Culture + Marketing

In the last post, I discussed how culture eats strategy for breakfast, which is almost a well-accepted mantra in the business world. If I elaborate on that train of thought, then I believe we can almost certainly say that culture eats processes for lunch and dinner. Not only because processes are the consequence of a strategy, but also because we even look at the theoretic idea of a process versus the practical application of a process.

A strategy is an overarching plan for an organization on how to achieve its business goals. From the strategy, we derive tactical and operational plans and create processes to ensure that we achieve the goals of those plans as efficiently as possible.  

When we look at the general idea of a workplace, we see that the overarching framework for a lot of workplaces is very similar. People travel to an assigned geographical location, have a time that they start and finish, have colleagues they work together with, and collectively they work towards an objective. Apart from that, professions differ in a lot of different ways. A police officer has a distinctively different set of tasks and responsibilities than a receptionist or software developer. Still, they have a lot in common too. One major thing that most jobs have in common is that they must deal with a lot of ambiguity. Whether you ask a police officer, receptionist, or software developer what they do on a daily basis, a lot of the answers boil down to a variant of “every day brings new unforeseen challenges”. It is hard to describe daily activities as they can vary immensely. No day is the same. Still, each one of those people knows what is expected of them in various situations. They know how to behave, even when the situation is new to them.  

Structures & Processes

One way of dealing with this problem is to build processes that give people guidelines on how to act in different situations. These processes are good to show other organisations on how you intend to run your businesses. A prime example of this is ISO certifications. Huge amounts of documentation on how an organisation has set up its processes to be able to guarantee a certain level of standardization and quality. But even the detailed documentation of ISO certifications leaves room for interpretations and ambiguity and requires employees to be adaptive and creative. Do not get me wrong; ISO certification can be critical for organizations to improve both the quality and efficiency of their work. I merely argue that it is not the ultimate tool for guiding your employees in their everyday work. These are often sophisticated texts and process flows to guide individuals on how to deal with complex issues, hidden in manuals or quality support systems. Only a small proportion of people have read these manuals and to make matters worse the theory always slightly differs from reality. This means that we need to give our people more guidelines on how to act, even with ambiguity and ever-changing situations.

Culture to the rescue

This is where culture comes in. I have already extensively talked about how decision-making, culture, and empowerment are correlated here. But besides taking decisions, we also behave in a certain way as people. Our behaviours are shaped by motivations, that which drives us individually, and by what is acceptable in a group, that which drives us collectively. As I am not a psychologist, I will not speculate too much here on how individual motivations are shaped, but as an HR specialist, I can tell you that group behaviours form and are shaped by company culture. In other words, as a company we cannot determine the motivations of an individual person, however, we can influence the overarching culture of our organisation. The culture that we create will in turn influence group behaviours, which in turn will influence individual behaviours and decisions.  

By creating the right culture, we can create the right group behaviours which will provide guidelines for individuals on how to behave and make decisions. This is the set of guidelines that help people make consistent decisions despite ambiguity and ever-changing situations. A good example of this is the cultural value of Facebook “Move fast and break things”, which got adopted by a lot of small fast-growing companies. Why? Simple: these companies often lack the structure to properly guide their employees through their decision-making process. A company value like that shows your employees that they should not be afraid and wait too long with making decisions. They are rather encouraged to rely on their own strengths and “Move fast and break things” instead of “Going slow and steady”.  

Although I am not arguing that this is a good cultural value (Facebook had to roll back its original bold value), it is a clear guideline and message to people on how to act in unclear situations that demand adaptability and creativity. That is something that processes can never give your employees. Processes can only help you with the predictable, but culture can help you with the unpredictable – and remember it is the case for most jobs that “every day brings new unforeseen situations”.  

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Companies and managers alike are always looking for ways to improve. Feedback conversations with employees are being held on the regular, but often they forget to utilize one group that is very important; the people who leave.

In the world of progress, nothing is as important as reflection. You need reflection to look back and see where there is room for improvement. Many managers and companies are already capitalizing on this by holding regular feedback meetings and one-to-one meetings, where both employees and managers openly speak about their experiences. If you are not doing this, then start doing it. Tomorrow. Seriously. The easiest way to improve your company is by tapping into the knowledge of your employees, so don’t let their talents go to waste. In this blog I will not pay attention to that, however. In this blog I will go into the importance of the feedback of the people who will actually leave your company and show you what you can learn from them.

