Does Company Culture Reflect Values?

Over the past decade, the battle for talent has undergone a bumpy road as the world of tech has united employees and organisations to reduce the barriers to causal scale. We’ve witnessed the actions of Assange unit people on the need for transparency, we’ve seen the acts of Market Basket overturn board decisions, and we are now watching the effects of the #NeverAgain pledge change the directions of the Tech Giants. 

It appears that the technology-enabled workforce now has the tools to unite a collective voice with astonishing impact. How many companies can they’ve decided to decline a 250 million dollar a year government contract just because it was the desired will of their employees? That’s precisely what happened when 4000 Google employees choose to show their view on a Pentagon-funded project to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the battlefield, resulting in Google announcing in June 2018 that it 'would not be renewing its military contracts for 2019’. 

I’ve been observing the growing trend in cultural transparency and activism in the workforce since 2014, events such as Wikileaks fuelled employees into action in some of the most tightly controlled secure organisations on the planet. However, do we as a business community the actions of Bradley Manning and the Wikileaks case study as a credible reference?

It was in 2014 that grocery giant Market Basket attempted to replace employee-centric CEO, Arthur Demoulas with one more favourable to shareholders. Market Basket employees were so outraged, and they coordinated the shut down of several stories before the board re-instated Demoulas. 

Employee activism isn’t new, back in the 1970s, flight attendants successfully campaigned against advertising that sexualised them because it reduced their effectiveness as safety officers. The recent surge in employee activism stems back to the beginning of the incoming Trump administration, and the desire to tightly control and reject immigration into the US on the grounds of race and religion. The tech sector collectively saw this as an ‘inhumane’ act and have been actively blocking the use of Silicon Valley technology to power the systems that are required to enforce the desires of the new immigration policy. 

Value-based employee activism is real and growing in size and effectiveness. So let’s take a look at a few examples I think will hit the headlines in the years to come:

Sustainable Food Sourcing

Real transparency in the farming, origin and supply chain of our food has been an ongoing debate. We’ve seen the rise of concepts such as organic, fair trade, farm to table and even negatively oriented campaigns on sugar, processed foods, preservatives and ethical buying practices. One only needs to browse through Netflix to find hundreds of documentaries on food and food choices, covering topics such as farming practices, hidden ingredients, industry motives, and health risks. If there are unethical or unsustainable practices happening in the food industry, it's only going to take a small, credible group of people to shine a light on these practices and potentially unite millions more on a cause to clean up the industry.

Simpler Ethical Finance

The finance sector has long traded on the ongoing desire of the population to have more than they can afford now. Advertisers overwhelm us with choice, and in many cases create the constant unfulfilled need for a ‘better life’. Whether it’s a nicer house, a new smartphone, or an Instagram perfect holiday, we seem to be addicted to the ‘desirable’ life. The challenge is many of us, and I included, don’t have the cash on hand to make those desires come real. Enter the world of credit. In the majority of cases banks and financiers, offer products that allow us to afford our spending desires on structured payments schedules. The challenge is the underlying motives of these products were designed decades before mass consumerism and the digital economy. Back then the world looked very different, and we used to buy products with a longer product life in mind. Today, we constantly ‘upgrade’. Says he who has ordered the new iPhone XS Max.

The Australian banking sector is currently going through a Royal Commission into the practices of the banks. The commission has found dozens of concerns ranging from predatory lending, the sale of insurance to known deceased individuals, and the over-selling of coverage. While for the most part, the industry remains tight-lipped, it's only a matter of time before a morally driven few speak out on something their dislike, and fear the commission missed.

Plastic Fantastic

We are witnessing a global rise in the conscious choice of products that use plastics. California leads the world on the declining use of plastic bottles, while various foods and beverage chains are opting to get ahead of the curve by removing single serve straws. However, this remains only a minority. 

New products in the food and beverage industry come to market every month. Leaving us the question, at what point will the collective conscious of the food and beverage industry employee activism directly in the product development process? Alternatively, could we see a #NeverAgain like revolt?

Our understanding of micro-plastics and their impact on the world around us are only just evolving. Unless you’ve stumbled across a conservationist organisation educating on micro-plastics, it’s unlikely you know just how likely it is you eat plastic in your food consumption. I suspect though that micro-plastic impact will start to become a boardroom discussion in the coming years. Particularly for those food and beverage brands that publicly claim elements of ‘goodness’ or ‘sustainable.’

A Growing Conscious

While employee activism isn’t new, the tools that power them are. In the ongoing evolution of corporate culture, one can observe the growing bias towards morale or human value-based learning, mainly as many employees bring their ‘whole self’ to work and see the link to themselves as a customer. This will accelerate by the ongoing acceptance of whistleblowing culture, supported by tools that unite individuals away from corporate controls (mainly social media).

The shift in the consciousness is amplified in the digitally native workforce, where an open debate about company purpose, value, culture and direction are expected. CEOs need to be more accessible and be seen to ‘live the values’. It’s one thing to cling to old-style practices, but not being open to self-reflection and potential change can spark a revolt. Research suggests that greater than 45% of Fortune 500 companies have an idea for potentially fixing a problem, or improving value to customers. In the past it was acceptable to leave these unexplored, but as companies start to claim association with words like ‘innovative’ and ‘customer-centric’ they raise the internal and external conscious on benchmarking placing them open to scrutiny on their claims. As an industry keen to align to the latest shareholder desired buzzwords, companies open themselves to being measured against those very terms on either subjective or objective means. So when a company like Google claims to ‘develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible’ it’s hard to justify the use of their services in warfare. 

Think about the brands in your daily life and the claims they make as a brand, product or service. Do they all reconcile? Does the brand live the values? Does the product deliver on a promise? If not, you are probably looking at a company that will face an employee value and purpose challenge in the coming years, and twice as likely to Experience employee activism. The perfect example is employees that complain about their company, mainly if they are both an employee and a customer. It’s why my single most effective tactic to boost a companies self-awareness is to remove employee privileges on products and services. Make them feel the same experience your customer does, only that way can you see your flaws.

As the digitally empowered grow in significance in the workforce, expect more movements like #NeverAgain to rise, creating choice for organisations. Transform organisational culture to be more in tune with the customer and employee consciousness where please live values that align with culture or face an extremely tough time trying to compete with talent that only works for a salary. People that connect to a companies purpose are ten times more effective because they care.

The choice is yours.

Know a company example where public messaging and culture are disconnected? Or which companies are great at executing on values? Share in the comments