121. How do I improve my workplace culture?

Transcript – Episode 121: How do I improve my workplace culture?

Joe: If you want to change your workplace culture, the first step may be to stop using that word.[Music]

Joe: Welcome to Boss Better Now, the show that teaches leaders and business owners how to activate employee commitment in today’s ever-changing workplace. Okay. How do you improve workplace culture? Well, first let’s define the concept. If you look around and you do any research, you’re going to find very quickly that there’s lots of different ways to define the concept of workplace culture. My favorite definition is that culture is the way we do things around here. Think about it. If you’ve been a part of a team or an organization for even a small amount of time, you start to pick up on habits or routines, things that are innate or organic about the way that we do things around here. If you’ve been on a team where there’s lots of drama and gossip and backbiting and infighting, it’s probably something that you picked up on and that you noticed and that just started happening around you and before you knew it, you were a part of it. Or if you’ve been a part of a culture where everybody had each other’s backs and pitched in, then that’s a whole different kind of experience, isn’t it? And you saw and observed people just doing that. It was the way we do things around here. And if you want to improve workplace culture, if you want to improve some aspect of the way we do things around here, then you’ve got to do two things. You’ve got to get granular, and you’ve got to focus on experiences. Now, let’s start with the latter. Focus on experiences. Now, when I say we should stop using the word culture, it’s really because culture is nothing more than a collection of experiences, right? the idea that the way we do things around here is uh really built around things that happen again and again and again. If you think about culture as a collection of experiences, then to improve culture, we have to re-engineer those experiences from the ground up. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is to understand that the influ the influence that experiences have on our beliefs and ultimately our actions. One of my favorite models for shaping culture and one of the things that I have repeatedly taught to leaders over the years in boss hero school and in some of the other keynotes and workshops that I deliver is based on a model that was published in 2009 by the authors Connors and Smith called the results pyramid. This first showed up in their book change the culture change the game. And what they argue is that the results we get depend on our actions. The actions we take are informed by our beliefs and the beliefs we have are rooted in our experiences. The problem is that when we want to change how people show up, we tend to start with actions. We tend to start by telling people, “Here’s what I want you to do differently.” But if we never take the time to understand what beliefs they hold and the experiences they have had or continue to have to shape those beliefs, it’s very unlikely that we’re really going to get long-term behavior change out of that person or as a part of that culture. And when we get the experiences right, we create a more resilient culture. Let me give you an example. Imagine that you and your partner or spouse went to a restaurant for the first time and you had an amazing experience. The service was outstanding. The food was spectacular. The environment, the atmosphere was fantastic. What happens, right? What beliefs do you have? This is a great restaurant. It’s a well-run place. The employees really care. What actions do you take as a result of those beliefs? Well, you tell other people about this great restaurant, and you keep going back, and the result is you have a new favorite place, and they have a new customer who continues to frequent the establishment. Now imagine that you go back a second time and you have the same experience. And imagine that you go back a third time and you have the same experience. And the fourth time you go back, you have the same experience. Now imagine that the fifth time you go to this restaurant, you don’t have the same experience. The waiter is not as friendly. The food doesn’t come out as quickly. And maybe it’s not as prepared or as tasty as it was in the past. Maybe you wait a long time for a table, and you leave feeling disappointed. What belief do you then hold? Most of the time people say that was a good place having a bad night. I have all these other experiences to draw on that have informed me that this is a pretty good place. And so, the action you’re going to take is that you’re going to give them the benefit of the doubt and you’re probably still going to try again. Now imagine that on the exact same night that you had the bad experience, there was another couple at the table next to you visiting that restaurant for the first time and they had a similar experience to yours. It didn’t go well. What belief do they hold after that one experience? The belief they probably hold is this is a lousy joint and the action they take is we’re not coming back here. And so, you get two different sets of beliefs and two different actions and then ultimately two different results based on those experiences. The pattern of experiences that we have is ultimately what shapes our culture. So, if you want to improve workplace culture, you have to get granular about those experiences. So, I want you to stop thinking about how do I improve my workplace culture and I instead want you to answer the question, what patterns of behavior or belief do I want to interrupt or change in my workplace? So, let’s take this for an example. If you have uh a culture, the way we do things around here, a pattern of behavior on your team of people consistently coming in late, how