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What Campaign Culture Teaches Us About Employee Engagement

By gothamCulture
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campaign culture

gothamCulture’s Samantha Goldman came to us with some incredible organizational experience under her belt: campaign work. Studying employee engagement through that lens became her thesis at The New School and is the basis for her first ever LinkedIn post (congrats Samantha!).  Here’s an excerpt:

Political campaign organizations are rarely discussed alongside broader issues of management, leadership and organizational culture. Yet, because of their agility, ability to scale quickly and high level of engaged staff, organizations can learn a lot from them.

To build off these insights, leaders in non-campaign organizations can connect staff to a clear singular mission in personal ways, empower and invest in staff as the front line of the organization and develop a culture focused on learning and adaptability. These best practices can apply to organizations with short-term or long-term endeavors. Even if the endeavor is longer than a campaign cycle, leaders can still build a strong sense of urgency centered on scaling up using key measurable goals and milestones.

Campaigns are heightened environments that showcase the power of organizational culture and staff engagement. Why shouldn’t we deconstruct them to apply best practices in other settings?

(Click here to read Samantha’s full article: Election Cycle Wisdom)

How Decentralizing Data Informs a Successful Organizational Culture

By gothamCulture
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data decentralization

With the rapid adoption of technology into today’s organizational culture, data collection and analysis is becoming a common component of the way we do business. However, this new reliance on data brings a new host of challenges, including how to combine and share this information across the organization in order to get as much value out of it as possible.

Every department has unique data needs, and while it’s important to analyze the data for individual departments, managers and leadership need to aggregate departmental data to gauge the overall health of the organization.

There can be huge differences in how departments structure and format their data. So, while combining multiple data sources has significant advantages, the disjointed nature of departmental data formats has led some organizations to rely on a less than ideal “top down” or “one size fits all” approach to analysis.  In some cases this approach can work, but it often forces the organization to follow an architecture that reduces the data’s usefulness within each department.

Attempting to simplify the process by generalization may support the manager’s agenda, but the end results are not nearly as specific or as meaningful as they could be.

So, how can organizations ensure data and its analysis serves the greatest number of departments and people as possible, while still benefiting the business as a whole?  Below are several ideas to consider:

Determine which questions need to be answered.

First and foremost, data has to help us answer questions.  It is essential to clearly articulate which questions are more critical to managers and business units, and to ensure that data can be captured to support those.

Establish similar terminologies.

Despite the likelihood that each department has its own unique culture and terminology, organizations should strive to use a similar language across the board.  This will help promote cross-communication and maintain a certain degree of data integrity for managers.  Where this is not possible, organizations should develop a “translation table,” (i.e. a “Rosetta Stone” for the business) which can serve as the key to understanding the different terminologies.

Agree to a common set of core variables.

Each department has its own set of questions that will require a unique set of data, but managers need to address questions that span departments. To ensure they can, organizations should agree on a core set of variables that each department will collect.  This can be something as simple as time, location, identification number, costs, and labor hours, etc.  The key is to agree on how these variables will be defined and documented. Yes – that could require a bit of time and finesse. While this may be the most taxing part of the process, it is the most critical in the data decentralization process.

In an ideal world, individual departments and leadership would easily find a compromise for their various data needs.  On the one hand, each business silo need data that is specifically relevant to their operations. On the other hand, managers need data sets that address broader questions and issues. If the overriding concern is real usefulness in the data, the time it takes to create systems that allow for both will be well worth effort.

How is your organization decentralizing data to inform your culture?

Workplace Safety Doesn’t Start With Punishment – Forbes

By gothamCulture
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workplace safety culture

Your chemistry teacher probably had numerous safety rules for students. But similar protection protocols don’t always exist in the workplace.

When disaster strikes in the office, knee-jerk reactions rooted in blame and punishment aren’t good for anyone. Instead, produce a culture of workplace safety by analyzing all the factors in an incident and adopting a report-friendly process. After all, learning from mistakes can prevent future blunders.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi discusses why you need a culture of safety and describes how to produce and sustain this type of culture.

The Culture Implications Of Starbucks New Dress Code

By gothamCulture
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starbucks culture

Starbucks has gained a lot of attention in the wake of their recent dress code policy changes, allowing their employees to wear black denim, colored ties, and allowing visible tattoos.

This may seem like a small change, but in the context of recent controversy over this very issue, it made us wonder what the deeper implications were for these policy changes.

