No, that’s not culture
Summary
In recent months leaders have advocated for a return to office (RTO), in the name of culture. Some of this stems from a fundamental dislike of remote work. If that isn’t the case however, companies must attempt to make their culture explicit.
A “good culture” is observable and tangible. It focusses on systems and not outcomes.
Speaking of culture in platitudes and poetic expressions, obscures people’s understanding of what culture really is. Leaders must strive to define culture using its constituent elements - resources, processes and values.
Since values are the most intangible aspect of culture, companies must define how people can act in alignment with those values.
Only when we define culture explicitly this way, can we have a meaningful conversation how locations, or location independence, influence culture.
Asynchronous work is most compatible with a remote-first culture. An organisation that thinks in a location-dependent manner can theoretically work asynchronously, but it’ll find it unnatural to adopt these practices. So my advocacy of async-first practices goes hand-in-hand with my support for remote work.
We’re at a point where we see a divide between some managers and executives who want a return to the office (RTO) and employees who largely want autonomy in where they work. Some arguments I’ve seen over the last three years are rather positional. They stem from the fact that certain leaders don’t believe in remote work. No amount of data will persuade them otherwise. This isn’t a judgement on those leaders, but a commentary on the human condition. We all have biases. We don’t like to challenge a fundamental belief. If that belief says that people must be in an office, then we’ll shift the goalposts until we find a reason to bring people back to an office. I explained some of those shifting goalposts in an earlier article.
A common argument against remote work is that companies will find it difficult to maintain their culture in such a highly distributed environment. When all else fails, culture is the last refuge of the naysayer. You can veto almost anything in the name of culture. As a corollary, culture is also the last refuge of the salesperson. You can sell whatever you like if you can make a cultural case for it.
On this site, I’ve written about culture earlier. In today’s post, I want to explore that topic a little more.
What in the world is a “good culture”?
We often look at different companies from the outside or the inside and label their cultures as good or bad. I wonder if we stop to think what it is about those cultures that deserve certain labels? After all, corporations are profit making entities. There’s a reason we say they are “for profit”. You can’t wish that away by showering people with poetic expressions and platitudes.
So if we take “for profit” as a common trait across most corporations, what characterises cultures we term as “good”? Here are a few features that come to mind.
When employees’ values match those of the company’s.
When people know what part they can play in furthering their company’s mission.
When it’s clear which behaviours the company rewards, and which ones it punishes.
When everyone knows how to act, even when no one’s looking.
When company decisions seem congruent with their stated values. Here are some examples.
The clients and customers you work with.
The way you allocate you spend your money.
Who you promote and who you sack.
The above features make a company’s culture observable and tangible. However, we often see the outcomes of this system and mistakenly call it culture. Let me explain.
When everyone feels aligned to the company’s values, there’s a lot of common ground between individuals. This leads to cohesion and a sense of community. Cohesion and a sense of community are not the culture, though. They are visible by-products of culture.
In a similar way, if a company promotes people who practise value aligned behaviours, then it shows a sense of fairness. This leads to loyalty and belonging. But loyalty and belonging are not the culture. They’re by-products of the culture.
If a company’s mission is clear to people and they know how to play their part in service of the mission, it’s likely that you’ll see strong progress towards that mission. Accelerated progress is a visible by-product, but not the culture itself.
Each of these visible by-products is an alluring goal. It’s natural for well-meaning leaders to want these. The trouble is that a focus on goals, obscures the systems that get us to them. Culture is the system that hides behind these goals.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
No fluff please
Before I proceed, I must acknowledge that culture is a myth. I’ve mentioned this earlier as well. After all, it’s an abstract concept that we use to bind people together in a collective. And this isn’t a terrible thing. Human society functions on myths - be it the notion of government, constitutions, political beliefs, religion or something else. But as I described earlier, a healthy culture aligns the values of the people who take part in this myth with the values of the collective entity - in this case, the company.
And so, it helps to define this myth tangibly. Too often I see leaders use loaded terms to describe their culture. Here are a few examples, some of which you’ll find familiar.
The X-factor
Our secret sauce
Magic!
The special something
Our DNA
Who we are as a company
I understand these phrases add colour to a leader’s speech, but beyond a point, they’re overused, trite and cliche. Almost every company could use them and you couldn’t tell one from another.
