Did Covid kill company culture? If so, can the downturn save it?

Although I have no formal training in cultural anthropology, I’ve worked in enough companies to have an intuitive understanding of what the term ‘company culture’ really means.?Company culture is the collective set of values, beliefs and attitudes held by a company’s employees.?It’s manifested by their behaviors.

?Cultural beliefs and behaviors may be blatantly obvious to external observers but much less apparent to employees immersed in their company’s culture on a daily basis.?While it’s easy to say that Covid has transformed the cultures of many companies, it’s important to keep several aspects about company culture in mind before making such claims.

?The plain truth about company culture

?Company cultures are not static, even though they might seem to be to their members or visitors.?Cultures continue to evolve over time in response to changes in company leadership, business strategies, financial success or failure, business expansion or contraction and a host of other factors.?The 2022 cultures of many companies would have been significantly different from their 2019 versions with or without Covid.

?Company cultures are not monolithic, even though they might seem to be to their members or visitors.?Unique sets of values, beliefs and attitudes are held by different work teams, functional departments and lines of business.?Company cultures are based upon a subset of values, beliefs and attitudes that are shared in common by the majority of a company’s employees across team, departmental and business boundaries.

?Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker once said “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, referring to the difficulty of overcoming cultural inertia in trying to effect changes in a company’s business operations.?It’s equally true that ‘size eats culture for lunch’.?The common values, beliefs and attitudes that define a company’s culture become increasingly hard to maintain as a company expands the size of its workforce, its lines of business and its operating locations.?

?Employees are the ultimate custodians of company culture.?Executives may come and go but employees with service tenures of four years or more are the ‘keepers’ of the cultural values within a company.?They have been schooled in their company’s values; rewarded for exhibiting behaviors consistent with those values; and now serve as cultural tutors and enforcers for new recruits serving their cultural apprenticeships.?

?Culture can survive relatively high turnover within the ranks of junior employees with tenures of three years or less.?Companies experiencing high turnover among longer term employees will struggle to maintain any semblance of a common culture.?

?Culture shapes employee behavior and employee behavior shapes culture. ?Culture and behavior are inextricably intertwined phenomena.?It’s undeniable that Covid had a transformative impact on the workplace behaviors of the vast majority of company employees.?It’s equally undeniable that these changes reset cultural norms regarding how work was to be performed and how to interact with managers and co-workers.???

?Culture cannot be managed, despite executive claims to the contrary.?Workplace beliefs are not established by value statements printed on employee identification badges or by requiring new recruits to memorize a set of cultural principles.?Employees learn about their company’s culture by observing the actions of their managers and co-workers.?

?Executives can influence culture by behaving in ways that are consistent with a desired set of workplace values and beliefs.?But such behaviors must be displayed on a sustained basis.?Employees pay close attention to executive behavior.?Cultural transgressions will be readily reported to co-workers.???

?Hiring managers can shape culture by seeking job candidates who possess values and attitudes that are consistent with their company’s desired cultural norms.?But even these efforts can backfire if new recruits don’t see a company’s alleged values affirmed during their first few months on the job.?In reality, many managers pay lip service to cultural qualifications during job interviews but end up prioritizing skills and experience in making their final hiring decisions.?

?Did Covid kill company culture?

?The answer is yes and no.?Yes, pre-Covid cultures have been vastly altered, in some cases beyond recognition.?But no, cultures continually evolve and new values, beliefs and attitudes are being established to replace those that existed in 2019.?

?Covid killed many 2019 era cultures for several reasons, some more obvious than others.?The most obvious change was the wholesale repatriation of knowledge workers from their offices to their homes accompanied by the forced use of Zoom and Slack as a replacement for in-person human interactions.?In many cases, employee attitudes regarding acceptable workplace behavior were dramatically altered after being exposed to the pets, children and home attire of their bosses and co-workers via Zoom.?

?The two other factors contributing to the demise of 2019 cultures are more systemic.?The Covid crisis served as a pretext for many long service employees approaching retirement age to simply quit, removing some of the most highly trained and well respected cultural enforcers from a company’s workforce.?At the same time, churn and business expansion resulted in the arrival of a new wave of employees whose schooling in cultural values and beliefs was sketchy at best.?

?These two factors – the loss of the best enforcers and the arrival of a new wave of cultural neophytes – have had a more disruptive and pronounced impact on 2019 cultures than the behavioral changes triggered by working from home.?This is the real reason that leaders such as Jamie Dimon at Chase and Tim Cook at Apple are trying to get their employees to return to the office.?Employees resisting these decisions feel that they are fighting for their personal freedom.?Dimon and Cook are fighting for their company cultures by trying to reestablish workplace environments in which the values and beliefs that have enabled their companies to succeed in the past can be preserved.?

?Can the 2022 downturn save company culture?

?When the Covid crisis appeared during the first quarter of 2020 most executives became justifiably focused on maintaining the continuity of business operations.?Few were concerned about the cultural impact of Covid.?Many actually claimed that their success in responding to the crisis was a direct result of their company’s cultural values and attitudes.???

Those claims haven’t withstood the test of time.?The Great Resignation was fully underway by the middle of 2021 and more recently executives have become concerned about employees who are ‘quietly quitting’ certain aspects of their jobs while continuing to draw a full salary.?These phenomena are not the hallmarks of healthy company cultures.

?The 2022 downturn gives executives a second chance to use a crisis to shape the cultures they are seeking to establish within their companies.?

?Executives should be acutely aware that employees will be evaluating how their company’s recovery plans were formed, why certain decisions were made and how these plans are being implemented in practice.?Staffing reduction decisions will be evaluated to determine if individuals whose workplace behaviors blatantly contradict cultural norms have been dismissed or retained.?In short, employees will be observing the behavior of their executives and quietly assessing whether those behaviors are consistent with the values on their ID badges or the principles they were taught at new employee orientation.???

?As Winston Churchill once famously said, “never let a good crisis go to waste”.?The 2022 downturn is enough of a crisis in many companies to galvanize the attention of employees and provide an opportunity for executives to display true cultural leadership.?Their behaviors over the next six to twelve months will be remembered by their employees – in some cases subconsciously – for a long, long time.?

?It’s time for executives to publicly exhibit the values, beliefs and attitudes they want their workforce to embrace in the future.?This is a unique cultural opportunity that should not be squandered.

Originally posted on Forbes.com CIO Network