Un-gaming your culture
Image by RonaldCandonga from Pixabay
A lot of talk goes around on workplace culture - what it is, how it can be negative/positive, etc - and a fair amount of money and time gets spent trying to improve it. People hire professional writers to define it, churning out documents explaining their company’s version of it, and generally spend a lot of resources trying at least to seem like their company has a healthy version of it. The first definition I could Google on company culture looks something like this:
Company culture is the shared values, attributes, and characteristics of an organization.
If that seems pretty vague to you, don’t worry; it does to us, as well. It’s often the case that a company develops cultural documents that are about as vague; they contain nice-sounding words like “culture of respect and responsibility” and are handed out to new hires who scan them and then never think about them again. At Clipboard Health, we think it’s possible to do a little more with the concept - to make something that’s reliable instead of vague and powerful instead of ignored.
Culture is what you reward
If standard definitions of culture are vague enough that they end up powerless, then we need some way of remedying that. The easiest way is by anchoring the definition to the real world in a way that makes it clear to everyone in the company that your culture exists and affects things in a way that goes beyond words on paper. For Clipboard health that means explicitly tying your culture into what you reward.
Think about it: an employee within a company that says it has a cultural value of truthful pushback that instead only promotes yes-men isn’t going to think of the company’s work culture as anything with force. The same goes for companies that say they value talent but reward tenure, or those that say they value outside-the-box thinking but punish people who get out of their lane. The things the company rewards are the things the employee will believe they actually care about; through rewarding certain behaviors, the company has demonstrated what they really care about.
We don’t think there’s any way around this. You have a choice as to whether or not you are explicit about your culture being pinned to your rewards system, but your team is going to eventually understand what’s actually important to the company as the things the company promotes and pays for. Our CEO Wei Deng puts it this way:
Culture is nothing less and nothing more than the set of behaviors perceived to be rewarded or punished within an organization….practically speaking, this means creating culture inside running human organizations is about shaping the perceived incentives that shape behavior. Of course people will behave in ways that are outside the perceived incentive gradient you create because people are multifarious and wonderful things. They might be driven by internal passion, or participate in some broader incentive gradient beyond your company, or they may have just freaked out that day. But averaging out human behavior over time, we tend towards following our incentives (or opting out of that incentive system entirely if we dislike it enough). This is why culture is so crucial: it is the primary factor that determines the behaviors (decisions, actions, discussions, questions) produced within your company overall.
There’s a very old joke about a man who goes to his friend’s house to ask to borrow his donkey, but who is then told by his friend that the donkey was stolen. As he’s about to leave, he hears the donkey bray from the house, and says “Hey! I thought you said the donkey was stolen!”. His friend says “Who are you going to believe - me, or some donkey?”. In the story, the donkey represents reality; you can state your culture however you want, but that reality is going to win out.
Values are rewarded
If your culture is what you reward, then values are the individual components that get rewarded. Your values are the pieces of your culture you can state and put forth as guidelines, but stating them isn’t enough; if they aren’t truly the parts of your culture you reward, they don’t mean much. Wei Deng again:
This leads to values. If culture is the set of behaviors perceived to be rewarded or punished, what are organizational values? Values are the officially proclaimed set of behaviors you reward and punish. Simply proclaiming something as a value does not mean that you actually reward or punish the appropriate behavior. Nor is it a guarantee that members of the organization will perceive it as rewarded or punished. This is why hanging up a list of company values usually doesn’t do much. We’ve seen companies where there are no written values, and yet everyone knows what they are, and conversely, we’ve seen companies with values strewn about their walls, and yet no one really knows what those values are.
Note that as Wei says, your company has real values that exist whether you like it or not; those values might be beneficial or negative. They might be consistently enforced or selectively applied (which, note, is itself a value). But the choice you have is how aware and honest you are about the values, not whether or not you have them.
Culture as an accountability tool - for everyone
From a management perspective, it’s tempting to perceive culture as a tool for influencing only the people they manage. And it does work for that, often very well. If your culture is a list of values that you consistently and honestly reward, then a team member asking why a request for a raise was turned down or why they were passed for a promotion is easily answered: you can simply point to the values they failed to live up to. But thinking about culture narrowly as only this is a trap that undercuts a healthy culture’s value.
A working, real culture that acknowledges reward as its own defining factor can’t be thought of as simply a tool of management, because it demands as much of the managers themselves as it does those they manage. So where Clipboard demands curiosity, initiative, and ownership from every team member, those team members can easily turn around and point out where they lived up to those standards. Where we demand excellence and accountability, a team member can demand the same of management; the values apply in all directions.
The beauty of this definition of culture is that it’s self-enforcing. A company that claims a value is important but only applies it to certain people or in certain situations proves itself wrong; the people in the company are going to notice, figure out what the real unstated value is and work towards fulfilling that. This means that values represent a chance for you to shape your company: if you choose them wisely and reward them consistently, they almost magically set your company’s direction and determine what your company becomes.
Values are perceived; guide by showing
Your culture is what you reward, broken up into individual values, but this only goes as far as the perception of those things. When rewards are noticed, an individual in the company will understand the values they reward to be important. When an individual notices that a value goes unrewarded, they begin to understand that particular value isn’t a “real” part of the actual company culture. Perception matters, so having something visible to perceive matters as well. Wei again:
This means the most important tool to influence your culture is publicizing who got promoted, who got the new project, who gets a bonus or a raise in general (people don’t like having their income disclosed to the company so you can’t just be straightforward here generally), why something was featured in the all-hands, who is being praised. When you promote someone, be explicit and loud about how and why you did it. When you assign a new project to someone, make sure people know why they were selected. As much as possible give the real reasons so that people will believe you because people are smart and good at sniffing out lies and they won’t be fooled for long.
When you give a reward, it’s important people know why. Letting them know why is a demonstration; it lets them know the value was rewarded, which in turn shows you were serious about the value. This is what makes things “real”; rewards for living out the values and negative consequences only when the values are violated are the “proof” a team member looks for to see what the real values are in the first place.
Clipboard Health intentionally builds its culture around, well, building an intentional culture. When we talk about a value, we do so with an explicit expectation that our values are things we not only encourage but also the explicit things we reward. When we talk about our culture, we think of it as being those values as they relate to our work and internal social interactions. Without this, you would still have values, just not necessarily ones intentionally chosen as a result of real thought. Do a little more - by focusing on what you reward, your values become a real way to make your company a truly great place to be.
If this article is the kind of thinking you find cool or exciting, we’d love to talk to you. Apply here, and we will be in touch soon!