It's Culture Time! Spread It & Scale It

Prior goes to how to build and scale them, I'll give a summary of some references about cultures that I used the most. In terms of definitions, I picked this one as my favorite:?A culture is?the total socially acquired life-way or life-style of a group of people. It consists of the patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are characteristic of the members of a particular society or segment of a society?(Harris, 1975).

As we are taking the cultures into an organizational context, this one is my favorite reference in defining and building an organization's culture:?Set of collective patterns lead the new members of organization to non-formal rules of perceiving, feeling, and processing information in the organization?(Schein, 2004).?

What is So Great yet So Dangerous About Culture?

Culture can spread to members within an organization either intentionally (any methods deliberately created to spread specific cultures to be embraced by people) or as an unconscious habit that occurs without direct agenda to teach particular beliefs. Culture shaping must be strongly driven and delivered by leaders or other figures that need to be role models or representatives of expected cultures. Unconscious transfer of a set of cultures can occur through day-to-day interactions between the members with somebody who strongly influences the group/team/organization, as most of the members will observe how the strong figures behave and mimic them in their way of work, beliefs, or assumptions.

I just realized how influential leaders influence how they do something through one of my experiences in leading the QA & Release Team. My team members replicated my style in operational activities: implementing a timebox in decision making, making a commitment with stakeholders, and creating clarity of what to do and what not to do should after the timebox is achieved, expected conditions not yet happen. I didn't teach that style intentionally, as it is only my preferable approach to achieving less coordination. But after a period of time, I was surprised that during a meeting with stakeholders, one of my team members asked for timebox confirmation. It turns out they observe and operate by mimicking how I did things. I had around 30 team members back then, so you can imagine that a good thing that I did could multiply into 30 times good, and a bad thing that I did could multiply into 30 times worse.

I'm grateful that I have had a lot of chances to observe and experiment with various ways of designing and scaling cultures in some of my employers. I will pick some implementations to be shared.

Design and Implement Subcultures at One of My Previous Employers

Culture: Solid Teamwork and Choosing what's best for the team rather than yourself. We planned to deliver the message that?Your Team Will Always Back You Up.?How do we ensure this message is received well by each team member? We translate it into how we operate :

• The way we distributed tasks and backup planning: Cross-team assignment enabled. Once any team member is on leave, if they don't have a peer on a similar team, somebody from the other team will temporarily be assigned to back up the tasks. Some opinions might be against this, referring to the potential switch context, but that was the trade-off I took. There was no harm in productivity, and we have solid operational stability (no interruption despite absence/sick/on leave team member). To minimize the trade of impact, we enable a strong foundation in transferring knowledge between each team.
• The way we implement assignments: We do gradual cross-transfer knowledge in low-risk activities and can provide multiple exposures to team members. One of them is that during post-deployment tests, we also ask another team member outside the in charge team to enable pairing assignments, increasing team knowledge exposure on different use cases.
• The way we design learning and knowledge transfer: Pairing assignments during the accepted period after onboarding until a specific individual is confident enough and ready to tackle specific duties with minimum supervision.
• The way we design engagement initiatives: Birthday celebrations, wishlist gifts, and meaningful moments for every team member.
• The way we build team resilience and operational sustainability: Same implementation with point 1 that guarantees to stakeholders and counterparts that even though there are any sick or on leave team members, there are always people who back up the tasks to be continuously delivered.?

Through those arrangements, safety and a sense of belonging were built strongly. They also feel supported by their managers and the assurance that no matter what, they have the team back them up. I would suggest use references in Communicating Cultures by Schein (1985) on below illustration summary.

Scalability in Building Culture

You have designed the culture and translated them into how your team operates. Next, how do you scale?

Identify and Leverage Culture Ambassadors

To make sure companies can spread the culture effectively and efficiently, make sure that the process is scalable as well. To enable scalability, identify formal and informal influential figures who will become great representatives of the culture. These people are considered people who serve as role models every day. Once the key people are identified, leverage them to influence their network and surroundings.

Establish connections in the workplace.?

Employee experience is greatly affected by day-to-day relationships. It's essential to give employees opportunities to strengthen interactions and relationships through workplace celebrations or events, social gathering spots around the office (which might not be applied during pandemic situations), team-building activities, and interactive games. There were some occasional experiments when I helped to bridge the team with management so that they could interact better through casual chats such as?AMA (Ask Me Anything), Appreciation Day, and various initiatives.

Want to know more? Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RtgF5DjQ9c where I shared more about cultures and do mini simulations in designing culture from scratch with available framework.