do we change that? Well, the results that you’re getting as a result of that pattern are probably problematic. We could name them, right? The maybe your operation isn’t staying on time, people are stressed, morale is low, you’re not as productive, maybe customers are feeling that impact. Those are the negative results you’re getting as a result of the actions of people coming in late. So, let’s reverse engineer the experiences we need to create to improve the culture by working backwards through that pyramid. So, what’s the new action that you want people to take? Well, obviously, it’s that they consistently arrive early or at worst on time for work. So, then what beliefs do they need to hold in order for that action to take place? Well, they need to believe that showing up on time is really important. Maybe that showing up on time has a really positive impact on their circumstances and on other things they care about. It has a positive impact on the customer experience. It has a positive impact on their career trajectory with your organization. It has a positive impact on their relationship with their boss. It has a positive impact on their ego. It has a positive impact on the future opportunities they might want to create for themselves in your organization. They also have to believe that if they don’t show up on time that there are consequences that it may cost them something that maybe they’re going to be a part of an uncomfortable conversation. Maybe they’re going to be uh disciplined or documented for not showing up on time. Maybe they’re going to have a peer who holds them accountable who says, “Hey man, I care about you and you’re a great teammate, but you can’t keep coming in late like this because it’s throwing the rest of us off and we’re having to pick up your slack.” Now, think about what I just described. I just described an experience, the experience of a peer holding another peer accountable and having that kind of conversation, which would then shape the belief that hey, I really need to be on time and that would then inform the action of actually being on time. So, I want you to get granular both about what you want to change about your culture and then I want you to work your way backwards through that pyramid and start to define the experiences that will shape the beliefs that will lead to the actions that you want. So, for example, following up on our example of changing a culture of people being late, you want to start to think about what are all the collective experiences that a member of my team needs to have again and again and again to reinforce the belief that it’s really important to be on time. So, you might start to think about your onboarding process. You might need to talk about in the onboarding process how impactful it is the work that we do for our clients, for our customers, what our commitment is to making sure they have a seamless experience. You might want to talk about, you know, don’t be that person who consistently shows up late and makes your teammates pick up the slack. You may talk about a uh team value of accountability and you may decide that it’s important to talk about in that onboarding process how to speak up and hold each other accountable when someone isn’t pulling their weight. You can keep that moving forward and think about what kind of team training or development do we need to give folks in order to make that happen. How do we teach team members to hold each other accountable in a way that is respectful? Right? How do we teach people to have those uh those kinds of feedback conversations to give feedback and receive feedback? What else do we need to do? How do you make sure that there are experiences that drive that action of showing up on time? Well, are there benefits to showing up on time? Does the boss point out, hey, I’ve noticed that, you know, in your first three months working with us here, you’re always here early. You’re always ready to go. you are always on point with the right attitude and the right energy around what we’re doing from the first moment of the day. And I just want you to know how much I appreciate that. That’s an experience that reinforces a belief that leads to the action we want about people showing up on time. And what about the person who starts to dip, who isn’t showing up on time? Do we just let that slide and hope that it’ll get better? Well, that’s not an experience that leads to the belief that changes the action, is it? We instead need to have a supervisor who pulls that person aside and says,”Hey, I’ve noticed you’ve come in late a couple of times. Are you okay?” Like, what do you need to be here on time? Because it’s really important that you’re here on time, and here are all the reasons why. When we think about that accountability, when we think about the dynamics that need to be in place in order for those experiences to recur again and again and again, we have to as leaders and business owners start to think about the experiences that we want to engineer. If nothing else, let’s just constantly praise and reward the positive experiences, the positive behaviors that we see because those reinforce the beliefs that it’s really important to show up on time at work. So, if you want to improve your workplace culture, get granular and focus on experiences. Use that results pyramid to think about what you need to do differently and focus in on. And I have no doubt that you’ll be able to improve the way we do things around here. All right; I’d love to hear from you on this. What’s your reaction? What are your thoughts? And what questions do you have that you’d like to see me answer in a future episode of Boss Better Now? Just pop a comment in the box below here on the YouTube video or you can email me at bossbetternow@gmail.com. Thanks for being with us. See you next time.

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