Are You Missing this Key Element That’s Actually Driving Your Company Culture?

How is it, after all that’s been published and studied around company culture, that a successful company culture can still be elusive despite best intentions and efforts?

Why isn’t it enough to just copy the values and culture book of companies who have successfully created a positive company culture (like Zappos)?

In the effort to create a positive company culture, leadership comes up with any combination of novel perks and value statements. Perhaps they implement community service outings, or team-building exercises, or maybe a foosball table in the break room. They come up with edgy, cool catch-phrases like “get stuff done” or “only accept awesome”.

Yet, that foosball table in the break room can sit gathering dust, the community service outing can cause resentment instead of bonding, and at one company, “only accept awesome” manifests as a vibrant and innovative team, while at another company it leads to burnout.

What gives? Why does a “perk” at one company lead to success, while falling flat at another? Why didn’t that catchy phrase catch fire in the way you intended?

Because there are Two Sides to Company Culture

Cognitive Culture and Emotional Culture.

Perks, value statements, belief statements, company missions, etc all fall into the category of “cognitive culture”. These are the top-down driven expectations of how we want our employees to behave, and even when those expectations are both positive and well-intentioned, there’s a hidden, and even more powerful driver of company culture that’s really going to set the tone. 

And that's your emotional culture. 

According to Sigal Barsade, Professor at The Wharton School of Business, cognitive culture means, “the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that guide group behavior”.

Whereas, emotional culture is, “the shared affective values, norms, artifacts and assumptions that govern what employees feel, what emotions they express, and which they know they are better off suppressing.”

The emotional culture of an organization is the huge mass that lies under the surface that is actually driving the behaviors of people at your company. If you look and listen, you can see, hear and feel those emotions.

But, most of us aren’t paying attention to emotional culture. We’re not looking for the right things, listening for the right things, or asking the right questions. We are just busy getting stuff done. 

How Emotional Culture Trumps Cognitive Culture

Here's an example.

Recently, a company called C Space attempted to reboot its culture. After interviewing employees, it came up with new cultural norms, or values, such as: 

The company leaders came up with these phrases, optimistic that people would interpret the phrases the intended way.

“I got this” was meant to remind team members to take accountability for projects. "Do what scares you" meant, "be willing to take risks".

But things didn’t go according to plan. 

As it turns out, one phrase in particular had a negative effect -- "Only accept awesome." 

The emotional environment that had already been created drove employees to interpret “only accept awesome” as “work until you are exhausted”.

Not what the leaders intended.

Because lying underneath the cognitive culture (the phrases and expectations) was the iceberg of emotional culture. In an environment that had already set an expectation of long work hours, these mantras revealed internal competitiveness and isolation, resulting in a burned out team with high turnover.

The company has since course-corrected to try to rectify the unintended impact of their new “values”. 

How Emotional Culture Impacts Your Bottom Line

The linkage between good organizational cultures and high employee engagement has been proven numerous times.

Gallup’s detailed studies show how highly engaged employees impact positive customer sentiment, sales, and profitability. We know that “good culture” means good business outcomes. 

On the other hand, a negative emotional culture can negatively impact the bottom line. For example, according to research by Berkeley’s Barry Staw, fear has been proven to narrow people’s focus, which may reduce their ability to solve challenging business problems.

Further research by neuroscientists have shown that stress impairs executive functions such as judgment, memory, and impulse control. In short, fear and stress leads your team into a closed-minded, defensive mode where they make bad decisions.

Signs of fear in the workplace are easy to find, even though a fearful organization may be hard to change (unless change comes from the top). People stay quiet and are unwilling to speak their minds. They go about their days, quietly doing their jobs and then leaving as soon as they can. There are many articles on fear in the workplace and toxic employees, so we will not go into more detail here.

That’s not to say that fear doesn’t occasionally have its place in a company, particularly for situations that need intense focus. But, some companies seem to believe that driving people harder and faster by fear is the pathway to success. Fear may work in the short-term, but in the long-term, fear can have horrible consequences.

Lastly, just because we are talking about positive emotions here, it doesn’t mean we should stifle all negativity. Some negative emotions translate into constructive feedback, which can be used to strengthen the organization. Also, our implicit goal isn’t to build a fake positive culture of automatons, people still need to be authentic.