Let’s start with: why?

Well, firstly, people who leave your company have nothing to ‘lose’, so they will be very forthcoming with what they think. In normal feedback meetings, employees are encouraged to be as open an up-front as possible. Although this sounds great, experience teaches us that employees can be a bit hesitant into saying everything that is on their mind in fear of retribution. This factor of retribution is not present at an ‘exit interview’, so your ex-employee will be open and honest.

Secondly, it is important to note that you can learn a lot from the reason why the employee is leaving. It might be possible that this new information helps you to prevent others from leaving for the same reasons as well. Often managers make assumptions as on why employees leave, instead of actually asking and understanding why they leave. This way they cannot effectively deal with possible problems in the internal organisation. Therefore, it is important to find out the true reasons in an exit interview.

Thirdly, it is important for your employer branding as a part of the employee experience. In an exit interview you can take up all sorts of matters which require closure before the employee leaves. Perhaps there are conflicts that need to be settled, equipment which has to be returned, or ongoing confidentiality clauses which have to be signed. Most of all it is a moment for your employee to reflect and express their thoughts and feelings. It is always good to give your employee the feeling that they are being heard, but it is even more important to actually listen (and act).

Still not convinced that it is important to have these exit interviews? Here are ten more reasons.

What to ask?

As said before, the main goal is to find out what the motivations are of the employee who leaves, but it is also good to unravel other possible problems in your organisation. So don’t be afraid to ask creative questions. Don’t make turn the interview in a acquisition and the atmosphere light-hearted to get your ex-employee to really open up. When having these exit interviews, then it is good to keep the questions uniform. Make sure that you are asking everybody the same questions, so that you can actually use the results. More on that later.

Here are some examples of questions that you might want to use:

• What is the reason you are leaving us? (obviously)
• Could you list a top three of reasons why you are leaving us?
• Is there anything we can improve as a company? Performance or cultural wise?
• Is there anything that your own department could improve?
• Is there anything that your manager can improve?
• If you would be owner of this company tomorrow, what would be the top five changes that you would make?
• If you would go back to the beginning of your time at our company, then what would you have liked to see differently during your time with us?
  

What’s next? Data.

Now that you know why it is important and which questions to ask, it is time to get to the interesting part: the data. To get an organised set of data, you will need to try and standardize the answers given by the ex-employees to get a clear picture. For example, if you ask the question “Why are you leaving us?” then you can get a very variety of answers as it is an open question. However, you can label the answers given so you can detect patterns. Answer labels for this question could include: “Atmosphere within company, Development possibilities, Prospect of better benefits, Personal reasons” etcetera.

One or two exit interviews will not give you enough information if you are dealing with possible internal problems. That is because it could just be that the couple ex-employees that you have interviewed might hold a grudge against you. However, if a certain pattern appears when more and more ex-employees point to the same problems, then you cannot hide behind the excuse of a coincidental common grudge anymore. So, volume is key here.

After having the right labels and enough volume, you are ready to analyse the data and draw the right conclusions to improve your company and tackle possible problems.

In conclusion

You should always hold exit interviews, not only because it adds to the employee experience, but you can also actually learn from them. This information can be valuable to retaining your future talent, tackle possibly hidden problems, and improve your company performance.

Do you need help with holding exit interviews, analysing the data, or implementing solutions to newly discovered problems? Get in touch with us and see what we can do for you.

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If you do a quick search on the internet you will find countless articles on the workplace of the future. It is flooded with blogs on working remotely, AI impacting work, and working more data driven (I also wrote a few blogs on those).

So today I want to talk about something different, on how the workplace will look like if we are used to working remotely, working with AI, and working data driven. In this blog I will take a shot at the social impact of these evolutions and talk about future hierarchies and decision making, how working will be more intertwined with our personal lives, and how human contact and wellbeing will become more and more important in our work lives.  

Hierarchies and decisions

Currently decisions are still made in hierarchical structures where one person’s input might weigh heavier than another. Of course, there are differences in how steep hierarchical structures are, from very tall hierarchies (still mostly common in Asia and parts of America) to flat hierarchies (still mostly common in Europe).

