To understand how culture is built, we first need to understand what it is, and that question is, in itself, difficult to grasp.
When it comes to workplace culture, the topic is often framed by the media or reputable business publications as something conceptual. It exists, but you can’t see it. It influences the bottom line, but it’s difficult to quantify. People can feel it, but often can’t name it. It’s dynamic and ever-changing, and you can measure it, but it’s shaped by millions of touch-points and we can’t easily change it.
It’s like it’s some mythical corporate mirage. 🌴
Culture is also often talked about alongside big terms like vision, strategy, transformation and systems. Throw in some fluffy terms like beliefs, values, narratives and signals, then some more concrete ones like practices, patterns, rituals, behaviours, mindsets and symbols, and it’s no wonder we struggle to build what we can’t define.
Even so, we expect every manager and leader in our organisations to be leading culture. And our contributors to be responsible for building it.
“If you want to provoke a vigorous debate, start a conversation on organizational culture” Michael D. Watkins
Without this becoming an essay with sources and references (because that is NOT my style!), let’s start with the word culture, which comes from the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation or care. I think that captures beautifully what we try to build when we work on culture in the workplace. Levels of care that signal to our people that they matter, the environment they work in matters, the connection to the purpose matter, our relationships with each other matter. And when all of that comes together, we do good business.
I’ve been working in the culture space for many years now, so I’ll speak from my experience and knowledge rather than purely the academic perspectives on what build culture in the day to day.
How culture is built…
It’s collective.
Culture involves people, not a single person. Because it’s more than the collection of individuals and everything they bring (behaviours, mindsets, values, beliefs, the ‘fluffy’ stuff above), culture is inherently dynamic. Changes to internal factors like structure, team makeup, reporting lines, people in leadership or power roles, the way communications are rolled out, the way the organisation operates in the market and the way decisions are made all shift culture.
It can be influenced, and it’s influential.
Although culture is collective, individuals can influence it, and it’s highly influential in return.
Influences make up the operating landscape: the systems, processes, policies, ways of working and structures people work within, and external factors such as workforce demographics and the external landscape (free STEEPLE Analysis tool download here). Influencers are the people who shape and change a culture. Think about a new CEO who reshapes a culture by changing the way the organisation deals with accountability or builds trust. Changes like these can alter the trajectory of an organisation, for better or worse.
Culture also guides how we act at work, in our professional relationships and in how we show up to get our work done.
Most organisations hold many cultures at once. Each team sits inside the wider culture and meets the same influences, and the people in it can give it a character of its own. Two teams in the same compliance-heavy organisation can feel very different to work in, depending on who is in the room and what they bring to it. Where we want to be more influential with culture, we need to change the practices and behaviours that move us toward the culture we want.
It’s observed in behaviours.
The ‘norms’ are set through behaviours, usually of the collective and adopted through signals of belonging – if you behave like this, you’ll be accepted and ‘belong’ in our culture. Sometimes however, one individual’s behaviour gets tolerated, then perceived as acceptable, then adopted by the collective, and suddenly it’s the way things are done around here. Behaviours are one of the clearest observable measures of culture, and so being clear on the behaviours provide clarity on cultural expectations. They are the moments that teach people what matters here. What is safe here. What gets tolerated here. What good looks like here. What does care look like in my workplace.
It has a hierarchy.
Yes, that dirty word, but this one sits across values, behaviours and emotions, rather than roles, power structures or people. We generally think culture is anchored in the organisation’s values, but values are often high level and subjective (what does integrity actually look like in action?). A way to crystallise expectations is to put a behavioural framework behind them: ‘this is what we’ll do, how we’ll do it and what it looks like in practice’.
Behavioural economics tells us that emotion drives behaviour, and workplaces often miss this part of the equation. How people feel at work shapes how they react and respond, and that shows up in what they do. When organisations skip the step of exploring how the workplace is making people feel, it becomes much harder to understand why they show up out of step with the values. That gap between the values and the behaviour, repeated across a team, goes on to set the norms.
It’s shaped through small moments of connection.
Culture is built in consistency (check out The Workplace Rituals Deck), and consistent connection is where trust, belonging and relationships form, the very foundation of an organisation’s culture. When we limit those opportunities for micro-connections, we are limiting the opportunity to create healthy, connected and interdependent cultures. Think about a team offsite where the entire agenda is built around business outcomes and KPI’s and productivity. Sure, we get a boost around clarity and perhaps a little momentum, but without building the connection that helps a team understand effective decision making, the shared mindsets needed to propel forward, the way they interact, or the EQ needed to operate collaboratively or the guardrails that we operate within, it’s all just short lived noise. The small moments are key – they are compounding and emotionally sticky.
Culture is built in practice, through consistent ways of working, clear intentions and actions, and a sense of purpose. These things can sound small, but they carry a lot of weight.
This is why I believe culture has to be made practical, rather than left as an aspiration or as words in the induction handbook. If we want to shift culture, change mindsets and shape better workplaces, we have to pay attention to the repeated behaviours, connections and rituals people experience every day.
Want to start exploring your culture?
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