I used to buy this lie about workplace culture.

The lie was: culture is intangible, fluffy, and therefore not worth significant investment. Go next.

Now I believe this perspective is lazy and we need to slip its embrace. Instead, we need to:

Manage Culture as a Product

If we do this we create value and competitive advantage in the form of:

⚒️ improved execution,

❤️ better talent acquisition/retention,

⚓ more alignment,

🪐 higher engagement

👌 brand authenticity.

🪴 and more!

🚀 All of which contribute to growth.

A little backstory…

I used to be swept up in this cosy blanket of laziness about workplace culture. I was persuaded it wasn’t worth trying to design or manage with any intent because it was intangible, it just wasn’t possible to go after.

Here’s the perspective I used to buy:

‘Yes, yes John…culture is important, everyone knows it eats strategy for breakfast, blah blah blah. But, look, it just isn’t possible to do anything about it. It’s not tangible. It’s soft. It’s fluffy. Besides, the founder(s)/CEO dictate culture — it’s on them and them alone. Do you disagree? OK, well someone in the People team then, they can deal with it, sounds like a good OKR for their next quarter…

Look, John, we are going to go and talk about important things like profit, cost and churn… talk all you want about culture, just make sure you do it at the kids’ table.”

Ok, maybe that last bit about the kids’ table was mostly in my head, but you get the picture :)

Seven years later, a few more scars, a bit more self-confidence, stalking businesses like Zappos and Hubspot…I’m no longer buying this. Culture has too big an impact on people, performance, execution…the works. It’s just not smart to leave it untended and let it go to waste. It is too precious. Like a garden, it will continue to grow but left unmanaged it may not grow in the directions you wanted it to!

It’s lazy to wrap it up in a blanket of ‘too hard to go after.’

So, to those leaders, I now say:

“I call BS!”

OK, I’m usually polite. It’s more like:

“Excuse me… Please can I invite you to share another perspective for a moment?

Let’s Manage Culture as a Product…

Culture is important.

It does eat strategy for breakfast.

It does impact the bottom line.

It’s not just the founder’s ‘problem’.

It is everyone’s opportunity.

Employees aren’t just customers of this product they are the designers & developers

It isn’t intangible…we just need to define it.

We should be defining it together as a whole business.

That definition might not be right for other businesses, but the game isn’t to try and find something for everyone.

The game is to define and evolve something valuable for us.

Nowadays the toolkit for distributed and asynchronous co-creation is better than ever. Extravert/introvert equal voice? Yup. Engagement? You bet. Possible at scale? Not just possible, better.

Once we’ve defined it…it becomes tangible.

It isn’t ethereal anymore…a golden oldie definition of culture like:‘It’s how we get stuff done around here’ can be unpacked into bite-size features that go past just creating a set of core values for our career site.

There is power in shaping these features together…which ones impact our ability to execute the most? Decision making, rules, meetings, structure, behaviours amplified, behaviours outlawed, hiring process, healthy conflict, org learning mechanisms, tools or something else?

We can get feedback on these features

We can measure these.

We can tune these.

We can experiment with these.

We can ship new iterations of these.

We can map culture today and we can envision where we want it to be tomorrow.

It’s not just ‘the way we do things around here, today.’

Now it’s ‘how we will do our best work together, tomorrow.’

We can roadmap this.

This can be marketed.

Now, it can be subscribed to.

Now it can be celebrated.

It is a magnet.

It is a beacon.

It is alignment.

It is execution.

It is worth investing in.

We should manage Culture as a Product.

If we do, we create a bright beacon to attract people who share our mission from the entire world, we create gravity and community to stay, and we co-create an environment that enables people to do their best work together. These directly translate to better execution and growth. Strategy is no longer eaten for breakfast.

This is what competitive advantage feels like.

What do you think?

Are you a Founder struggling to operationalise your values? Are you a People lead concerned about talent acquisition or retention? Are you someone who wants to change culture but aren’t sure where to begin?

If yes, then this is for you.

TL;DR

I believe culture can and should be unleashed as an organisation’s competitive advantage. If a team isn’t thinking about it in those terms, I say: friends, welcome to the land of opportunity! Culture doesn’t have to be dismissed as intangible or reduced to just a set of values on your career site. I believe instead that it is tangible and can be managed just like a product. This is not an overnight process or a one-off project and it takes time, energy, a shift in mindset and discipline to do effectively. I’m going to propose 3 high-level first steps to get started on this journey:

1. Define your culture today, beyond values
2. Design your culture of tomorrow
3. Manage it like a product

In this post, we will explore steps 1. and 2. and in the next post I’ll cover step 3.

So leadership team…what does culture mean to you?

The conversation perhaps goes a little something like this: ‘How do we turn our culture into a beacon and magnet for talented people?’ Followed by someone seeking to clarify, ‘Culture is really important and then someone else: ‘Yes but what is culture?’ Everyone nods their head about how important culture is, but they quickly realise that culture is quite a big, vague word, and after a few exchanges it becomes clear that the team have wildly different ideas about what it is, why it’s important and who owns it.

Lean into that conversation a bit more and you start to realise that one person’s culture is ‘core values on a website’, another’s is simply: ‘vibe,’ and another person believes it is ‘the founder’s or CEO’s problem not mine…’

Sound familiar?