If your emotional culture is off, you will notice people doing things that don’t align with the values and behaviors you desire, even if you believe you have clearly explained what you are looking for.

On the other hand, a negative emotional culture can have disastrous effects. United, notoriously, has had several awful customer service problems on flights over the past few years. Who can forget the passenger who was beaten up? In another story, one man decided to take matters into his own hands and post a hilarious video about United breaking his guitar. 

With over 18 million views, journalists estimate that the video alone cost United more than $100 million in lost shareholder value!

It should come as no surprise that a negative emotional culture hurts a business. What you probably don’t know is just how big an impact a healthy culture can have on a business. The Hay Group states: “Our research among millions of employees worldwide shows that firms scoring highest for engagement achieve 2.5 times the revenue growth of those that rate lowest – it’s a prize worth fighting for.”

In his book The Employee Experience Advantage, Jacob Morgan found even more benefits, as shown below:

The challenge has been understanding how to actually change a culture, beyond words on the walls that don’t seem to do much.

How to Create a Healthy Emotional Culture That Will Make Your Company Stand Out and Thrill Your Employees, Customers and Shareholders

Some of the examples shared here seem obvious, but, it can be harder to see inside your own company in an objective way.

Earlier, we said that figuring out how to actually change a culture is the hard part. Follow these steps to get your culture on the path you want.

1. Measure your emotional culture

You can’t fix what you can’t see, so the first step is to identify the emotions that dominate your workplace. The two most common tools to do this are: surveys and observation.

Let’s start with surveys. First, you want to make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Counterintuitively, you don’t want to ask your employees to report on their own feelings, but rather the emotions that they see other people expressing.

According to Barsade: “When ... [we] measure emotional culture, we don’t ask how employees themselves feel but rather ask them to report on what emotions they see expressed by the colleagues around them. Emotional expression is what sets culture in motion.”

Emotions reveal the truth about where people are. And, emotions are contagious. One positive person can change a team’s dynamic just by injecting their positive emotions.

Here are a list of questions you can ask your employees that will help reveal what emotions are being expressed in your organization and what emotions seem to be the most contagious. Another benefit to asking what your employees see others expressing is that it’s often easier and less biased to answer questions about other people.

• What emotions do you see expressed by your colleagues? (You can provide a list or leave it open ended)
• What words would you use to describe the culture or personality of your unit?
• To what degree do other people in your organization express [happiness]? (You can repeat this question for different emotions you are trying to measure)
• What emotions do you think your colleagues should not express in your organization?

You can bolster survey results with observations, adding subjective color to what employees tell you. When managers walk around and speak to their teams, they can learn a ton simply by getting to know people, paying attention to body language, watching for changes in work habits, and observing behaviors that give clues into people’s emotions.

Yes, you can quantify feelings! These questions will determine the dominant emotions in your organization. Once you have these emotional measurements, it’s pretty easy to identify the positive and negative emotions.

2. Model the emotions you want to accentuate

One of the most effective ways to accentuate positive emotions is to model the positive behavior. For example, in an emotional culture that values companionship (what psychologists call “companionate love”), you may find kudos walls, where people write notes about great things their teammates have done. At Zeal, we keep a channel in Slack to identify and recognize these kinds of moments. Each week, we post this Slack channel to remind everyone of the great accomplishments from the past week.

The whole key to modeling behavior is that emotions are contagious. Positive people tend to create positivity around them. As managers and leaders, you have to pay very close attention to your own moods and behaviors, as your teams will mimic your emotions.

To be clear, everyone at your company can model behavior -- you don’t have to rely on your CEO to be the only one.

Also (and this is important), creating a healthy emotion culture doesn’t mean having a completely homogenous group. In other words, don't take this advice to mean your entire team needs to have the same emotional affect. Our society tends to favor positive extroverts, for example, but the reality is that companies and teams need all types of people to be successful (thanks to Google’s Project Aristotle).

For example, you may have an IT person who starts every conversation with the statement “the problem is…” That person’s job is to protect your company from risk, outages, etc – to look for the downside. The role suits a person who isn’t unrealistically optimistic. In that case, hire the person with the right attitude to be successful. The rest of your team will appreciate that you have the right person for the job

Or, maybe you lead a team of introverts – maybe they write code, or do deeply analytical work that requires focus and flow. A traditional team-building event of going out to a loud bar for beers and slaps on the back may be their idea of hell! But, a team outing to an escape room, where they can have fun doing the things they enjoy, is just the right thing.

