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15 things to look for in a culture
In the last few weeks, for a number of reasons, I have had lots of conversations about ‘corporate culture’ and in particular ‘what to measure’. I must confess I am rather skeptical 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 these recent conversations made me think that it is very 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
- 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 rooms, 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