Taming the Complexity Around Culture: How to Build Future Skills in the Post-pandemic Era

Photo by Daniel Fazio on Unsplash

Matt Collier is a Senior Industry Fellow at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and with development partner Sally McNamara — on how organisational culture efforts can double as a capability-building initiative in service of workforce transformation and future skills.

What do Calcutta and Fontainebleau have in common? Not much, on the surface of things. One is a cacophonous Indian city, the other a pristine French forest. But as Sumantra Ghosal, an Indian management guru, once said in comparing the two, “Culture is the smell of the place,” and just as a place has a distinctive vibe that cannot be easily articulated, culture can be difficult to define and describe.

And yet, regardless of our ability to wrap our minds around it and find the words to coherently characterise it, the situational context that culture creates nevertheless has a profound effect on the attitudes, behaviors, and experiences of employees within an organisation, including and especially their overall health and wellbeing.

Revitalising people has a lot less to do with changing people, and has a lot more to do with changing the context that companies, that senior managers … create around their people.

— Prof. Sumantra Ghosal

Culture is inherently conceptual and somewhat wooly. It often gets conflated with other initiatives such as innovation, inclusion, customer centricity, risk management, performance, etc. It is not uncommon to see organisations talk about a ‘risk culture’ or a ‘safety culture’ or a ‘culture of continuous learning’ whilst also touting more traditional markers of culture such as values in internal communications.

Everyday employees already have a lot on their plates, with research showing stress and burnout levels at all-time highs. It seems like a lot, then, to ask them to make sense of all these versions of ‘culture’ whilst also doing more with less in their jobs and summoning the emotional capacity to be inspired by an organisation’s purpose, to abide by its principles, and to share its values. The list goes on and on.

Enter the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report. Released in October 2020 — which was just 10 months into the Covid-19 pandemic, as the world was still grappling with its public health implications and the poly crises wrought by its worldwide disruptions — the report identified People and Culture as an emerging job cluster, highlighting the essential role that culture will play in fit-for-the-future organisations.

Regarding skills gaps, the report found that “the top skills and skill groups which employers see as rising in prominence … include groups such as critical thinking and analysis as well as problem-solving, and skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility.” All of these, as Prof. Ghosal so aptly posited nearly two decades ago, can be linked to culture and its context.

More recently, the public debut of ChatGPT, an AI language model and the fastest growing consumer application in history, is fueling a discussion on potential labour market disruptions and the kinds of technical and collaboration skills people will need going forward.

Leaders across sectors are facing these tectonic shifts as they adapt organisations and entire economies for the changing nature of work itself, for the new and emerging skills needed in their workforces, and for how people are equipped and supported amidst all this change.

Few would contest that culture is a crucial topic. It is, after all, one of the most researched and documented aspects of business and leadership. A search in Google Scholar for the term “organisational culture” returns over 1.4 million results, and a search in the Harvard Business Review’s database returns over 2,500 articles on the topic. Why do we need yet another piece on culture, and why now?

The pandemic has changed many aspects of our work and home lives, including everything from remote and hybrid working to new collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and MURAL to how we get our groceries, school our children, and socialise with friends and family.

In our work lives, in particular, the swirl seems to be intensifying, driven by increasing expectations from customers, investors, and regulators and the larger scale at which multinationals are operating. Meanwhile, everyday workers — and some HR and business leaders — are still becoming familiar with concepts such as asynchronous work or the availability of on-demand talent in the gig economy.

As Azeem Azhar argues in The Exponential Age, we’re now living in a world that is changing exponentially, not linearly — and the gap is widening between the possibilities offered by technology and the way organisations have adapted. In a McKinsey interview, Azhar outlines advancements in the domains of computing, energy, biology, and manufacturing, and then argues that the changes that we might expect based on our past experience may not be the changes we see in the future.

General-purpose technologies shape societies in tremendous ways. And we can think, absolutely, of the car and electricity and how, together, they brought mass production and factories and factory jobs. And those had knock-on effects, like the creation of suburbs and then of welfare nets. So we’ve understood this because we’ve lived it before. The domains that we have today are very broadly applicable across our economies. And as they intersect, they create many, many new opportunities.

As these domains intersect, we should expect there to be second- and third-order effects across our economies, across our geopolitics, across the ways in which we live our lives. For example, within the field of the economy, one of the things I identify is that these technologies facilitate and enable superstar companies, a winner-takes-most market. I call them “unlimited companies,” larger than we’ve ever seen before. They make us think about competition in markets very differently.

It’s no wonder, then, that employees are feeling the heat. From a Microsoft study on hybrid work in late 2021, one of the key findings was that high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce: “One in five global survey respondents say their employer doesn’t care about their work-life balance. Fifty-four percent feel overworked. Thirty-nine percent feel exhausted. And trillions of productivity signals from Microsoft 365 quantify the precise digital exhaustion workers are feeling.”

