Inside Out Culture

Your Culture Questions Answered: Measuring Culture, Banter, Generations and more!

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 5

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On this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we are answering your questions. The issues that people face differ from industry to industry and business to business, so we look at the most pressing issues and provide insights into the things that you can do.

Specifically we look at:

  • Getting started on culture
  • Talking about culture
  • Banter
  • Measuring culture
  • Generational differences
  • Hiring to enhance culture

Don't forget that you can submit your questions for our next questions episode by using the email address below.

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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.

Instagram: @insideoutculture

Email your questions to: insideoutculture@gmail.com

Receive the Culture Leaders Action Sheet: bit.ly/iocpmail

Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis and I'm Cath.

Cath:

Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think.

Cath:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast. I'm Cath Bishop.

Colin:

And I'm Colin Ellis, and on this episode we are going to be answering your questions. Now I don't know about you, Cath, but every time I do a speech at a conference or a workshop, I'm always asked lots of questions, actually actually thinking about it. The two questions I get asked most is when I speak in australia, people say you say you're from liverpool, but where does your liverpool accent gone? So I have to then go what you're talking just right here.

Colin:

I just haven't used it and then, when I speaking in Europe, people ask me if I can get them an Australian visa. So we should do a show about stereotypes. Not all Liverpoolians have bags full of passports and visas. But, joking aside, yeah, lots of culture questions. I think that there are very specific questions that people have at a moment in time. Here's a thing that I'm dealing with. Is that something you get asked lots of questions as well.

Cath:

Yeah, definitely, and I think it's almost. Sometimes people don't have space to go, and what we want to create actually is that space where you can ask a question that you might feel stupid to ask, or there's just no gap on the agenda to ask. So I do find people have questions, but they're nervous about them. Is it a good culture question or should I be asking this? So, yeah, that's really part of the reason for doing the podcast, isn't it To create a space for us to have conversations about culture?

Cath:

And one of the things that I notice with questions about culture is there often isn't a right or wrong answer, and that's why sometimes people find culture different or difficult. And it certainly is slightly different from other finite parts of the job where you're just getting stuff done and ticking off tasks and adding up profit margins. It is different and we need to be in a different mindset. So sometimes I find also that questions come and they want some silver bullet, some magic answer, and so often I find that I need to reframe the answer and we might be sort of thinking about yeah, what's the premise behind the answer and how might we want to look at it differently, rather than say here's your answer and that's the beauty for me, that's the fascination around culture is that it actually gives us space to explore and find out how we might shape our cultures to be even better than they are.

Colin:

Yeah, and often it's not. Often it's just not linear. The answer is never a linear thing. You know, whenever someone asks me a question I'm dealing with this issue right now I always need some context. I always need to understand well, where are you at a point in time. You know what's happening in and around you right now. What aspiration does your organization have? You know what do you feel that the root cause is? But organisation have you know what do you feel that the root cause is? But I definitely think that you know, and we're really encouraging people to email us at insideoutculture, at gmailcom, any questions that you have. We won't kind of name you. If you want to give us contacts, that's great. We won't name you. We'll say oh, I have a question here from Keith at Coventry Hospital who says my leaders like we won't do that, but you know. But just let us know what your question is. If there's a little bit of context and we're more than happy to answer it on the show.

Cath:

Great, so let's kick off.

Colin:

Let's kick off. I've got one for you, Cath, straight away. Let's just get straight into it. So if culture isn't part of what I do and I know that it should be where do I start?

Cath:

Yeah, that's a good question, isn't it? The thing is, often in our organizations we're not spending time on this, we're not scheduling it, we're not putting it in the electronic calendar. We've got a meeting about the tasks, about the next stage of the project, but we're not always thinking about how, and so I guess that's where I would start is to say what you want to be asking and thinking about is how does stuff get done? Not what are you doing, but how. So the first thing really is to observe and start to understand and maybe, thinking back to your black book from the first episode, maybe start writing down a few things so you might take a particular way in which you do things. You might look at decision making. You might look at how you share feedback, how you communicate in times of stress, and just think how do we do it?

Cath:

So, does everyone have a voice? Who speaks first? Who makes the ultimate decision? What does it feel like as a conversation? How honest are people? You become like an observer. First of all, get curious about your culture and start noting down behaviours and certain situations, perhaps things where you feel a bit uncomfortable, or things where you feel really energised and motivated and think what was it that created that? It won't be the task. It will be the experience that you've created with your colleagues around it. So get curious, start noticing behaviors and writing down how things get done.

Colin:

Yeah, that's a great answer and I think for me that's how I started as a manager is just one of those little moments we call it employee experience these days, but there's often it isn't a demonstrable experience, it isn't all written down. So I completely agree. What are those micro experiences that kind of make up your working day? So, yeah, that's a great, great way to start OK.

Cath:

Next question so right, this is one that comes up a lot, so I'm really interested in your answer. Is banter still okay?