These fluffy terms can also be pernicious. They mask a company’s culture to a point where no one knows what it means. After all, it’s a “secret sauce” isn't it? And if no one knows what it means, then everyone can define what it means to them.
You can refuse to hire someone because they’re not a “culture fit”.
Teams can push back on working for a certain client, because they’re not “culture aligned”.
Leaders can reject data, and employee sentiments about a certain way of working because it isn’t “in line with culture”.
Culture - the last resort of the naysayer. The corollary also holds true. I’ll leave it to you to imagine those possibilities.
Companies that care about their culture, should therefore, go beyond the fluffy myth, to a myth that people understand well. According to Clay Christensen, they must:
identify their resources or assets;
detail their processes so they make use of these resources;
and clarify the values that help people make decisions.
To me, values are the most important and the most ignored part of this cultural jigsaw.
What are your value aligned behaviours?
In tech, the most important assets are people. These people employ a set of processes and ways of working every day. Those processes are an in-practice representation of your culture. Values, though, are tricky. They guide the company’s decisions and shape its priorities. And often there’s a chasm between a company’s stated values and what people perceive of the company from its behaviour.
I notice several companies list out their values in pleasant sounding words. Some may even add a paragraph or two describing each value. But how does one act in alignment with those values? Well, that remains a mystery.
I understand that this opacity may stem from good intentions. Many leaders and founders hope that their culture has strong roots, and that experienced employees will pass on their understanding of these values to new employees. There’s also a fear of finality with spelling out value aligned behaviours. After all, we want our cultures to grow and not be static. Doesn’t writing things out make a culture seem rigid? While I understand these trepidations, I suggest a less fearful approach.
If your culture only propagates through word of mouth, it can also degenerate into a game of telephone. And as we’ve discussed several times on this site, writing is iterative. If you can adopt an “everything is in draft” approach to running your business, you can help people understand that the way you define your values represents only your current understanding. Things can, and should change with time. When they change, people should know where to look.
This is where I find GitLab’s effort in defining their values admirable. Here’s what they’ve done.
In the interest of memorability, they condensed their values into a memorable acronym - CREDIT.
Each of these has an associated emoji, so people can use the emojis on different channels to recognise value aligned behaviour
🤝 Collaboration
📈 Results
⏱️ Efficiency
🌐 Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
👣 Iteration
👁️ Transparency.
Not only have they defined what the values stand for, but they’ve also described 100 value aligned behaviours they urge their employees to practise. The above image summarises GitLab’s values and their aligned behaviours.
What I find most remarkable is that the company makes all this information public. That way they hold themselves accountable to both their employees, their notional talent pool and other external stakeholders.
Now, is GitLab a “good culture”? I don’t know. I haven’t worked there to know how congruent people’s behaviour is to their stated company values. What I know is that if someone were to apply to work at GitLab, they’ll have a clear idea of its stated culture. No “magic”. No “secret sauce”. No “x-factor”. Just plain English.
Of course, you can argue that GitLab doesn’t do enough. Luke Burgis, in his book, “Wanting”, advises us to rank our values. He says that if you state all values as equal, you create room for confusion.
“By stratifying your values, you will be able to weigh and measure options when you have to make decisions in complex situations… Some values are absolutes. Know them. Name them. Defend them. They make up the base of the pyramid, or the centre of your concentric circles (depending on how you choose to depict the hierarchy).”
Burgis’s exhortation aside, I believe that GitLab already does more than the standard corporation. They seem to care about their culture, so they make their value aligned behaviours explicit. As a leader if you care about your culture, I daresay this should also be your first step.
When you define your culture through value aligned behaviours, you can have a constructive conversation about remote work.
What behaviours can you only practise in an office?
Which of your values directly opposes remote work?
What can you do to practise your values in a location independent manner?
How does office-centricity erode some of your values?
In April 2022, Future Forum’s pulse report revealed that fully in-person workers have the lowest employee experience scores. Fully remote workers, as you’d expect, are the happiest. This is at odds with how several leaders wish to herd people back to the office in the name of culture. The report also noted a startling asymmetry. While 35% of non-executives were working from the office five days a week, only 19% of the executives spent all five days in an office. Should culture have such disproportionate costs on the average worker? You won’t know until you describe what culture means to you!