A Familiar Story For People Leaders...
You do some work on your core values or operating principles.
You take the time.
You do the offsite.
You write it up.
Now you need to operationalise them, but aren't sure how to do that. No problem, this one's for you.
TL;DR
Culture can and should be harnessed as a company’s competitive edge. If your team isn't considering it in those terms, welcome to a world of opportunity! Culture doesn't have to be dismissed as intangible or reduced to just a set of values on your website. Instead, it is tangible and can be managed just like a product. This is not an overnight process or a one-off project—it takes time, energy, a shift in mindset, and discipline to do effectively. Here are three high-level first steps to get started on this journey:
- Define your current culture, beyond values.
- Design your future culture.
- Manage it like a product.
In this post, we will explore all three steps, with a special focus on how to manage your culture like a product by creating a people roadmap and using it to communicate what experiments are being run.
Defining Your Current Culture
What Does Culture Mean to You?
The conversation often starts with, "How do we turn our culture into a beacon and magnet for talented people?" This is usually followed by someone seeking to clarify, "Culture is really important," and another person adding, "Yes, but what is culture?" Everyone nods in agreement about how important culture is, but it quickly becomes clear that the team has wildly different ideas about what it is, why it’s important, and who owns it.
From ‘Fluffy’ to Tangible
This perception of culture being many things to many people is part of the problem. It's why culture can be dismissed as nebulous or intangible compared to other priorities. Leadership teams might relegate culture to the league of "too wishy-washy" or "too hard," or even to the pile of "we aren’t going to look at that, let’s talk about profit and product!"
However, even if you don’t clarify what you mean by the word, properly define it, and grow it intentionally, culture will still grow. Think of it as a walled garden you purposefully filled with variety and color. If left unattended, it will grow regardless—but it might be overrun with weeds instead of the beautiful environment you intended.
Define It: Making Culture Tangible
To avoid culture being relegated to the league of "too wishy-washy," you must first define what you mean, understand its tangible parts, and create a hard link between culture and business results (e.g., profit, speed, retention, NPS, etc.). Good news: if you define it well, the second part becomes much easier. Let’s dive deeper.
How to Define Your Culture, Beyond Values
I like this simple definition of organisational culture from Deal & Kennedy (2000):
Culture is:“The way things are done around here.”
For the future, I propose:
Tomorrow’s culture is:“How we will do our best work together.”
Once we’ve defined culture at a high level, we can begin to drill down into its component parts. We can’t be intentional about growing it in the right direction if we don’t know what we are growing, right? :)
How We Are Currently Thinking About Culture
'How' is the name of the game:
- How do we measure success against our mission
- How do we operate (values in action / operating principles)
- How do we prioritise
- How do we make decisions
- How do we communicate
- How do we do meetings
- How do we give/receive feedback
- How do we celebrate success
- How do we learn through mistakes as a whole team
- How do we encourage equal voice
- How do we have healthy conflict
- How do we raise problems
- How do we improve together
Create a rough prototype on a digital whiteboard and ask the rest of the business for some asynchronous feedback. We want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute, improve, align, and subscribe.
Designing Your Future Culture
Co-Creation: The Key to Success
Once we’ve co-created a set of tangible components, we can facilitate a powerful conversation about where our culture is today and where we want it to be tomorrow. The principle of co-creation should be front and centre of any culture design initiative. This ensures equal voice and engagement from everyone in the organisation.
Example Questions to Facilitate the Discussion
- What behaviours do we amplify as a result of our values?
- What behaviours do we outlaw as a result of our values?
- What do we do and not do?
- How do we communicate with each other, and what are our speeds and tools?
- What meetings do we have synchronously/asynchronously? Why?
- How do we have healthy conflict? What does unhealthy conflict look like?
- How do we ensure fearlessness and equal voice?
- How, when, and why do we celebrate?
- How will we hold ourselves to account? What does that look like?
- How do we hire? Who do we look for?
- Why do we fire and how do we do it?
- How do we share knowledge?
- What are our unique quirks?
Building a Shared Picture of Today’s Culture
Use a Miro board to create a shared understanding of the current culture. This can be done asynchronously over 72 hours, followed by volunteer-led synchronous workshops to sense-make and then playback to the rest of the business.
Designing Tomorrow’s Culture
Leverage the opportunities identified to design a clear and concise future culture. This is best done by a small team of volunteers who then invite the rest of the business to provide feedback before iterating.
If you'd like an accelerator for this first bit, it's included in one our 'Doing Culture Right: 10 x playbooks' so check that out if you want to save yourself some design and planning time.