In the workplace of the future, I believe that the hierarchical structures will not disappear, but change in form and appearance. In this sense the traditional manager will be replaced by groups and teams who check each other’s behaviour and performance. Driven by data and AI they will take decisions based upon crowd-based intelligence instead of hierarchical positions.

In a similar fashion, bonusses and salaries will not be a result of negotiations and charisma, but from data-based performance and team approval. There will be more transparency in why certain decisions will be made and more people will be involved in the decision-making structure. This will require a simplified model of decision making as more actors will be involved.

This will make for organisations that:  

• are more agile and can respond quicker to market trends;
• have less internal politics and bureaucracy, and;
• determine, plan and execute better decisions.

Want to find out more about our future hierarchies? Read this article from Collin Williams.

Work and personal life

If working remotely will be fully accepted and implemented in the future, then that will have an implication towards the division of work and personal life. I, and with me many others, believe that working remotely will be fully implemented in the future.

Beside the challenges and opportunities which that brings, this will also have an influence on the division between our work and personal life. Obvious things come to mind as the working day has no ‘solid’ start and finish anymore. So, you might pick up your laptop during the evening, do a laundry run between meetings, or go out for a coffee with the family when there is not a lot to do. This has the advantage that we can become more flexible in how and where we work, but I would argue that this can also result in a lot of new forms of stress.

Since we do not have a solid end of our working day, we will experience a constant ‘working-mode’ kind of pressure in our mind. I would therefore argue that in the workplace of the future there will be more emphasis on planning and the use of calendars to structure your workday, and that this will be required by employers to prevent needless amounts of stress.

What’s more is that I believe that retirement as we now know it, might be a thing of the past. We live in a time that the proportion of elderly population will become relatively larger and that they will live longer as well. It is technically and financially not possible anymore to maintain ‘early’ retirements anymore in the current system as most people stop working around the age of 65 (and often earlier).

This system worked when people lived up until the age of 80, but currently people are generally becoming older. What has also always baffled me is that people at the age of retirement immediately go down from a full week of working to absolutely nothing. I believe this to be a wrong way of retiring. Firstly, because stopping too early with working is detrimental for your cognitive ability (see this article). Secondly, because it drops a lot of people in a mental hole, often feeling social isolated and without a sense of purpose. Thirdly, because these people are often capable of working longer if we rethink our perception of retirement.

I believe that in the future we will go to a step-by-step retiring system, involving medical advice and personal preference. An example of this could be a long-term plan where somebody starts to work 75% at the age of 60, 50% at the age of 67, all the way down to 25% at the age of 75. Other ideas could involve different or less intense functions and shorter working days. Of course, there will be people who will read this with a bit of healthy scepticism and will say that it is physically or mentally not possible to work that long. To them I would say that their arguing is sound if they base those ideas on current-day working conditions. I would argue that future work will become less physical and mental intense due to atomization, robotization and the utilization of AI.

Human interaction and wellbeing

As technology and working methods advance towards working remotely, there will be a bigger future emphasis on human interaction and wellbeing. More and more people will look for ways to interact with colleagues as they make up a large part of their social life and life in general. We already start to see the first signs on the wall with the COVID-crisis: people start meeting up for lunch meetings again and are showing up at the office for a couple of days a week.

So, despite a global health crisis, we still long for human interaction. In the future this will mean that there will be more emphasis on events that promote human interaction despite the working-remotely working culture. Things you can think of are: regularly reoccurring teambuilding events (going from once a year to once every other week), lunch meetings, culture promoting events, working remotely in teams etcetera. The employer of the future will support this in the future as it is important to maintain the company culture and the loyalty of his or her employees.

In an ever-changing world more driven by data, we believe that more and more companies will take a vested interest in their employees’ health and wellbeing to keep them at the top of their performance. This might mean that future employers will get involved to help out their employees with personalized health programmes in accordance to how their employees sleep, eat, drink and feel. So, in this sense data will be collected at the future workplace to analyse how the employees are doing and in the same sense will personalized health plans be a part of the future workplace. You might think of personalized food plans, wellness and mindfulness programmes, and personalized ergonomic working stations.

In conclusion

In this blog I’ve tried to look beyond just stating the future ideas of working remotely, AI, and being data driven and gave a sense of the implications that these developments might have. I believe that the future workplace will be ruled by mass-intelligence, driven by data, and focussed on health, wellbeing and performance optimization of the employees.

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