We asked our team at gothamCulture how they viewed this recent change, and what bigger implications for the coffee giant’s organizational culture may be underlying it. Here are some of our thoughts:

Stuart Farrand – Associate

stuart-farrandI’d say its 60% PR and 40% pragmatism and believe the two go hand in hand.  A growing percentage of the population has tattoos, especially within the services industry.  At the moment, having a tattoo doesn’t carry the stigma it used to. In fact, it’s become more of a cultural norm.

From a PR standpoint, it did seem that Starbucks was out of touch with society.  From a pragmatic standpoint, I think they realized that tattoos are really not something they can control. It’s much easier to acquiesce than to make the dress code more restrictive (i.e. wearing long sleeves to cover up tattoos, regulating the color of the long sleeve shirt, etc.), which would also be more difficult to enforce.

In terms of what other organizations might learn from this, I see two big takeaways:

1. Weigh the costs and benefits of the rules you impose on your employees.  Dress code is a good example, but it the same is true for broader rules across your organization.  At what point do the rules (and enforcing the rules) actually impede someone’s ability to do their job?

2. Organizations must be flexible with emerging social norms, and try to accommodate them as much as possible.

Samantha Goldman – Associate

samantha-goldmanThis is a great example of an organization updating a policy to act more in accordance with its values and mission, and thereby preserve its own integrity as an organization. The anti-tattoo policy or a very strict dress code did seem to be in contradiction with Starbucks first value of “Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome”. It also undermines their mission, “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

While any organization must have some guidelines for physical appearance/dress code, employees can’t be blatantly prohibited from showing up physically in a way that reflects their own human spirits, especially when “warmth and belonging” are guiding values in the brand’s interaction with customers. Such policies are a critical component of an organization’s culture. If the organization is trying to create a culture that reflects their mission and values, it’s critical that policies are aligned as much as possible.

Mark Emerson – General Manager

mark-emersonStarbucks is bowing to the inevitable shift to a new generation.  This is a push/pull situation, in that their customers are younger, and the younger generation doesn’t view body art as any big deal. And, in most cases it is an expression of individuality – which pulls the company forward.

Then you have the push aspect. The company wants to show they are keeping with the times. What better way to do that than to have their baristas reflect a large portion of their customer base?  This feeds very much into the culture and system of values Starbucks wants to reflect: one of making the employees the bottom-line and everything else will flow from that.

Secondly, and I think Starbucks is always looking at the practicality of things. They were probably starting to run into a recruitment issue. They are, in some ways, the “McDonald’s of coffee” and provide starter jobs for many teens/twenty-somethings. Banning tattoos was bound to trip them up with their enormous staffing needs.

This also reminds me of the story in the NY Times about the Starbucks worker who was having so much trouble getting steady work hours and trying to care for her young son.  Literally, within one day of the story coming out, the company changed its global policy and vowed to make hours more steady for it workers.

What other corporation of this size would make such a change so rapidly, simply because it is the right thing to do?  They could simply have said they’d ‘study’ the problem, but they massively adjusted their entire work process because of their culture of putting employees first.

Dustin Schneider –  Senior Associate

Dustin SchneiderThere has definitely been a “latte” attention recently about Starbucks’ decision to allow employees to have their tattoos visible.

The purpose of an organization’s core values is to help guide behavior.  They provide clear guardrails on what’s expected, what’s allowed, and what should be encouraged.  To have a value of belonging and inclusion, while at the same time asking employees to hide their real selves, seems counterintuitive.

I commend them for continually bouncing their policies up against their stated values in order to ensure that decisions they make are in alignment with them.

Cary Paul – Senior Associate

cary-paulStarbucks is in a unique position in its industry, and the business world in general.  People love it or hate it.  Some people that love the coffee actually hate the business side, and the idea that they put mom and pop shops out of business.  But most business people respect that Starbucks almost single-handedly built the whole idea of a new culture around coffee and people being together… again, around coffee.

As a result, their every move is watched and scrutinized, and they can’t make a move in their business without at least some thought to the PR implications. That part of it was most likely at least in the discussion. But, I think this was about something bigger: freedom of choice, and inclusion, as defined in the core values.

 As Schultz discusses in his book, the core values are the critical lens through which the company operates.  Period.  When they didn’t, things went sour.

These have massive implications on workplace culture, especially as a model for a company adhering to the tenets of its core values.  And, if the company stands behind its commitments to those values, it becomes more likely that the employees will.

 

The Starbucks reversal of their tattoo guidelines may have been partly a PR move. What seems more likely, however, is that the company cares enough about their core values to constantly change and adapt in order to reflect what is important to their people.

