Chapter 4: What is culture?
How do you explain culture? During my primary research and talking to people within the industry I can tell it’s hard to define. Most times people sigh deeply and say “I’m not quite sure”. Culture is very fluffy and abstract. But as soon as you throw the word “startup” into the mix people start saying things like beer, ping pong tables and hustling. All very tangible things and concepts.
So, what is culture? According to Schein (2010) organizational culture can be defined on several levels.
- Visible artifacts
- Adopted beliefs, values, rules, and behavioral norms
- Implicit underlying assumptions
Schein (2010) argues that unless an organization dig down towards the assumptions you can’t really decipher the artifacts, values, and norms. Therefore it’s important to expose these and explore their interrelationship in order to get to the essence of what culture is in your company. This also means that there is no right or wrong way to do things, but merely many different ways of operating.
The process of building culture is very much alike the process of building a team in the sense that the group identity, the shared patterns of thought, feelings and values resulted from shared experiences and learnings, result in a pattern of shared assumptions (Schein, 2010). If that is the case then it’s valuable to look at how teams form. Wheelan’s (2014) Integrated Model of Group Development describes how a group goes through different stages, where the early one’s are tied to dependency, co-dependency and trust which are obligatory concepts that needs to be defined and worked through before they can be productive and efficient.
Stage 1
* Member dependency on the designated leader
* Concerns about safety and being included
* Reliance on powerful members to provide direction
* Pseudo-work, exchanging stories that aren’t related to group goals
Stage 2
* Conflict based on disagreement about group goals and procedures
* Task is to develop unified set of goals, values and operational activities
* Conflict necessary to establish trust and sense of safety in disagreeing with each other
Stage 3
* Trust, commitment and willingness to cooperate
* Open communication is established
* Solidifying positive working relationships
Stage 4
* Intense team productivity and effectiveness
* Resolved issues before so the group can focus on tasks and goals
By considering two different processes of the group, one that concerns what it means to build culture and one that revolves around how a great team is formed, one might be able to construct a process that takes both into consideration and possibly make it more collaborative and distributed.
Culture in startups
The goal for any company is to be a high performing organization. Why bother with such a fluffy thing as culture? According to Singh (2014b) a startup can only become one when it’s got the right mix of strategy, structure and culture. The Lean Startup methodology provides a strategy and there are already new ways of structuring being developed, like Holacracy and the concept of teal organizations (see next section for more info). But no new tangible process or framework has been considered. From the interviews conducted in this project I’ve learned that most startups are relying on vision and mission statements and doing things together socially outside of work. As Marianne mentions, working together means that you’re working towards the same goals. This aligns with what Dante says about culture being all about expectations and aligning the team around those. If the assumptions and expectations are implicit and not out there, it means a lot of change can be done if we draw them out into the open.
When asked what culture means, Joe says he think it often gets confused with the questions of the startups having a foosball table. The same sentiment is expressed by Collin, who says he doesn’t think culture equals ping pong tables. Dante says that a big part of the culture at the two startups he’s worked at is beer and games, which could be interpreted as culture being a social endeavor, somewhat separated from the working day. These statements can be referred to Schein’s (2010) first layer of culture, a couple of artifacts.
But although Joe and Collin both express some disdain to the artifactual and superficial area of culture building in startups, and perhaps does so since it’s become somewhat of a buzzy thing to do, Joe’s company is the only startup in this study that has actually sat down to talk about their company culture. All the others seem to think it’s something that comes naturally, either through hiring from their networks and therefore having some kind of cultural alignment already, as mentioned by Colling and Sanjay, or through operational issues, mentioned by Sanjay, Tess and Federici.
Collin says that he thinks communication is the best way to improve culture, which indicates the need for stronger communication skills in startups for them to build their culture. This view, along with Joe’s statement about culture being a work in progress, suggests that the conversation about culture can’t be done once and then it’s done with. Instead the process of culture building has to be iterative and conversational.
The future of work
Schein (2010) argues that you need to understand the macro context that the organization operate in to fully grasp what happens within the organization. Today many organizations are focusing on culture, which could be seen as a way of positioning themselves to attract top talent. Fjord, a digital agency, have an employee experience initiative and see it as one of 2016 biggest trends. ustwo, another digital agency, have switched out their project managers to coaches. Zappos and Medium have made the switch to Holacracy, a new organizational structure based on self-leadership and self-governance (although Medium has drawn back a bit from adopting the whole framework).
There’s also a lot of talk about purpose in organizations. AirBnB’s purpose is to create a world where you can belong anywhere, Tesla wants to accelerate sustainable transport, Google’s goal is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useable for everyone, and Facebook wants to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
To zoom out a bit further in this context we could take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1987). People who work in the digital industry in the Western world have climbed up that hierarchy. Most of us have access to food and water, a home and thanks to social media and the internet a sense of belonging. Our bottom layers of the hierarchy are fulfilled. We’re now looking at gaining esteem, where the rising number of people getting a university degree could be an extensions of that, and self-actualizing. We’d like to be creative, solve problems and follow our dreams. Spending your time in an organization with a purpose feeds into this need.
We can also see this evolution in organizations. Frederic Laloux (2014) mentions different paradigm shifts within the world of organizing, starting from an agricultural perspective. If we zoom in just a little bit when it comes to history and start from the industrial revolution we’ve had some major shifts.
We’re currently in a paradigm shift where some organizations are moving towards self-management and an evolutionary mindset, what the teal organization represent. But if we take a quick look at Medium there’s a lot of articles on culture, values and empowerment, things that relates to the orange paradigm. This project also feeds into that paradigm a bit since it take’s off in a cultural aspect, but with the intention of making the culture a fluid and evolutionary part of the organization.
Along with the concept of teal organizations, ResponsiveOrg is a community that “aims to develop a shared language and independent global community that promotes and enables a fundamental shift in our way of working and organizing.” (from their About Us section). In their manifesto they state five tensions.
It aligns with some of the values of the Lean Startup movement that is based on a cycle of build-measure-learn where experimentation and empowerment is at the main core (Ries, 2011). This is the framework that most startups use today, mostly because of their approach to user feedback and minimum viable product, which is a cost-effective way of building the business.
Concerning culture, today most traditional organizations work from a top-down hierarchical structure where the culture is decided by the executives and then imposed on employees. If we accept the hypothesis ResponsiveOrg has on the future of work it means that we need to create a framework that allows culture to be transparent, co-created and fluid with a strong purpose built into it. Joe made the claim that culture is a system that empowers people instead of having someone, for example a leader, doing that personally to each employee, which corresponds to this type of framework.
Takeaways
Culture is defined by the underlying assumptions by the people in the organization, that takes form in shared norms and behaviors, which in turn form tangible artifacts. Most startups haven’t had a proper sit down to talk about their culture, instead it’s formed through ad hoc solutions in the day to day and is seen as something that’s shaped and cultivated from non-work activities, like beers, games, and/or trips. Since the future of work is going in an evolutionary direction, meaning the organization is to be seen as a living organism, the process of building your culture needs to be iterative, worked on during work hours, and tied to a purpose which all members of the organization can buy into. It’s also important to consider the different stages of group development in this process, to ensure that it’s successful.
Next: Chapter 5: The importance of practice
Previous: Chapter 3: The interviews
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Hyper Island — MA Digital Media Management
Industry Research Project