Managing Culture Like a Product
Culture Management is not a Project, it's a Product
Managing culture is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. Regularly assess and iterate on your cultural initiatives to ensure they remain aligned with your organisational goals and employee needs. Here's how to do it:
Create your People Roadmap
Just like a product roadmap outlines the vision, strategy, and progress of a product over time, a people roadmap does the same for culture. It should detail the key initiatives, experiments, and milestones that will shape your culture. Here’s how to create and use a people roadmap effectively:
Steps to Create a People Roadmap
- Set Clear Objectives: Define what you want to achieve with your cultural initiatives. These could include improving employee engagement, reducing turnover, enhancing collaboration, etc.
- Identify Key Initiatives: Based on your objectives, identify the key initiatives that will help you achieve them. These could be changes to meeting structures, new communication tools, feedback mechanisms, etc.
- Prioritise Initiatives: Prioritise the initiatives based on their potential impact and feasibility. Start with the ones that are likely to have the most significant positive impact on your culture.
- Define Success Metrics: For each initiative, define clear success metrics. These could include quantitative measures like employee engagement scores, retention rates, or qualitative feedback from employees.
- Create a Timeline: Develop a timeline for implementing each initiative. This should include start and end dates, key milestones, and regular check-ins to assess progress.
- Assign Ownership: Assign ownership of each initiative to specific team members. This ensures accountability and clarity on who is responsible for driving each initiative forward.
Communicate your People Roadmap
A people roadmap is only effective if it is crowd-sourced and communicated clearly and regularly. Here’s how to do it:
- Crowd-source improvements: Survey, poll, miro board, 1-2-1's...get signal on what's working, what's not and where the best ROI is.
- Regular Updates: Provide regular updates on the progress of the roadmap. This could be through company-wide meetings, email newsletters, or a dedicated section on your wiki/intranet or slack workspace.
- Get Feedback: Encourage folks to provide feedback on the roadmap and the initiatives being implemented. This helps to identify any issues early and ensures that the initiatives are having the desired impact.
Run Culture Experiments
Just like product managers run A/B tests, your people team can run culture experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. For example, you might test different meeting formats to find the most productive one or try out new communication tools to improve collaboration.
Steps to Run Culture Experiments
- Identify Areas for Improvement: Look at your current culture and identify areas that need improvement. This could be anything from meeting structures to feedback mechanisms.
- Develop Hypotheses: Based on your observations, develop hypotheses for what changes might improve these areas. For example, "If we reduce the length of meetings, we will improve productivity."
- Run Experiments: Implement the changes on a small scale first. Monitor the impact and gather feedback from employees.
- Analyse Results: Assess the results of your experiments. Did the changes have the desired effect? What did employees think?
- Iterate and Scale: Based on the results, iterate on your changes. If an experiment was successful, consider scaling it up across the organisation.
Use Data to Drive Decisions
Just as product managers rely on data to make decisions, so should you. Collect data on various aspects of your culture, such as employee engagement, productivity, and retention rates. Use this data to inform your experiments and measure the impact of changes.
Create Feedback Loops
Regular feedback is crucial for managing culture. Create mechanisms for employees to provide feedback on cultural initiatives. This could be through surveys, anonymous suggestion boxes, or regular one-on-one meetings. Use this feedback to continually refine and improve your culture.
Foster Ownership
Everyone in the organisation should feel a sense of ownership over the culture. Encourage employees at all levels to contribute ideas and take an active role in cultural initiatives. This not only fosters engagement but also ensures that your culture evolves in a way that reflects the values and needs of the entire organisation.
Communicate Transparently
At Open Org we've interviewed and worked with hundreds of startup and scale-up founders and CPOs and have learned that transparency is key to building trust and ensuring everyone is aligned with the cultural vision. Communicate openly about the cultural changes you are making, the reasons behind them, and the results of any experiments. Keep everyone informed and involved in the process.
Conclusion
Managing culture like a product is an ongoing journey that requires constant attention, experimentation, and iteration. By defining your current culture, designing your future culture, and managing it with the same rigour as a product manager, you can create a thriving organisational culture that drives success. Stay tuned for the next post, where we’ll dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of managing culture experiments. Culture isn’t just a set of values on a career site—it’s the competitive advantage your organisation can leverage to achieve great things. Let’s make it tangible, intentional, and co-created for maximum impact.
👉 Want some extra help? Open Org offers On-Demand Culture Design on an affordable monthly subscription, that's built for busy, startup people teams. We can help you design, build & manage your culture like a product. Let's talk!
