People have thought about culture as this separate thing, but it really is integral to the business. If we pull one-if the strategy shifts-we need to also look at our culture-our behaviors.
One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of “systems thinking,” which means we need to connect how we’re working with what we’re working on, which is our strategy, and why we’re doing it, which is our purpose. Why has it been difficult to define what workplace culture is? Culture is happening whether by design or by default, so why not design it intentionally based on how we want our organization to work? My book is about just that: How do we make sure that the focus on culture amplifies even more now with the office being taken away for a couple of years? Those relationships that we create every day, the decisions that we make, the interactions we have-all of that is culture.
#ANOTHER WORD FOR ACTIONS FREE#
Free food and Ping-Pong tables are great, but culture is really how work happens between people. I wanted to make the point that culture is not what happens in an office. Because we don’t go into an office now, people think, “Oh, my God, our culture is gone.” I wanted to make the point that culture is not what happens in an office. How we’ve typically defined culture is by the food we have, the Ping-Pong tables, and the happy hours.
#ANOTHER WORD FOR ACTIONS HOW TO#
We’re all trying to write this playbook together, and nobody knows exactly how to navigate this next chapter of our work. One of the reasons I wanted to write the book is because I do think there is a way to define an intentional culture. It surprised me that organizational culture has been around as a concept for over 70 years, and yet we’re still in this place of defining culture as a very nebulous concept. Was there anything in the writing, research, or in the response to this book that surprised you?
The book is about this continuous process of integrating those behaviors into your everyday work and acknowledging that it is all part of a system. Practices are things that we’re also doing on a daily basis: meetings, communication, how we connect with each other. Then, what are the different processes you need to embed those behaviors in? Processes are the things we already do: hiring process, onboarding process, promotion process, feedback. What are those observable actions that exemplify values? The point of the book is to go beyond a list of values and identify those behaviors. I believe, and I’ve experienced, that there are several more steps we need to take to have the kind of healthy cultures we see many, many companies have. Often, we think culture is this soft thing on the side that HR gets to at some point, that it’s a one-time exercise where you list a number of values and you’re done-you throw them up on a wall, you throw them up on a website, and that’s it.
I had a stint at WeWork, and it taught me even more so the value of a healthy culture. I’ve had the good fortune of working at some really great companies-iconic and fast-growing companies, like Adobe and Twitter.
I have always believed that culture is a really important component of any organization. So I wrote this book as a way to give people a blueprint for how to intentionally design and integrate culture in their organizations. There was a way to design and operationalize culture that hadn’t been done more broadly, and I have experience doing it at several companies. It got tiring and frustrating because I knew that culture was much more concrete than that. There are so many definitions about what culture means, from engagement, to an organization’s personality, to what happens when the boss isn’t around. I kept reading books, research articles, and everything you could possibly find out there about culture, and I continued to get frustrated about how culture was regarded as a very nebulous concept. I wrote the book because I’ve been in tech for over 20 years, and for about that amount of time, I have been studying, participating in, and driving culture change. ReCulturing is about how to design intentional cultures with your organization in a hybrid workplace.
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