The same is true for negative emotions. Here’s a particularly poignant example from Harvard Business Review:

At one Fortune 500 company, unbeknownst to the CEO, senior employees regularly use text message codes to describe his nonverbal expressions of anger in meetings. “RED” means he is getting red in the face. “VEIN” means his veins are popping out. “ACP,” which stands for “assume the crash position,” means he is about to start throwing things. This leader is very effective at creating an emotional culture—but it’s probably not the one he wants.”

3. Display artifacts that reinforce your desired emotional culture

In research by Edgar Schein of MIT, one of the early pioneers in researching organizational culture, he identified that one of the three key components of culture are artifacts. These are any tangible or verbally identifiable elements in an organization, including the architecture, design, layout or a workspace; functionality, attractive visuals, elegance, furniture etc. Even implicit or explicit dress codes speak a lot about workplace culture.

In an emotional culture that values fun or joy, pictures of your team smiling and enjoying time together is a simple reminder of the emotion you are striving for.

At Zeal, we like to joke that ping pong tables and pizza parties don’t make culture. Ironically, some of us previously worked for a company where a ping pong table actually became an artifact of cultural significance and contributed to a positive emotional culture. It all started when we sponsored a charity event that included a ping pong tournament against celebrity athletes. For the months leading up to the tournament, we held an internal competition to determine which six people would play at the event. Everyone who didn’t play at the event were still able to attend and enjoy the evening together.

For these few months, the fun of playing ping-pong became all about the joy of spending time together and all the positive emotions associated with that. After the event, the ping pong table wasn’t just a physical object in our office, it was an artifact that became a constant reminder of the joy we had together.

At your company, you can find or create those artifacts that have significance and remind people of positive emotions. Pixar is another great example. Pixar’s offices are a constant reminder of the creativity and success the company has enjoyed over the years. According to one article on Pixar’s office space: "There can be no greater feeling that walking around the workplace and being reminded of the great work you helped to produce – as well as seeing the smiles of the many visitors as they recollect the ways each movie touched their lives."

Just remember that artifacts alone don’t drive your company culture, they help boost whatever emotional tone has been set.

4. Create Healthy Communication

Communication within your organization can make a huge impact on evolving your emotional culture. Managers’ and leaders’ communication styles will have a huge impact on their people. It’s not just what we say, it’s how we say it. A playful manager can spread fun throughout their team. A manager or leader can foster a culture of companionship by communicating in a caring or nurturing way.

Here are some actions you can take to ensure your communication improves your emotional culture at all levels in your organization:

1. Embrace two-way communication with your employees, give employees a voice, foster participation and listen. 
2. Ensure you and your organization’s managers and leaders express the kind of emotions you want to foster in your organization, focusing on the positive emotions like gratitude, joy and companionship.
3. Encourage managers to practice inclusiveness, by asking for all team members’ input and encourage each one to take initiative.
4. Show genuine concern for your team’s feelings and interests.

In a study by Rita Linjuan Men, PhD, she found: “...when employees’ needs for mutual respect, care, connections, and reliance on one another is satisfied in the organization, they tend to trust the organization more, be more satisfied with, and committed to the organization, and feel the balance of power in the relationship with the organization.” That is an outcome that can inspire all of us!

And, in a final example, Arthur T. Demoulas, CEO of Market Basket, was revered by his people. He would regular walk through Market Basket stores and speak with employees. What blew people away is that he remembered his employee’s major life events even when seeing them infrequently. People realized he genuinely cared about them. The Market Basket Story is a poignant example of how a positive and caring emotional culture led a company to massive success.

You can take these actions at every level of your organization, from small teams all the way up to the top. Every manager, no matter how senior, can take the actions described above to impact the emotional culture on their team.

Conclusion

Emotional culture is the hidden force that drives your people’s behaviors. Neglecting to cultivate a healthy emotional culture will, more often than not, render other attempts to create “company culture” useless.

Culture is frequently described as "how we do things around here.” That phrase isn’t enough to accurately describe your culture. You need to include “how we feel around here.” Once you understand your emotional culture, then you can truly impact your organization and put it on a pathway to business success.

If you enjoyed this article about company culture, you can read more of our content or watch our how to videos at Zeal's website.