Why it’s wrong to separate time and place when designing for culture and engagement
There is thus a time and place to focus on employee engagement, and a time and place to focus on culture evolution. Let’s not conflate the two, or we may end up solving the wrong problem.
(“Improving Company Culture is not About Providing Free Snacks,” Alice Zhou, Strategy+Business, July 31, 2017)
I’m not so sure about that. When guarding against the conflation of organizational culture and employment engagement, could it be the wrong move to separate times and places? Maybe the right move is to design a place that nurtures the continuity and durability of culture yet adapts to times of changing focus and engagement.
I appreciate the idea that a heightened quality of experience at work that is characterized by the spirit that we call engagement may be episodic or periodic. Indeed, the concept of “flow” (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) or the concept of scenius (Brian Eno) that might be highly aligned with engagement seem in their nature to be temporary.
Yet, it seems, that achieving these states of high engagement and performance may be more easily achieved in well-developed cultures if, by culture, we mean a set of behaviors reflecting the values and unique identity of an organization. We expect these behaviors to be constants.
As a company confronts increasingly complex matters in highly dynamic conditions, however, the pace of its work cannot be a constant. Different conditions in changing contexts require an agility in organizational response, an ability to respond to conditions or develop products or services in modes that are simultaneously or sequentially fast, and slow, and spiky.
This responsiveness will then require ongoing changes in the organization of the organization. A small team of people may meet to generate an idea and, with success and support, grow over time into an organization of hundreds. An organization of hundreds may, at times, need to shape a war room for a small swat team to quickly confront a problem and find a solution. An organization may, in meeting the digital imperative, shift its culture a bit to accommodate the talents and work modes of a new class of employees.
For people to engage, however, for employees to assemble the energy to meet the mission of the organization, for staff to commit and appreciate the experience of that commitment, they’ll look for assurances of the authenticity of the culture that seeks their engagement as well as the proof that they’ll be supported.
The place of work, the design of the work space, is a powerful signal of that authenticity and support. How can I believe in a team culture when you isolate me in my high-walled cubicle? How can I believe in a culture of collaboration when the only space where I can engage with others is in a scheduled conference room? How do look forward to a culture of innovation when nothing in the workplace displays the products of that innovation? How do I embrace the values of the organization and behave in accordance with them when my leadership is invisible?
In the best of cases, and organization’s purpose and its culture align exquisitely. That alignment may be the key factor that nurtures great employee experience, that enables agility, and that nurtures engagement through the variable paces of business activity.
That may also be why we think that the conflation of culture and engagement in the place of work as an appropriate goal for design. In that regard, we see the design of the workspace not as independent of culture as Strategy+Business claims, but critical to its strength and viability.
In the course of events in society and business, different times and different contexts breed different conditions for response and action. Employee engagement is critical to success. We consider the activity of organizations and their components as variable, at times fast, slow or spiky, and design the workspace with the agility to respond at pace.
Culture, of course, is durable. We hear the description of culture in many ways but seek consistently to read, or support, the behaviors that are the true signal of organizational DNA. We design to make those behaviors visible in the workspace so that others may read their authenticity and imitate them.
As we’ve consistently said, the leading organizations of the future will be the ones who “get” the experience of work. Getting that experience is simultaneously about culture and engagement in the same place.
A version of this story was published on the blog of MEREDITH Strategy + Design at http://meredithstrategyanddesign.com/blog/
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