Organisational culture is often, somewhat unhelpfully, described as being “the way things are done around here”.
For anyone interested in getting really deliberate around their workplace culture, this doesn’t give much of a steer as to where to begin. Hopefully this will help: culture is shaped by behaviours, systems and practices and the way they interact. Congruence between words and actions is key. Values are all too often laminated rather than lived – splattered over walls and websites but conspicuously absent in day-to-day interactions.
To build on this, I share here a thought-provoking piece which seeks to build on the overly simplistic, and ultimately unhelpful, articulation of organisational culture: https://hbr.org/2018/05/why-great-employees-leave-great-cultures?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=LinkedIn&tpcc=orgsocial_edit
This particularly resonated with me: “A common culture-building practice is the creation of value statements. But the real test is how leaders behave; how they enact these values, or don’t. People watch everything leaders do. If leaders are not exhibiting the behaviors that reflect the values, the values are meaningless.”