With that as a backdrop, consider the business implications. The title of a 2019 HBR article says it all: Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology. The article offers that 90% of CEOs are concerned about their ability to digitally transform and then goes on to argue that “if people lack the right mindset to change and the current organisational practices are flawed, digital transformation will simply magnify those flaws.”

What if it’s not just the mindset that’s missing, but also the ability to meaningfully participate and contribute in the first place? Either way, culture, and the context that it creates, is at play in all of this. And it comes at a significant cost, with Forbes reporting that 70% of these initiatives don’t reach their goals, costing companies an estimated $900 billion in wastage out of a $1.3 trillion spend in 2018.

At the same time, watchdogs are increasingly scrutinising whether boards and executives have clearly established culture and have in place mechanisms to routinely monitor and assess the workplace. For example, the UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC), which sets the UK Corporate Governance Code, annually reports on compliance with the code, including a rather particular focus on culture.

In its November 2021 report, it did not mince words: “Clear and insightful purpose and values statements are also helpful as they can serve as a guide for stakeholders on how the company operates, creating a sense of direction and reducing conduct risk. We expect companies to pay greater attention to the clarity and consistency of explanations … and cross-referencing between related elements.”

Because of the stakes, financially and ethically, and also from a regulatory perspective, it is imperative for leaders to be much more proactive about defining and shaping culture, to reconcile the many and well-intentioned initiatives that tend to surround it, and to intentionally leverage the context it creates. This cannot just be an HR and/or a comms exercise. Nor can it be one that does window dressing around purpose and values.

Not only will this reduce the cognitive and social loads placed on employees, but it may also open up another possibility: that a carefully-crafted culture initiative can create the conditions for employees to learn in the flow of work (e.g., in service of a digital transformation, or perhaps in service of a radical shift towards customer centricity) and alongside their colleagues (i.e., social learning).

Put simply, culture is context, and context is a great teacher. With a view towards reducing human costs and enhancing future skills through culture, organisations can not only meet rising regulatory expectations and deliver on their transformation agendas, but they can also create positive outcomes for their people and society as a whole.

Given the gravity and complexity of this topic, this introductory article is just the beginning of our exploration of organisational culture in the post-pandemic era. In the coming months, we will cover the following topics in more detail:

1. Framing the Stakes: Understanding culture as a driver of future skills, workforce transformation, public health, and economic security. Policymakers, regulators, and business leaders must recognize the importance of creating safe, supportive work environments to promote mental health and wellbeing while also establishing strong cultures that align with business strategy and develop future skills. Here we will draw reference to the Inner Development Goals (IDGs), a global effort to outline the skills and characteristics people will need to create a more sustainable future.
2. Articulating the Vision: Choosing the right message that meets people where they are and catalyses the desired change. By characterising the culture with a few key ambitions, leaders can help employees see what the organisation is striving for and, if an organisation’s culture framework is well designed (see #3 below), these messages can evolve as the culture matures without necessitating big changes that introduce noise into the system.
3. Defining Culture: Using frameworks and constructs to make cultural concepts more accessible, practicable, and durable. This means investing in a culture framework that is clear, accessible, and practically applicable in everything from rhetoric for leaders to behavioural definitions for employees; and ensuring that the framework can adapt, evolve, and incorporate feedback without breaking its underlying conceptual integrity.
4. From Vision to Reality: Applying a top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out approach to launching and sustaining a culture movement. Given the complexities involved, a comprehensive approach is needed to build an effective culture initiative by engaging employees in vetting and defining cultural ideals, equipping leaders and holding them accountable for walking the talk, and embedding the ideals within and across the organisation’s policies, procedures, and programmes.
5. Linking Culture to Strategy: Seeing culture as a business enabler rather than an HR initiative or compliance consideration. Over time, the stated cultural ideals must become the lived experience of employees. Here we will explore how a strong culture can be integrated into an organization’s business, ESG, customer, and people strategies, with a particular emphasis on how culture needs to show up in aspects of the HR/people strategy.

There is a high degree of overlap and interdependency between each of the above five topics. Because culture is an omnipresent and multifaceted part of an organisation’s existence and operation, there is significant material to cover in order to give a comprehensive, systems view. Reading only one or two of the set is likely to leave a sense of incompleteness; attempting to explore all five at once will make for a rather tedious read.

Thus, we will examine them each in turn, demonstrating the importance of being much more intentional about shaping culture as a means to prepare for the future of work, and to offer practical guidance for those looking to tame the complexity around culture.

Note: The first draft of this article was written with the assistance of ChatGPT-3, an AI language model. The author provided prompts, outlines from research and experience, and other prepared materials, while ChatGPT generated language, helped to refine the text, and supported research/citation requests. The collaboration between the author and ChatGPT highlights how the future of work will involve human-machine collaboration, with AI language models serving as valuable tools to assist humans in being more effective and efficient. For a copy of the chat transcript, email matt@matt-collier.com.