TL;DR
🖤 We all agree culture is important. We all agree that ‘good culture’ should lead to better results. And yet, many struggle to actually describe what their culture is.
How then, can it be used as a driver of high-performance if we don’t understand what it is that helps us do our best work together? 🤷♂️
That is exactly why our focus at Open Org is about helping people & leadership teams to design & manage culture in a much more transparent, tangible way.
The below mini-playbook summarises our core philosophy & approach to culture management.
🤷♂️ Why Make Culture Tangible?
This is why 👇
Too many companies believe they invest in culture, have a handle on culture, and understand their culture, with an understanding that it will lead to high-performing teams.
But it does not ❌.
Why? Because too often we focus on culture at a surface level; We mean:
👉 Emotions👉 Vibes👉 Making employees happy
Ultimately, how work makes us ‘feel’. But that’s not culture. Our belief? 👇
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💡So we decided to create our own framework to help companies design & manage culture in a more tangible, transparent & open way…
🗺️ Open Org's Culture OS
This is our own take on how companies can better define, design & manage culture; the result of exposure to dozens of other well-known frameworks & diagnostics over the years, combined with a background & belief in product management and how those principles can be better applied to the people & culture realm.
🧠 Our Guiding Principles…
- Culture can and should be managed like a product
- It goes beyond values; it can and should be understood and managed at an operational level
- It’s ‘How we Work’ not ‘How we Feel about work’
♻️ How Can I Use It To Design & Manage Culture?
Breaking down culture into components is just the first step 👣. How you design & manage those components is another important element that work with people teams on using something we like to call ‘The Culture Management Loop’ 👇
🔄 The Culture Management Loop
Let’s dive a little deeper into each step…
1. 🧪 Diagnose
You need a way of building a view of what’s healthy, and what’s harming you right now. There are a few ways to do this but we have a handy diagnostic tool we use (Import Apr 14, 2023). We played with a version of this in the PX Espresso workshop but you can access the public version above too.
2. 🚦 Prioritise & Heat-map
If you’re diagnosing as one individual, it may be hard to build a solid view of where your problem areas truly are. This exercise can be much more powerful if you can execute org wide or at least with a cross-section of employees to build a solid heat-map of which components in particular are causing harm most. That will help, in part, direct how you prioritise which fires to tackle first. We say in part, because there are of course other things to take into account too, like business strategy, and the type of fix required. But before that, you need to understand the root cause…
3. 🌱 Root Causes
On the surface there is often one or two obvious root causes that ‘could’ be causing problems. But dig deeper, and you can often connect that problem to a few other things that you didn’t consider straight away. Sadly too many teams rush to dive in on fixing what they think is the obvious problem; it wastes time, energy and resources and these things are all precious to any business, let alone a lean or lone people team.
You need to identify the root cause, and there’s a few ways you can do that. We like a couple of root cause analysis tools:
'5 Whys'
Fishbone
4. 💡 Picking The Right Solution
Another crucial step to culture management that passes so many teams by, and slows a lot of folks down. Once you’ve identified what’s actually causing your problem, you should be able to work on a solution. But what’s the right way to fix this, in a world where everyone is now encouraged to endlessly co-create and involve others?
We want to be clear; co-creation is powerful, but it’s not the right thing every time. Sometimes you need to ‘Just do it’ (#JDI) and often you might even need to go back to the drawing board to better understand the problem you’re trying to solve. We like to use our own adapted version of the Stacey Matrix (below), which can be a really helpful decision-making tool to help you determine the best approach to take. It also helps a lot with prioritisation decisions.
5. 🎯 Execute
Do the thing. 👍
6. ♻️ Closing The Loop
Once you’ve done the thing, there’s one more thing to consider that (again) many teams fail to do; close the loop. Broadly speaking, this involves a few things when done well:
- 📣 Internal Comms- Confirmation of changes made. You should think about:
- Context
- Why was this done?
- Why was it done this way?
- Who was involved in decision-making, and why?
- Medium - How are you going to communicate this? And based on complexity & importance to business, how many times does it need to be reinforced to help with embedded
- Context
- ♻️ Feedback Loop- How do you continue to monitor health here so that you have an early-warning system in place to understand impact of the fix in the future. Think about:
- Mini-retro, depending on what’s being fixed, potential impact and complexity
- Appropriate type of feedback loop (e.g. 1:1s? Survey? AMA Forum?)
- 📋 Open People Roadmap- Optional, but powerful. You have this incredible opportunity now to share with the business exactly what it is you are working on now, next, and why? As mentioned above, you can’t do everything, for everyone, all at once. Open Roadmaps help other teams to:
- Understand your workload
- Understand why you are or are not working on something
- How you prioritise, and make decisions
- For the really brave…Sharing your roadmap & above journey publicly is an incredible employer brand builder too! 🔥
📈 Key Takeaways…
Part of the challenge most people team’s face is in working out which fires to tackle, and which to let burn a little longer. You can’t fix everything, all at once. Aside from where problem area’s seem most concentrated, you also want to do two things:
- Consider which are most likely to positively impact / support current business priorities
- Do what you can to quantify just how much these problems are causing harm (£$). This can be hard, but often speaks the same language as exec teams, and is sometimes the best way to influence decision-making and help reframe culture from being about ‘vibes’ to being about business performance
📚 Useful Resources
Open Org's Culture Heat-map (free notion template)
👀 What is it?
A self-serve version of the diagnostic tool we use at Open Org when working with people teams to build a holistic view of which areas of their culture are healthy, or harmful. This version is perfect if you want to run an individual diagnostic yourself, but can be adapted for use by many on an org-wide basis too.
If you’ve enjoyed this, and you’ve been nodding heavily along and feel aligned with how we see culture there’s 3 things we’d love to share with you now:
1️. Our intentionally small online community for startup people-people who want to build & manage culture that’s more open, transparent & tangible. Come check it out here
2️. We support a small, select handful of startup/scale-up people teams with their ongoing culture design & management journey via a flexible monthly rolling service that has been designed to be incredibly accessible to startup budgets.
3️. We regularly run Culture Design Cohorts, where we take groups of 15-20 people leaders through our framework, and management principles in a lot more depth over 9 weeks of roundtables, group workshops and 1:1 time with us.
