It's here, there & everywhere

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

“Culture is like the air we breathe – all around us, yet very hard to see”

Culture has been slipping into workplace chatter a lot lately. It’s the single most important asset for any company. It drives growth, value, and yes, success. But many are still struggling to wrap their arms around exactly what culture is - how to define it, design it, and shape it.?

This was exactly the focus of a Culture Conference we attended this week. Here were are top take-aways:

Head of Culture is the Head of People 2.0?

• Culture isn’t just for Patagonia and tech startups. In attendance were a huge number of organizations not historically known for focusing on culture.? A large swath of Wall St (big banks to private equity), legacy media, and even mining companies were present and actively staking their claim on culture. Critically they are creating formal leadership roles whose role it is to spread culture throughout the organization. This doesn’t belong to HR, this is org wide and needs to tie into every element of the company and ensure leaders are carrying culture across teams.?

Talking Talent

• Talent and search firms are increasingly involved in the culture world. While their precise role is unclear, these firms make it clear that the burden has shifted onto organizations and away from candidates. Companies are increasingly thinking about if a candidate is a culture add NOT a culture fit (culture fit is dead)

Word of the day?

• It’s a toss up between “intentionality” and “deliberate” (used 48 times vs 46 times in 6 hours). Semantics aside, given commitments to remote and hybrid work, hope and onsite osmosis are not viable strategies.? Culture, like yoga, must be a focused, consistent, practice. This requires ongoing communication and deep focus on making the implicit, explicit. Make sure your culture narrative is clear and visible for all?

Ongoing Onboarding

• Tactically, onboarding is a critical component of building, sustaining, and imbuing culture. Companies are rethinking how new hires can learn about their culture (buddying & mentoring systems) and increasingly extending the duration of the onboarding process to cover 6-12 months. Importantly, this includes ensuring senior hires also receive an equally purposeful experience.

ROI of Culture -? a Thought Exercise

• The financial impact of culture is hard to isolate given its wide reaching impact across retention, recruitment, productivity, morale, and alignment. But a simple framework can help.? Suppose a company is aiming to grow its EBITDA from $500M to $600M, ask yourself two questions:

1. How do you need people to behave to deliver that growth??
2. What percentage of the expected upside is at risk if people don’t behave that way?

In addition to the above, what stood out to me was the question ‘how do you scale culture’? The answer is community. And community comes from bringing people together, from creating human bonds through intentional moments of connection.?

If you want a culture that sticks, focus on bringing your people together through the conversations that matter most to them.?

How are you thinking about culture? Are you taking office culture and plopping into our new world of work? Re-thinking your culture completely??

Join us for these upcoming events!

4/12: Embracing interfaith holidays?

4/27: Crafting a human-centered employee experience?