Written by: Seven Douglas
Thank you for clicking your way here! On this page, you will find a few helpful resources as you recalibrate and reorient your company on the journey to success. Listed below are resources that can assist with your organizational culture on your success journey.
Playing Top Secret
Imagine a company that did not allow its employees to share useful tools or best practices with each other. How would you envision performance in this Top-Secret environment? Unless regulatory, proprietary, or other requirements dictate, companies allow their employees to freely exchange tools and information that can improve performance and evolve their organizational culture.
Issues from the pandemic have added a new layer of difficulty to shared learning in companies which has led many organizations to become Top-Secret Inc. and reduced their performance. For example, a recent study[1] identified an increase in the number of hours employees spent focused on work or production. Still, missed opportunities for informal shared learning are the unintended consequence, as team members cannot share in the break room or visit a coworker at their desk.
Major Workplace Shift
The pandemic has overshadowed the way organizations have traditionally conducted business, including shared learning. Chatting over cubical walls has been replaced with chatting over instant messaging (IM), Zoom meetings, or similar technology. This technology is important and very necessary for conducting business; however, it can negatively impact the organization, its teams, and organizational culture when the spontaneity of ideas struggle to exist, limiting shared learning. Now that the work environment is beginning to stabilize, it is time to elevate the importance of shared learning. It is so vital, that organizational culture guru, Edgar Schein, states “the most important element [of] culture is a shared product of shared learning[2]”.
Back to the Routine
As businesses move away from “pandemic panic mode” into a better routine, bringing shared learning front and center is necessary, whether your company plans to return to office, stay fully remote, or use a hybrid work model. We consider two components essential to help in the refocus process: proximity and performance outputs.
Proximity and Organizational Culture
The idea of proximity might seem paradoxical and out of place in the current unsettled business environment. Over the past 50 years, office space design has become more open, focusing on collaboration. First, walled offices gave way to cubicles; then, their walls were lowered to increase interaction. When the pandemic occurred, the workforce became dispersed; however, the need to collaborate still existed. To fill the short-term communications gap, many organizations added technology. Even with all the ways technology has proved for people to connect, it cannot completely meet the human need for social interaction. This shortcoming has negatively impacted employee overall job satisfaction, a further negative influence on organization culture. One way to mediate this negative influence is through proximity.
Let’s look at the influence of proximity. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines proximity as “nearness in space, time, or relationship”. The rapid shift to a distributed workforce has forced many aspects of business into stasis, or holding pattern, with the organization’s culture being among the largest. Joann Keyton identifies the importance of organizational culture by stating, “an organization does not have a culture, it is culture”. Therefore, now is the time to move out of the holding pattern and improve performance through proximity.
Even though communications methods have changed, it is still possible to develop proximity through the relational aspect of communications. This means team members need to communicate with intentionality. Managers must work with their teams to build a common understanding and develop ways that allow a free flow of ideas to promote shared learning. It is important to remember that proximity can exist even within distributed work teams.
Performance Outputs
How can team members share tools, best practices, or learning needed to meet production goals if the performance outputs are not clearly defined? Developing work standards is not just assembling metrics that make senior management happy; it must include a way to develop the team that enables them to achieve successful outcomes. The development process encompasses three points: ensuring performance outputs align with business objectives, identifying success measurements, and training.
Aligning performance outputs with business objectives is more than just a management task; it is necessary for employees as it gives them a glimpse at the overall direction the company is moving. This is especially important when team members experience ambiguity. When performance outputs are clearly defined, employees better appreciate how their work contributes to the company’s success.
Another aspect of performance outcomes is the clarity of the performance output success measures. This means that success measures are quantifiable and verifiable so that the person performing the task, or an informed observer, knows it is completed correctly.
The final point on performance outputs is employee training for new hires and process changes. Regardless of an employee’s longevity, training must focus on performance, not on information dumping. Training does not necessarily require a formal classroom setting; it can be 1-on-1 mentoring with the first-line supervisor or peer or even a job aid. Regardless of the training format, team members need to know what they will learn, why it is crucial to their job, and the necessary actions or steps. Once the skill has been trained, time must be given to employees to practice the new task/skill until they are proficient. Bottom-line, the task/skill must identify what will be accomplished, what is needed to complete the task, and a clear outcome standard.
Conclusion
The situations of the past two years have had a tremendous impact on how companies conduct business. To help you in your return to routine, we recommend focusing on ways to develop shared learning to improve performance. Look for ways to build the relational aspects of communications to promote employee proximity and your organization’s culture and align performance outputs with business objectives.
Please connect through an email, phone call, or LinkedIn invitation, so we can help your company improve performance through consulting, recruiting, and training.
- Managing the explosion of digital tools, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (2022)
- Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed. p. 6
- https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/face-to-face-communication
- https://www.arthurholm.com/the-magic-of-working-face-to-face/
- https://work.life/blog/face-to-face-communication-in-business/
- https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/performance-standards
- https://www.freshbooks.com/hub/productivity/what-are-performance-standards
- https://growthmastery.net/performance-standards/
