Your company culture is broken. Fix it.
How to identify a broken culture and fix it (or fix you).
The trauma of working in a company that has a broken culture will forever stick with me — and anyone else who’s experienced it.
The bad news is, there are a lot of companies with broken cultures around. In times of rapid change, it’s difficult to give culture the attention it deserves. The good news is, you can always fix it. Yes, you too. Yes, even if you’re new (especially when you’re new) or junior or scared.
What are the characteristics of a broken company culture?
- fast growth or trouble growing
- new leadership
- intransparency
- lack of communication between teams and from management
- low employee retention, high employee turnover
- organizational silos
- the ratio between managers and employees is off (often 1:1) — everyone is a director, head of something, or CXO
- no dedicated HR department
- little attention to onboarding
- little attention to employee development (especially leadership)
- little to no attention to offboarding and exiting employees
This list could go on and on. The sad truth is, that if your organization checks at least half of these boxes, you have a cultural problem.
What happens if your culture is broken?
- driven, ambitious, brilliant employees leave
- engagement drops
- performance drops
- innovation suffers — if you don’t feel safe at work, why share your ideas?
- employees who underperform get promoted (because they hold out)
- gossip and shit-talk increases
- employees seek help from externals — unions, coaches, friends — instead of trying to speak up (often because they don’t feel like they have impact)
- employees burn out
The company will end up with a bunch of half-decent, but likely unprepared people on management level that have crazy turn-overs in their teams (which they don’t know how to manage). Employees burn out. The air becomes really thick, really quickly. Everyone is venting and drinks too much wine after work.
What can you do if you’ve identified the culture you’re working in as broken?
Speak up.
I know you don’t want to hear this, but it‘s pretty much the only way. If you speak up (and you’ll likely have to do it repeatedly) two things can happen:
- things improve or
- you realize management doesn’t care. In that case, you now know you should move on to another company.
Both scenarios are an improvement. In both cases, you’ll feel much better, quickly.
Take on responsibility.
If you feel like things are going South and you have ideas for solutions, try to take action yourself. Ask coworkers if they’d be interested in a conversation with the union, host a workshop on culture, see if you can scrape together some budget for a change-focused coach or facilitator. There’s tons of knowledge out there. If you read up a bit, a lot of things can be bootstrapped without being dependent on management.
Which brings us to the next point:
Always come with solutions.
When a culture is broken or becoming worse, it’s often due to management shortages, growth pains, or even bigger issues. This means the people who could lead the change, are likely the ones with the least time and the shortest attention span. However, if you do some work on your own and come with suggestions on how to solve cultural issues, the chances they will listen (and maybe even act) are significantly higher.
Hold out or leave.
Last but not least, if all the above fails, the healthy thing to do is to make a decision:
- are you willing and able to accept the currently broken culture and hold on to your job or
- do you need to leave?
Some serious reflection and listening to your gut feeling will surely help you make the right decision.
I don’t think you should always leave when the company culture is broken. If you can deal with it for a while (and sometimes longer) it can be smart to stay and be an active part of creating a healthy culture once it does become an attention area.
However, if you’re very emotionally affected by a broken culture’s characteristics, it’s probably a good idea to move on.
Have you ever been exposed to broken company culture? How did you feel and what happened? Let me know.
Want to contribute to shared and done?
Send in your submission via Medium or email me.
This is day 19 of 90 days that I will be sharing something I’ve learned here in this publication. Don’t miss it.
