LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report 02.17.20

Welcome to the weekly roundup of the trends and most notable content related to culture management on LinkedIn. We're scouring the platform everyday to find posts about what's happening in the world of corporate culture and employee experience. This is what you need to know as you start your work week.

Let's get to the highlights:

Google's Culture Hits a Hurdle

Often we ask the question "what companies come to mind when you think of strong cultures?"

Regardless of whether you're in a conference room or ballroom, the list offered by the audience always includes Google. The company deserves credit for helping transform the employee employer relationship. One of those transformations was flattening the org chart and giving individual contributors a much louder voice.

Until now those pioneering moves have been celebrated more than scrutinized.

Google's culture is now consistently making headlines for the wrong reasons. We saw literally dozens of posts from inside and outside Google about its culture last week. The news that generated the most discussion was Google CHRO, Eileen Naughton, leaving.

Here's one of many news story posts about that change:

This move comes after employee walkouts and very public arguments over various policy changes. We saw many posts about how the culture headlines could impact the stock price as well as arguing about who's right and who's wrong.

It will be interesting to see what impact the internal turmoil ultimately has on Google's culture. The implications are broader than for just one company. The question academics are asking is: Did Google go too far in empowering employees? How this plays out will be studied and will impact organizational structure elsewhere.

Meanwhile, we thought you might be interested in another series of posts we saw that sought to broaden the discussion to not just the culture at Google but the culture of Silicon Valley right now.

Clearly there's significant movement right now. The land of small disruptors has become the home to some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. Those companies now find themselves defending their size and reach. Here's an article in the Atlantic that has generated dozens of posts on LinkedIn over the last few weeks. People are clearly interested and posting about it.

New Rankings for Religious Diversity

With all the noise about Google's culture the company topped a brand new index. This one comes as Diversity and Inclusion becomes an increasingly frequent conversation in C-Suites.

This new index analyzes Fortune 100 companies on their inclusion of people of various faiths. We saw several posts about the rankings last week. Here's one from Sue Warnke at Salesforce:

Home Depot Announces It's Hiring 80,000

U.S.-based do-it-yourself giant, Home Depot, was the topic of quite a few posts here on LinkedIn last week. The company announced its plans to hire tends of thousands of seasonal workers as the weather begins to warm up.

Home Depot's culture has been a major focus of the company in recent years. Like a growing number of companies seeking to attract talent in this competitive market Home Depot devotes a section of their website to detailing their "Core Values" and their "Orangelife Advantage." The focus on culture is having an impact on customer service scores and shareholder value.

Here's one of the many posts about Home Depot's hiring announcement. This one is by someone deeply involved in the news.

Another JetBlue? And Video Chats with Delta's CEO

I want to share two more quick nuggets from this past week. When we started this newsletter I wasn't sure how much we'd have to highlight each week. It turns out we get more tips than we can fit in here. Thank you for DMing those tips by the way!

We'll close this week with two airlines making news. The first is from the founder of JetBlue. David Neeleman initially made a name for JetBlue with its unique culture, fares, and flight schedule.

Well this last week Neeleman announced he's starting a new airline. Here's one of many posts about it. This one from Neeleman's new CFO (who might convince his boss to update his profile on here - especially after you see what Ed @ Delta's doing below ??):

Delta has been racking up awards in recent weeks for customer service. That's in part to their relentless focus on culture. CEO Ed Bastian is super active on LinkedIn (well, it's most likely a staffer managing his account). Last week we found this video a unique new way of communicating the culture of approachability he's trying to create at Delta. He's answering questions from people on LinkedIn and tagging them in the post. Nicely done.

These are just a few of the posts about company culture that caught our attention last week. We'll be back next week with another edition of the LinkedIn Weekly Culture Report!

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When your organization needs insight and assistance building or executing your organization's Culture Management Plan send me a DM on here or contact our firm: Partners In Leadership - the Experts In Culture Management.

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Russ Hill is host of the Decide to Lead podcast and a senior partner at Partners In Leadership. They've authored 5 New York Times best-selling books on Building Greater Accountability and Managing Culture.