The “culture” of free food and beer, birthday cakes, office parties and open floor plans
Last week has been interesting. Not just because of the usual webinars, online interviews and potential collaboration related conversations. But, because “culture” came up as a topic of conversation; and the repetitive occurrence makes me write this irreverent piece which might lose me some friends.
Often, “collaborative” is how companies, and their HR personnel describe their company culture. The supporting words that surround “collaborative,” are insightful, supportive, passionate, entrepreneurial, borderless, intrapreneurial, unafraid etc. If you argued that these adjectives are more relevant to the people these companies hope (will) work for them, rather than being indicative of a culture itself, you are spot on. Culture statements, tend to reside on web sites, sit comfortably under the recruitment banner and are spewed often by HR with serious conviction.
A company’s culture is of particular interest to potential job seekers, and companies are quick to tout benefits as culture (e.g., free unlimited food, birthday cakes, celebrating heritage of employees). But do these elements really add up to a organizational culture? What does culture actually mean? Is culture anything more than a buzzword for companies?
What is Culture?
Well, that is the question, I want to answer. Or at least provide an opinion on, using cultural and corporate anthropology.
Edward Burnett Tylor, the founder of cultural anthropology, defined culture as “…the complete whole, including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a person as a member of society…”. Of course, multitudes of factors influence the formation of culture. Culture manifests in the social fabric such that it orients interactions of humans (of other social animals as well); it is bound by the roles that we occupy and how we interact with each other; and it grows and adapts to the accepted norms of the time. It is in our food and drink and how we acquire the ingredients; the language(s) we speak and how we teach our children to read and write; it is the clothes we wear, when and where we wear them, and how those clothes are crafted; it is the houses we live in, the way the bricks are made, and how much effort and care is used to fire those bricks. It is the expectations we have of our policemen, firemen, nurses, doctors, teachers, postmen and pourakarmikas and how much we respect them. One can choose to divide and sub divide, into homogenous pockets. And these pockets may have a culture, and a sub culture but they, overall, ultimately answer to their mainstream cultural ethos.
What is, then, Culture in an Organization?
Of the usual types (and I am using just four) one finds, a handy classification is as below:
Process Culture: These situations are usually hierarchy driven. One can tell by the type of furniture, seating areas and the type of dressing. This is usually a low input condition; chances of transformation are low. One would usually find this type in Finance, Accounting, Insurance, Healthcare type of environments.
Hero Culture: Individual workers take high risks, get quick feedback on their actions. This is visible in advertising, and professional sports.
Work Hard, Play Hard Culture: People here get quick feedback as well, but the risks are lower. This would be a sales organisation.
The Bet Your Company Culture: is the other extreme with slow feedback and high risk. These usually are behemoth traditional industry companies e.g. Deere & Co, Exxon, Reliance and (some say) IBM types.
These classifications, then, allow a premise to discuss corporate culture and tell you why culture is much more than the spiel on web sites. This isn’t the way the organisations sell themselves, nor is the way potential recruits make a choice. But, these classifications help us understand the tenets around culture.
To begin with, each of these is a fragment of an entirety. While they are contained inside themselves, for an organization to be fruitful, they are expected to interweave. Process culture in a group may help control contracts, but the organization also needs the work hard play hard group to go win deals. In this way, though not dominantly characteristic of an organization, they give us a structure from which we can discern how these groupings emerge.
Second, all hierarchical groupings are are established towards furthering a mission for the organization. This speaks to the public facing objective that the organization needs all its people to move towards. The manner in which the organization energizes and strengthens its people towards this objective, and the way these people exert themselves speaks about the organiztion’s way of life. This exertion from the individuals is symptomised by the connections that exist between people.
Another anthropologist, Victor Turner referred to establishment of networks as a mechanism to provide human security. This thought of communitas is unmistakable from the organized monetary, political, and legal frameworks that administer public society and activity. The unstructured components often move, reform, get reordered or rebalanced. Thus activities, practices and connections are administered by communitas—the associations we have with one another. This is an arrangement of one employee inside his /her own network. This network, then, enables in its own way (or not) codification and diffusion of information (or knowledge).
Progression matters.
And in industrialised social orders, your title or job role can go on to be a marker for your personality in the work environment. Your being a software engineer, or a business analyst, or a medical intern, or a first officer has a reflection on your informing others about yourself. Perhaps a series of characteristics, and what to expect from you.
In an organization, these put you somewhere in a pecking order, in an heirarchy, mentions what your “JD” is. This uniqueness draws you nearer to individuals who resemble you, and with whom you might have shared objectives. The JD (implying boundaries) is set by the organization, yet the individuals involved shape what it means to others, and to the organization.
If you, luckily, happen to be in (say) the Innovation CoE of a company, your methods of working would be different from those in other groups and also of those in Innovation CoEs in other companies but aligned to your company’s objectives (hopefully). You, inside the larger company community, will, likely, be representative of your CoE. But inside the CoE, there will be your individuality shining in the communitas. In a scenario where boundaries are clear, especially for development and improvement and individuals see how they can progress, people will try to help their communitas develop to help their own hierarchical objectives. This is significant, isn’t it? While the organization’s public facing objectives matter, individuals continually arrange their characteristics to sync with extended accepted practices, to further their own goals.
So free food, beer, birthday cakes, office parties or open floor plan aren’t culture?
No. These are benefits. Some individuals, when talking about their working environment, may state that their colleagues resemble family. This is common to smaller groups where members have to cooperate with almost everyone else in the group, and for relatively shorter time frames. This sentiment of closeness arises out from a mutual feeling of communitas, and reinforced by little ceremonies that are just conceivable in small gatherings. You will notice these ceremonies happening in sub-groups of larger companies. These are social markers really.
Additonally, the best social markers are those that aren’t forced on workers by the organization, but are defined by representatives of the groups. These brings a sense of cohesiveness, builds trust among individuals and towards the organization. Empowering people, unlike in authorative environments where these markers are scheduled and part of a program, to build their individual and group specific markers enables these employees to beome guardians of these markers. Culture is bigger than these authoritative targets. An organization which isn’t constantly growing (not in size) won’t be able to empower its workers, or give them the tools to create ceremonies, encourage communitas and thus find it difficult to obtain support for the organization.
So the question, again, is – what is culture?
Regardless of whether intended or not, a common encounter doesn’t express solidarity. Solidarity is created by individuals acting together toward an objective. But, it is quite possible that this objective isn’t shared. It is quite conceivable that somebody is partaking in the gathering cause a personal advancement by meeting the gathering’s expectations. Individual objectives and business objectives are not necessarily interlaced. Individuals may align themselves to organization targets because employment brings (among others) monetary gains, not because they have whole heartedly bought into the organization’s statement of purpose. Nothing wrong with that. Culture can unite individuals in synergistic settings to accomplish objectives. It can, of course, also do the exact opposite.
Hierarchical culture might be driven by direction towards the other types of culture. It sits on the cusp of the relationship of the organization and the communitas inside it, and thus with the individuals therein. Essentially resource enabling workers, and remunerating their dependability establishes hierarchical culture. It isn’t something that gets named with the latest HR created fad phrase. At the point when an organization claims to have a “collective” culture, what they are really saying is that they have a solid feeling of communitas.
To end on a lighter vein, it would really help to introduce straightforward “Anthropology” credits in those MBA HR courses.
… and the question I leave you with is – What happens to culture when a majority work from home, without the open plan, without the free food, without the parties, without the birthday cakes?
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