Over the years, I have had lots of conversations about ‘corporate culture’ and in particular ‘what to measure’. I must confess I am rather sceptical of culture surveys because they usually presuppose a specific model behind that you have to marry (or at lest romance) before any survey. I am more interested in what I would look for through the lenses of organizational anthropology. I did publish this list about a year ago but I bring it back now because it is still so relevant:
- Not what is written in procedures but what is not written in those pages
- Not how people behave in meetings, but in the cafeteria
- What people can get away with, and nothing would happen
- What happens in the long breaks, not in the mesmerizing looking at screens
- The noise in the corridor (yes, noise as in noise) or the deserted feeling
- The recognized elephants occupying all the room that nobody talks about
- What the employee manual does not tell you
- The percentage of people doing emails when pretending to listen to a conference call
- The things you never do here, what you are not supposed to do
- The phrases or expressions that surprisingly everybody uses in almost epidemic style
- The things we never talk about. The topics that are never on the table
- The number of people who work from home but don’t really work
- The terms, themes, phrases you don’t use because they trigger bad memories
- Not what is said in a meeting, but the unsaid
- Not what people say but what they do