This Is the One Thing Missing in Company Culture Practices

The subject of company culture has come a long way in the last 10 years. But there’s still one thing curiously lacking on the common lists of culture practices: decision making.

That’s the situation even though actively involving employees in company decision making might be THE most important practice of all.

COVID-19 continues as a horrible intervention. Nevertheless, the basic business activity of decision making continues. This paper suggests the characteristics of a timely tool that can help to rectify the situation.

There are countless papers, books, and conferences on the topic of culture. Most of that content started to pop up around 2010.

Culture elements include topics like trust, engagement, happiness, wellbeing, mindfulness, collaboration, experiences, leadership, recognition and more. But the consideration of how employees participate in company decision making and how results are communicated to all stakeholders has remained absent from the list.

There needs to be an on-going process to engage employees in company problem solving events. The following briefly introduces the characteristics of a software tool that could facilitate that process.

The starting place is to collect qualitative data, i.e., stakeholder opinions. Such data input usually covers employee feelings on topics like workplace engagement and job satisfaction. (Seldom if ever is there input data about ideas for how to solve an explicit problem.)

The most famous qualitative data is Gallup’s famous Q12 survey for employee engagement. There’s only one out of 12 questions that even comes close to addressing employees’ interaction with company decision making. That question is “At work, do your opinions seem to count?”. I would venture to say that the other 11 questions are influenced by the extent to which employees participate in workplace problem solving, yet it’s not addressed.

The number one fault with most qualitative data input is that the data is anonymous. That means that all the human knowledge behind the numbers is lost. I believe, as does Nanci Meadows, that anonymity in the workplace should be abolished. Anonymity propagates distrust and fear which are the enemies of a positive workplace culture.

The data that’s collected needs to be interactive and visual. There is value in spreadsheet tabular data, bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. But data comes alive when made personal and interactive.

For example, showing data points as a person’s name and photo. A click on a photo can show the contributor’s name along with their data input. Another click can send them an email asking why they responded as they did. Of course, all participants see all the data in these interactions.

Example screens in Figures 1 and 2 are from a tool called Teams Get It© from the Academy of Culture Ambassadors. The data are for the fictitious Barr family planning their 2021 family reunion.

Figure 1. Team members see who voted how. They can click on a photo and send that person an email to ask why they responded in the way they did.

Figure 2. Team members see who contributed ideas, who selected what ideas as their preferences, and how often each idea was selected.

For a decision structure to be adopted it must be easy to use. My way of expressing that is that any employee can use it on the fly and after one use, they continue to remember how to use it. Of course, a brief initial orientation is needed to understand concepts.

Last but not least is the ability to see documentation of all input data with conclusions that can be saved as a pdf or emailed to stakeholders. One click can show the conclusion and all data input such as in Figure 3.

Figure 3. A click of the “Conclusion” button shows a complete summary of all data. It can be saved as a pdf, printed, and sent by email.

Of all the “soft” variables thought to influence employee engagement the most important one is trust. The visible and tangible way to improve trust is for employees to openly and honestly participate in company decision making. This requires a huge attitude adjustment — but so do most significant changes. It’s well worth it.

What is suggested above is very doable and there is no concern about ROI. There is huge potential for “R” with essentially zero “I”. Making better decisions is also a natural consequence of the above suggestions. That in all likelihood adds a lot to the “R” and nothing to the “I”.

Gerald R. Wagner, Ph.D.

Gerald R. Wagner, PhD was an influencer in the Decision Support Movement in the early 1980’s with his software called Interactive Financial Planning System (IFPS); in the Group Decision Support movement in the early 1990’s with his software called VisionQuest and WebIQ. In each of those he was particularly well known for his easy to use software. He was an influencer in the Wellbeing and Organizational Culture movement starting in about 2011 and in 2015 he started the Academy of Culture Ambassadors with its Workplace Wisdom Retreats. Now the Academy recently announced the new Teams Get It software. He has been on the full-time faculty in the College of Engineering, University of Texas, Austin; College of Business, University of Texas, Austin; College of Business, Texas A&M; College of Information Science and Technology, University of Nebraska, Omaha; started the Institute for Employee Wellbeing and developed the Employee Wellbeing software, Bellevue University. He was also a Senior Scientist at Gallup specializing in data visualization.