias, etc.) as rules or policies that people can quickly absorb in order to comply with organizational values. That’s the wrong approach with the wrong intention, driven by lawyers whose focus is to prevent and defend claims and litigation—not to develop workplace skills.

Your intention drives your results and when your intention is risk management, you don’t build skills. Yet these are skills in the same way people have management and leadership skills. Yes, you can read a policy and theoretically understand the concepts… but that's a far cry from navigating situations that are nuanced by different people, their emotions and their perceptions of the situation. Instead, the concepts need to be transformed into actions that people can practice and develop into skills — workplace culture skills. By developing workplace culture skills, people become more valuable employees and organizations create healthier workplace cultures.

A version of this article was originally posted on the Emtrain Blog.