15 things to look for in a culture

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 them that you have to marry (or at least 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 some time ago but I bring it back now because it is still so relevant:

1. Not what is written in procedures but what is not written in those pages
2. Not how people behave in meetings, but in the cafeteria
3. What people can get away with and nothing would happen
4. What happens in the long breaks, not in the mesmerizing looking at screens
5. The noise in the corridor (yes, noise as in noise) or the deserted feeling
6. The recognized elephants occupying all the room that nobody talks about
7. What the employee manual does not tell you
8. The percentage of people doing emails when pretending to listen to a conference call
9. The things you never do here, what you are not supposed to do
10. The phrases or expressions that surprisingly everybody uses in almost epidemic style
11. The things we never talk about. The topics that are never on the table
12. The number of people who work from home but don’t really work
13. The terms, themes, phrases you don’t use because they trigger bad memories
14. Not what is said in a meeting, but the unsaid
15. Not what people say but what they do

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