What is employee culture? How do you shape it? How do you mould behaviour of your employees so that it protects the company? How do you get the org to behave in certain ways at scale, without explicit mechanisms alone? How do you get commitment for a strategy or — worse — get them to follow you through some uncertain business changes?
This concept sequence lists examples of companies, executives and entrepreneurs that shaped their employee cultures — with varying degrees of success. It should be read in combination with the Commoncog book summary of Stan Slap’s Under The Hood — which lays out a coherent model for thinking about employee culture.
The core idea of Under The Hood is that an employee culture is an information-gathering organism, primarily interested in its own survival. This model was developed by Stan Slap in the late 90s, and tested through his firm SLAP in over 100 companies doing business in 44 countries, over a period of around 30 years. Some of these companies hire SLAP to build better employee culture. Many more hire the firm to get employee commitment for some business strategy. Slap argues that the financial impact of these ideas is now on the order of several billion dollars; shaping employee culture in large enterprises is a fundamentally high leverage thing.
Having a coherent model for culture is important: it ties together various disparate techniques for shaping employee culture, explains why these techniques work, and allows you to come up with new techniques of your own. The book summary goes into some detail, but implications of this model include:
When implementing an organisational change, reassure your culture what isn't going to change.
When implementing compensation, the meaning of the compensation matters more than absolute compensation amounts.
Explicitly listing company values is dangerous, and often a surefire way to lose trust.
The most effective way to communicate with a culture is to use ‘legends’ — stories that the culture tells itself about how to behave.
The following cases illustrate aspects of these ideas.