Starbucks is doing well to authentically make changes to policies in order to better reflect their core values and build a culture through their people. They may not get everything right the first time, but they are aware of the journey – and are paying attention to when change needs to happen.

What did you think when you heard about this latest news? And, is Starbucks a model for evolution of employee policies that other corporations should consider?

(photo credit)

Using Your Culture to Attract Top Talent – Forbes

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,
organizational empathy

Hopefully, your company culture is helping you retain employees. But is it helping you attract top talent like it should be?

Many businesses overlook how important their cultures are in recruiting valuable employees. By developing an intentional culture that celebrates learning, you can make your business appealing to those interested in joining your driven team.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi discusses how to attract top talent and propel the talent you currently have to reach its full potential.

Building a Foundation of Human-Scale Culture For Innovation

By gothamCulture
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human scale businessWhat does a conference about digital innovation have to do with organizational culture? A lot, it turns out.

We attended this year’s Seattle Interactive Conference with two purposes in mind. First; get more familiar with the big thinkers in Seattle, gothamCulture’s second base of operations. Second; to understand the emerging business models and organizational issues on the minds of the technology and digital entrepreneurship community.

The official theme of this year’s event was “makers,” and how commerce and culture are driven by innovation. However, the storyline we took away is the return to the human-scale model of business. It is one that efficiently leverages technology, and one with an organizational culture of entirely different shape and form. Traditional corporations may well be at a disadvantage.

The Answer is Always No Until You Ask (Click to Tweet)

Janelle Maiocco , CEO of Farmstr, the online marketplace for local farm food.

Janelle shared her lessons learned in dealing with adversity in her business, and how when the manure hits the fan, it can actually be a good thing.  Farmstr is a great example of the new economic model that cuts out grocery stores, speeds organic/local foods to people, decreases customer costs and increases farmer margins all at the same time by removing the middleman, and linking farmers directly to consumers.

Lesson: The human-scaling of groceries, by reconnecting consumers directly to farmers.

Crowd Funding is the Highest Form of Loyalty (Click to Tweet)

Jeremiah Owyang, Founder, Crowd Companies Council

Jeremiah spoke on “partnering with the crowd” – and his online business model for moving the crowd economy from reliance on big companies to reliance on each other. Examples of that include Pley.com, a Lego sharing site, Yerdle.com, and BoatBound.co, a peer-to-peer boat sharing community. The question is, what does it mean in the long term for commerce if consumers adopt this framework of reusing goods, rather than buying new from corporations?

Lesson: The human-scaling of commerce, by connecting and empowering people to share with each other.

When Things Become Emotional, They Become Universal (Click to Tweet)

Warren Etheredge of The Warren Report,

Warren spoke about how stories must be people-driven. We can’t change peoples’ opinions with simply premise or plot. From an organizational culture perspective, this is especially interesting. Culture is a collective concept and the values and norms for behavior are transferred from person-to-person and generation-to-generation through their stories (among other things). Stories convey a core message about what people should do or not do, and what is valued within a group.

Lesson: The human-scaling of communication. Tapping emotions among humans and connecting them to one another is foundational for the way today’s organizations can thrive.

The Seattle Interactive Conference wasn’t just for the local digital community. The thought leadership there, in both speakers and participants (as evidenced on Twitter as well as hallway conversations) reflected an incredible intellectual energy for creative thinking and innovation. The gathering was a creative resource for us, with ideas and thinking we plan to share with readers and clients in the coming months – human-to-human.

Forbes: CVS’ Bold Move to Align Behavior With Brand

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

It’s one thing to have a company vision, but it’s another thing entirely to live out that vision. So where does your company stand?

CVS Caremark (now CVS Health) is leading by example. That company recently took on its mission more fully – by removing all tobacco products from its stores. In light of the huge, and risky, change, business and brand approval actually increased. So, if their experience is any indication, values really do matter to customers, and other businesses should start paying attention.

In this article , Chris Cancialosi discusses the value behind CVS’ move to align the company’s actions with its vision.

Implementing Change, Part 2: Recognizing our Human Nature

By gothamCulture
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In Implementing Change, Part 1: With More Predictability Than the Weather, I discussed how reflecting on your own reactions to feeling out of control in relation to the weather is helpful in gaining empathy towards employees who often feel like the changes in their organization are as unpredictable as the weather.

As humans, we respond to our environments, whether it’s meteorological climate or to our organizational climate. There is research and a model that reminds us that we as humans respond to our environments in the same ways that we might only think of other animals responding–even in organizational settings. For example, we are grounded in our innate tendency to monitor our environment for threats and rewards and to then take action to avoid threats and move towards rewards. This circuitry and these impulses in our brains impact our relationships with others and more broadly how we interact with our environment and ultimately make decisions.

