A Better Workday Just Got a Little More Balanced

I worked with a company two years ago that changed my outlook on workplace culture. We sat down in a meeting room, closed off from the “lesser, entry-level layer” of the organization, with just us: the organizational consultant (me), the CEO (who, mind you, was sweating through his blue jacket for whatever odd reason), and upper-level management.

They brought me into the mix with a single question: “Is our team performing well?” You may laugh, but yes, this was actually my day: listening to the CEO lecture for forty-five minutes on how profit was up, how the focus group last week went incredibly well, and how the “Teams Are People, Too!” workshop “inspired employees.”

Then came the awkward part when I had to interrupt and ask: “Um, sir? Did you talk to any of the workers?”

The answer, as you will have guessed, was “no.”

What Work Culture Isn’t

Every organization I’ve worked with has, at some point, tried to fix its culture with a candid workshop, a rephrased mission statement, or a nicely designed PDF that gets emailed around once and is then quietly forgotten. I want to save you the trouble of that. You see, culture isn’t a mission statement.

It most surely isn’t the poster portrayed in the lobby or the three adjectives on the company’s careers page. Rather, culture is what your people actually do when nobody with a title is in the room, and that’s the whole definition. Yet most culture initiatives never get anywhere close.

I spend a lot of my consulting work in exactly this gap: not good culture versus bad culture, but the disconnect between “the culture a company thinks it has” and “the one it’s actually operating within.” I’ve learned what it is, why it moves real financial numbers, how it quietly preserves itself, and what a leadership team can do about it starting this week.

What Work Culture Is

Many executives and entry-level workers alike have heard the term “workplace culture” and somehow find themselves believing that it is simply the “emotional” feeling a company has when you are working there. Google has been highly regarded as a company known for taking extraordinary steps, but what stands out to me most is its openness. Have you ever been to Google HQ? I have, and I was incongruously there when they came up with Google Maps.

It was not the innovation of a team, mind you, but rather, they had something called “20% time,” which meant that every Friday, employees had the day to themselves — paid — to come up with new ideas. They knew that their team was well-versed, talented, and well-suited to such a concept. This also gave the world Gmail.

So, if Google Maps was the work of one person, then wouldn’t their culture have been “openness”? Wouldn’t you see their culture as one that invites initiative, expects employees to feel empowered, and is a place where you could probably find a massage parlor? Furthermore, rather than simply describing its culture, did the workplace show or tell employees what that culture would be? They showed it, clearly, and per this discussion, that is what workplace culture is, but it is not the full definition.

From the Found of Workplace Culture

Organizational psychologist Edgar Schein (ironically, the same researcher most responsible for turning “culture” into an actual field of study) contended that this philosophy operates on three levels, and only the deepest one reliably predicts behavior. Level one consists of artifacts: dress code, office layout, and other niceties such as whether the CEO has a corner office. Level two consists of espoused values: what the company says out loud, in the onboarding deck, or on the motivational print in a line item. Level three consists of underlying assumptions: the unspoken beliefs about how things actually work there, such as what’s safe to say, who really holds power, and what happens when you fail in public.

Nearly every corporate culture initiative lives in levels one and two, seemingly refreshed with new paint and rewritten language. Level three, the part that actually runs the show, almost never gets touched, which helps explain why these initiatives rarely survive their first difficult quarter.

This isn’t mere opinion. Researchers at MIT Sloan compared stated corporate values against how employees actually rated their companies on those same values, across more than 400 large organizations. The correlation was essentially zero. Not weak, mind you, but essentially zero—even at companies that, on paper, take their values seriously.

Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, and Barclays all listed integrity as a core value in the years before their respective scandals broke. Boeing had integrity, quality, and safety on the wall before a string of well-documented safety failures. The words on the poster were never truly the problem, evidently, but they also were not what was running the company. Culture isn’t the soft initiative you fund after the real strategic bets. The data says it might be the strategic bet with the best return on the list. None of this matters to a P&L unless it moves real numbers, so here are some.