The last few years have felt like an unrelenting force attempting to knock us down. Like a tsunami washing over us and deciding how we go about our lives. Removing our choices of how we conduct our business.
Yet, we are still here.
The pandemic brought new ways of working, which may have worked for some, but may not have worked for others.
Each day brings a report or call from various organisations and governments ordering workers back to the office.
I understand the need to get productivity back on track, but is this the best way to approach the problem in a long-term sustainable way?
Did you know…
👉 Only one in six people feel highly connected to their organisation and the people they work for and with;
👉 Only one in five people feels comfortable sharing problems or raising conflicts with colleagues;
👉 Only one in four report that leaders are responsive to their needs, communicate regularly and feels that team members are treated equally.
It seems there is a disconnect between our organisations and our people. Our organisational cultures are not feeling too healthy right now.
Ask yourself:
Do you know the concerns, needs and expectations of your people?
What are you doing to acknowledge how your teams are feeling?
What does your organisation’s culture look like to you and your teams?
Does your organisations culture effect how effective your business can be?
After you ask these questions, ask your self one more.
How do you know?
What are you doing to explore the culture in relation to how your people are feeling?
It was ever thus…
It is unfair to blame the pandemic entirely for these problems. The problems encountered over the last few years are not the sole cause. What it has done has focussed the problem and enable it to be noticed.
Margaret Heffernan highlighted these issues in Forget the Pecking Order at Work , her TED talk at TEDWomen 2015.
In the talk, Heffernan makes it clear that the most effective companies are the ones that value social cohesion rather than star performers.
In fact, she illustrates that this can have a meaningful effect on the turnover of a business. By banning coffee cups at desks and scheduling coffee breaks in order to create social interactions, Alex Pentland helped one company increase profits by 15 million dollars and employee satisfaction by 10%.
The Bricks and Mortar of our businesses can crumble unless we look after the connections. The mortar.
How do we create social capital?
In a word, humanness, creating human interaction by acknowledging what it is to be human.
We need to start facilitating those connections and building our culture from the people upwards. This requires listening for the needs of the group as a whole. Fostering connections and a culture of sharing problems and ideas.
This builds a culture of candid helpfulness where conflicts are constantly surfaced and remedied.
A culture where listening is of paramount importance, listening to understand that is.
Listening to understand, rather than listening to respond, is a skill. Our default is to try to solve problems and this causes us to leap into problem solving mode too quickly.
You know this mode.
You hear the problem, feel comfortable you know what to do and start to create a strategy and tactics.
This is fine for solving relatively simple problems.
But we are concerned with human relationships, our organisational culture. Human relationships are complex.
What we need is to embrace exploration. What we need to do is leap into problem discovery mode by hearing from everyone. This leads to surfacing more opportunities and ideas. This leads us to greater creativity and cohesiveness in our teams. And the ultimate goal is an effective team that achieves the objectives of the organisation.
Laying the groundwork for a cohesive social culture…
The ideal is for an organisation’s needs to be in concert with the needs of the individuals working there. This might seem an abstract idea but is achievable by using your organisation’s values. Many organisations have a values document, whether these values are adhered to in practice is something worth exploring.
By attempting to align the values of the organisation with the values of the people within the organisation we can find a good culture fit. This is important for the organisation and for the people working within it.
In fact, the website Glassdoor found, in a 2019 survey, that more than 50% of those surveyed opined that a company’s culture was “more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction.”
A practical route to an effective culture
Our route to an effective culture is through facilitated workshops that allow everyone in the team to be heard.
The ideal would be to co-create a set of shared values [https://mundonovus.com/news/shared- values-how-do-we-create-them/] with the whole team or at least from representatives from across it. This will require exploration. Facilitated workshops are designed to be more effective than an ordinary meeting and can aid the exploration of a topic with that desired effectiveness.
By using a facilitator you gain the defined process that leads to a productive meeting. Coupled with a neutral viewpoint that allows all parties to be heard and the team to feel ownership over the ideas or product of the process.
At MundoNovus we use playful techniques including Lego® Serious Play®, a methodology that allows organisations to unlock the full potential of their employees – and to encourage everyone to participate, contribute and commit to the solution. We also use games and exercises from Applied Improv to Liberating Structures and Game Storming to design and develop highly effective workshops.
By embracing Lego Serious Play your team can explore and agree on a set of values that are in concert with their own personal values before creating Simple Guiding Principles.
The beauty of Simple Guiding Principles
Simple guiding principles are a desirable outcome as they communicate a trust in the team to make good real-time decisions. They have an advantage over rules as they promote team members to apply their own thinking to each situation which allows for a more common sense approach that is guided by the principles to be inline with our established values.
What we are describing here is emergent strategy. Henry Mintzberg described this as “a realized pattern, not expressly intended” or in other words a strategy that allows us to learn and take action from interaction with real world practice.
So by creating our simple guiding principles we are enabling our team to make effective decisions rather than having to follow a set of predefined rules. We are allowing our strategies to develop in real time and allows us to work within a changing landscape. This maximises our chances of success.
Having a set of simple guiding principles based on our co-created values allows us to maximise our chances of developing a culture that:
Allows our people to feel connected to the organisation, their colleagues and the work; Encourages the sharing of problems so that potential conflicts are remedied constantly before they accumulate or grow into deeper conflict;
Creates a relationship between our leaders and people that is responsive, equitable, needs-driven and well communicated.
We are available to help you by designing and facilitating workshops that redevelops your company culture for your current and future business operations.
Mart Gordon is the founder of the facilitation agency MundoNovus.
MundoNovus helps leaders, teams and individuals collaborate better, generate more ideas and create dynamic transformational strategies through playful facilitation.