From ‘wishy-washy’ to tangible

This perception of culture being many things to many people is part of the problem and it is why sometimes culture can be dismissed as nebulous or intangible in comparison to other priorities. This can look like leadership teams relegating culture to the league of ‘too wishy-washy’ or ‘too hard,’ or even to the pile of ‘we aren’t going to look at that, let’s talk about profit and product!’.

But even if you don’t clarify what you mean by the word, properly define it, and then grow it intentionally then… culture will still grow. I think of it like a walled garden that you purposefully and lovingly filled with variety and colour and different aromas. You then left it for a while because you prioritised other things... what happened? It still grew, right!? Only now your garden may be full of things you didn’t plant. Instead of the beautiful environment, you set out to create, now you have a weed-ridden patch — and some weeds are very hard to remove.

How to avoid culture being relegated to the league of ‘too wishy-washy’? Define it.

We have to first define what we mean, understand its tangible parts and create a hard link between culture and business results (e.g. profit, speed, retention, NPS etc). Good news: if you define it well, that second bit becomes much easier. Let’s dive a bit deeper…

How to define your culture, beyond values:

I like this definition of organizational culture for its simplicity (Deal & Kennedy, 2000).

Culture is:

‘the way things are done around here.’

If we anchor that for how we think about today’s culture, then I propose tomorrow’s culture is:

‘how we will do our best work together.’

Once we’ve defined culture at a high level, now we can begin to drill down into its component parts. We can’t be intentional about growing it in the right direction if we don’t know what we are growing, right? :)

Here’s how we are currently thinking about culture:

1. Mission
2. Values
3. Principles
4. Cultural Priorities
5. Behaviours
6. Decision Making
7. Communication
8. Meetings
9. Feedback
10. Celebration
11. Org Learning
12. Equal Voice
13. Fearlessness
14. Healthy Conflict
15. Quirks

The important thing here is your context

Whether you like the components in the image above or want to use another framework, I recommend creating a rough prototype on a digital whiteboard and asking the rest of the business for some ‘what else?’ asynchronous feedback.

We want all eyes on this because we want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute, improve, align and subscribe.

Once we’ve co-created a set of tangible components, we can facilitate a powerful conversation around both where our culture is today, and then later where do we want it to be tomorrow or if you subscribe to our earlier definition of culture being:

‘how will we do our best work together.’

Here are some example questions to help you facilitate this:

• What behaviours do we amplify as a result of our values?
• What behaviours do we outlaw as a result of our values?
• What do we do and not do?
• How do we communicate with each other, what are our speeds and tools?
• What meetings do we have synchronously / asynchronously? Why?
• How do we have healthy conflict? What does unhealthy conflict look like?
• How do we ensure fearlessness and equal voice?
• How, when and why do we celebrate?
• How will we hold ourselves to account? What does that look like?
• How do we hire? Who do we look for?
• Why do we fire and how do we do it?
• How do we share knowledge?
• What are our unique quirks?

The mistake to avoid

The mistake I see leadership teams making when having the culture conversation is doing it on their own. Sometimes there is a tendency to disappear into the woods for a retreat or an offsite and emerge triumphant with everything worked out. This is a fast track to disengagement and subscription which means wasting time and missing out on the opportunity of having your whole business aligned on a way of work that is optimised for you and your context.

So, what should we do instead? Well, the principle I have found to be most effective when targeting engagement and subscription (two core ingredients to embedding any org-wide change) is harnessing the power of co-creation.

Designing your culture of tomorrow by harnessing the power of co-creation

I advocate this principle be front and centre of any virtual, physical, synchronous or asynchronous, small-scale or large-scale culture design initiative.

There are many ways to do this depending on your organisation’s attributes, my personal favourite for ensuring equal voice is an asynchronous Miro board exercise with everyone — over the course of 72 hours — followed by a set of volunteer-led synchronous workshops (with small groups) to sense make and then playback to the rest of the business.

The high-level blueprint for running this is pretty much the same regardless of whether you are a 10-person startup or a 1000-person organisation. The facilitation structure is:

1. Build a shared picture of today’s culture
2. Identify opportunities together
3. Design tomorrow’s culture

This provides a solid foundation for managing culture like a product — more on that in the next post).

Here’s an example of what it looks like being co-created in Miro (200 people asynchronous facilitation over a week, most people contributed by spending about 90 mins commenting/adding stickies and joining the discussion at their own pace over 2–3 trips to the board). This is building a shared view of culture today with heat mapped stickies denoting opportunity areas.

This is part 2. designing culture tomorrow, where the opportunities identified previously are leveraged and simplified for clarity and reference. This is best done by a small team of volunteers and then invite the rest of the business to feedback before iterating.

If you are interested in the facilitation nuts and bolts of this kind of thing, let me know and I’ll cover it in a future post, or DM me and we can have a coffee and chat it through. We are running a 250-person asynchronous culture design over a 2-week event at the moment purely using a digital whiteboard tool for all collaboration.

This co-creation principle in action is so powerful if done well and goes a long way to supporting the next piece of the puzzle: putting everyone in charge of culture and managing it like a product, both of which I will cover in my next post.

Hope this was interesting for you! If it resonates, you’ll maybe enjoy some of the open source resources we share at openorg.fyi.

I love meeting people who share my enthusiasm for designing culture-first businesses and making culture a competitive advantage so if that sounds like you, please feel free to connect on LinkedIn/Twitter.

Cheers

John