The SCARF model (developed by David Rock) highlights the importance of looking at these basic human instincts when trying to understand social interactions.

It is crucial to look at our sense of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

  • Status: Our relative importance to others
  • Certainty: Our being able to predict the future
  • Autonomy: Our sense of control over events
  • Relatedness: Our sense of safety with others
  • Fairness: Our perception of fair exchanges between people

These feelings are at play in our life, and definitely at work when we think about how people experience their relationships with others in organizations. For example, my sense of autonomy (my sense of being able to control events) is exactly where I feel challenged when I cannot stop the oncoming winter and changing seasons in the outside world. I bet you could think of tons of examples within your own organization when your sense of autonomy was challenged; this is an often felt sentiment in organizations going through change. Similarly, my sense of certainty (being able to predict the future) is challenged from the weather when I don’t know if my flight will be canceled due to snowstorms, or if my much anticipated picnic in the park will have to be rescheduled; this sense of “not knowing” is also all too common in organizations when impactful changes are announced at random.

In organizations, it is crucial for leaders not to forget our humanity and to always try to address such needs as our needs for certainty and autonomy. This is even more critical when an organization is going through change. It’s important to be constantly asking:

  • How can we implement changes that allow people to have the most control in the process and a greater say in the change?
  • How can we be clearer about upcoming events and changes so that people know what to expect as much as we are able to predict?
  • How do we communicate this out in a way that respects people’s needs for certainty and autonomy?

The more we can support people’s needs rather than leaving them ‘out in the cold’ feeling a lack of autonomy and certainty, the less likely they will shut down due to a threat response. The more we can give people a sense of autonomy and certainty in their work, the more likely they will be able to have positive relationships with others and be productive in their organization.

Forbes: Culture – The Most Overlooked Element of Company Culture Audits

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

Culture is defined as “a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization (such as a business).” Essentially, it’s the core of your business — so why wouldn’t you include it in your company’s audit?

Your company culture drives all the decisions you make and the communication processes you use. Including culture in your audit allows you to take a closer look at what could use some revamping and how you might increase productivity for your business as a whole.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi discusses the value of auditing company culture and explains why it’s often overlooked as a key component of what makes — or breaks — a business.

Implementing Change, Part 1: With More Predictability than the Weather

By gothamCulture
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If you’re like me in that you wish every day was summer, but you happen to live in a place that too soon will be covered with snow, you might be feeling some anticipatory blues. Yes, there are still many months (hopefully) until we need to pull out our hats and gloves (see my previous post about putting them away!) But, just the occasional chill in the air and the noticeably shorter days reminds me where we are headed–and that’s a long, cold winter.

In my work in organizational change and my desire to understand how people react to change and handle transitions, I often find it helpful to reflect on my personal reactions towards changes in the weather. Understanding my own feelings of anticipation and loss as the seasons cycle allows me greater empathy towards individuals in organizations where they experience changes that are also seemingly not under their control.

Organizations are their own world and the people within them often are at the whim of the leadership or the marketplace–feeling as vulnerable as we do when the seasons change. And, while we as humans have mastered indoor heating and air conditioning to protect us from the elements, all we need is a week of rain to remind us of how much we need sunshine or a debilitating blizzard to reinforce our lack of control. Even just feeling the temperature drop, watching the leaves fall, and noticing the days getting shorter reminds us that there are greater forces at work, and that we must adapt i.e. wear a jacket, or find ourselves cold.

Whether people in organizations are facing the natural ebbs and flows of organization life i.e. the yearly busy tax season or the arrival of the latest wave of new hires or are experiencing much larger disruptions such as a merger, new leadership or new systems and processes, the resulting feelings are similar and stem from a sense of lack of control.

Recognizing that people within organizations often feel at the whim of the organizations and have a lack of control, is an important data point to consider when designing any sort of organizational change. The more you can minimize this lack of control the better. Engaging people in the process, frequently communicating, and making the process as predictable as far out in advance as possible, supports people in feeling more of a sense of control and predictability.

Our nature as humans is a huge part of how we react to changes and transition in our environments. Stay tuned for Part 2: Implementing Change That Recognizes Our Human Nature where I describe a bit more specifically a model that addresses some of the key feelings we feel as humans within organizations. I also list some questions you should ask yourself during the change process in order to make sure you are considering the human needs of your employees.