In this new post-covid hybrid world, how do we maintain and develop this culture?  

To help us unpack this we had a chat with Josh Levine, Culture Strategist and the author of Great Monday’s, about how to design a company culture that employees love. 

More than ping pong and pizza 

As Josh says, culture is ‘more than ping pong and pizza, though ping pong and pizza is absolutely part of it’! 

Culture is essentially the ‘cause and effect of every choice that you make’. It’s a self-reinforcing system that ‘can enable people to work more efficiently inside of an organisation’. When you use culture ‘to inspire, articulate what we're trying to do, what our company is trying to do and how we do it’ you may notice you’re no longer having to assign tasks and work, things become self-organising.  

In a time where everything is accelerating and new businesses seem to be popping up daily,  ‘everything we thought we knew about business is falling apart at the seams’. In this uncertain world, that traditional command and control structure is no longer effective.  

Another reason for ensuring a good culture in your workplace - no one can take that from you! 

As Josh highlights, ‘ your best employee, a head hunter can come and take them. Your amazing  features that you've just launched, I can copy that’. What your competitors can’t easily copy and get their hands on is your five-star workplace culture.  

The six components of culture 

When building a workplace culture, Josh has six components you need to have - purpose, values, behaviours, recognition, rituals, and cues. 

The purpose, values and behaviours are how ‘we think about the design of the system, the design of your culture and recognition’.  

Rituals and cues are ‘the operationalisation, the activation of your culture’. Let’s quickly break down each component further. 

• Purpose - ‘the inspiration. It's why you exist beyond making money’ 
• Values - ‘your three to five most important behaviours you want employees to enact … collaboration, innovation, etc’ 
• Behaviours - the outcome. ‘What do we want? What are the specific behaviours that we're talking about?’ 
• Recognition - now that you’ve described what you want, how do you incentivise people to follow this? More then just recognising people’s output, ‘you need to recognise the process, how people get to the outputs you want’. 
• Rituals - the ‘recurring activities that build and strengthen relationships’. 
• Cues -  the ‘reminders of what we're shooting for, reminders of our culture, reminders of the purpose and values’. 

Culture Debt  

Over the past three years, thanks to covid, workplaces have incurred plenty of what is called culture debt.  

With a ‘lack of investment in culture’ teams are no longer functioning, as well meaning ‘relationships are degrading and we no longer have the kind of trust that we once had’.  

As Josh puts it, ‘trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organisations to work’. 

Collaboration is key 

So why is trust and building relationships so important? Where do we even start? 

Josh says, ‘trust isn’t the work itself, but it is how it gets done’. In a world where we may no longer see our team on a daily basis, we begin to lose that sense of connection. Without connection we don’t have collaboration, and without any collaboration we begin to lose trust in others. 

When we lose trust and a sense of any relationship with others, business loses its meaning. 

As Josh highlights, ‘ relationships are business full stop’. Without them, a business is basically just a pile of tables and chairs where nothing gets done. Building relationships and trust ‘improves the flow of ideas and the flow of ideas drives innovation’. Innovation makes a business grow. 

Relationships are also important for helping those within the business understand ‘the who's and what's of [their] company’. When people know who they should turn to, who to ask questions of when they need help and feel comfortable doing this, the business becomes more productive. More productivity = better bottom lines. 

A whole new world 

In summary, ‘trust is the fundamental attribute that you need in order to build a great culture’.  

You don’t need to be face-to-face everyday to build this kind of trust and culture, but in a hybrid world, leaders need to be more thoughtful, considered and proactive in building the relationships and trust within their company. 

As Josh perfectly summarises it, 'you have to be able to do it in a way that you've never had to do before’. 

 

Want all the insider info from our conversation with Josh? Click here to watch the full conversation.