Colin:

Oh, wow, we're getting straight into the difficult ones. So banter I mean, the short answer is yes, and, and there's an and. So banter if you're not familiar with it, it's where you exchange, I suppose, remarks or comments in a playful way, I would say, except that's not always been the case with banter. Now, the thing with banter is that I said yes, anne, yes, it is still possible, providing that there are strong relationships, that there's an understanding of how to behave today, not five years ago, not 10 years ago, not 15 years ago, that it's within the context of what you do, and you've made some agreements, you've made some agreements of what's appropriate, what's not, and you've really. You know, one of the things that I do a lot is create team agreements and you do it all within those team agreements. But banter really requires understanding at a personality level. It requires that you understand each other, it requires that you're self-aware, it requires trust, it requires, like I said, a commonality, and bantering one team will be completely different to bantering another team. I've worked with teams where they've maybe teased each other in a particular way and then they've gone and worked with another team and they're like oh, this team's completely different. Everyone's so touchy and I was like well no, because you had established relationships over here, you had a common language. You can't lift and drop that. We can't copy culture. Everybody's kind of subculture is slightly different.

Colin:

I think where it starts to get into a real gray area is where people see demeaning people, harassing people, as banter, or using words to threaten and harass, or inappropriate language. Oh, this is all banter. You know, I still hear Cath and you probably heard it yourself people are too touchy these days. Oh, you can't say anything. You know generationally, you can't say anything these days. But there hasn't really been that recognition. That kind of things have moved on. There are certain things you can say, there are certain things you can't say. There's still some people who kind of hark back to what they think is the good old days. But yes, banter is still possible. The best teams, the most vibrant cultures have heaps of fun and often there are those little comments at each other's expense, but it's done in a real playful way. There's never a need for an apology afterwards because the team agreement is in place of how they work together and behave.

Cath:

Yeah, so it's trust first, isn't it? I definitely find that there have been quite a few cultures where there hasn't been great diversity and then when you bring other people into the team, the banter continues, but it really doesn't land well because you haven't got the relationships, you're not thinking about the impact that it now has on a broader set of people, and we've seen a lot in the news about, in the UK, for example, banter in the army being used in a very bullying way, in a very misogynistic way, and so you know we need to be really alive to that. So I think I feel that you know, let's start building trust and thinking about building trust, and then sometimes, you know, banter common language can evolve from that and be very powerful. But just focus on deepening those relationships first.

Colin:

Yeah, and what I would add to that, Cath, is that language evolves social culture. So social culture is part of the fabric of which we build our working culture, kind of what happens in our days outside of work. It evolves all of the time. Social culture doesn't just stop. Language doesn't just stop at a point in time when we're born and you know people often say, oh, I'm just not comfortable to say things anymore. That's all part of the education process. It doesn't matter how old we are. If you want to be relevant in today's world, you constantly have to educate yourself on what you know, kind of what's appropriate, what's not, how to talk about things. I think sometimes we have a set and forget mindset when it comes to work is this is the way that I'm used to working and we see it in hybrid work. This is the way that I'm used to working and so this should always be the way, when that's simply just not true.

Cath:

So context matters, right. Next question.

Colin:

Context definitely matters, yeah. Question three oh, this one that comes up all the time, kat. How do I measure culture?

Cath:

Oh, yes, I think we probably need a whole episode on this one. It's really important because often the metrics that we have don't measure culture, and that's part of why we're not noticing it, valuing it, developing it, shaping it, understanding it, and part of that is because we have a real love of short-term quantitative metrics. We count stuff and things, not human experiences. So, for me, meaningful measurement of culture requires us to start looking much more qualitative data so people's experiences, how they're feeling the impact, their emotions, their reactions, and to be really listening, and so that requires a very different process. You're not going to shovel that in a spreadsheet. It's about really thinking. The numbers you have got actually have a whole set of human stories behind them. Do you know what they are? Are people burnt out in delivering this set of quarterly figures, or are they super engaged, innovating and ready to go and perform even higher in the next quarter? So you need to understand the stories behind the figures that we collect and start to get better at qualitative measuring, and that can mean a lot of things.

Cath:

Now the interesting thing is that often people want a framework, and I find they say tell me how to measure it, like there's one measure. There isn't one measure because it's complex. It's about all of us, our behaviors, our norms, our mindset, our feelings, our experiences, and so we can't get that all in one snapshot. So you often have to evolve what you're measuring, ask different questions snapshot. So you often have to evolve what you're measuring, ask different questions, constantly ask yourself what else matters that I don't know about yet, that I need to find out about, and so the process of actually creating your measures is as powerful as understanding then the stories that come out.

Cath:

So the process of and it takes some time with teams, because it actually requires you to think what do we really want to achieve? What's the impact that we want to have on others, in our business, with our customers? What's the impact that we want to the experience we want to create as a team? So it's often a brilliant process for getting really clear on that, which can then enable you know it can be a brilliant building block for sustained performance and brilliance.

Cath:

So it's a very helpful process, but you don't want to rush that conversation. In itself, that conversation has huge value, so we've got to think qualitative. We need to be thinking about how we get under the surface at the stories, and it's also not about how do we prove everything's okay, because I've heard that quite recently as well. How do we get the information that says everything's okay? We've got lots of complex human beings in our organization and they'll have good days and less good days, so we shouldn't be trying to prove everything's okay. We need to be seeking to understand the genuine stories, listening, understanding and then thinking okay, what could I do that would shape the environment to help people have an even better experience?

Colin:

It's a perfect blueprint for how you should measure culture, and yet most people certainly in my experience shovel into a spreadsheet I love that phrase they do. It's like what's our engagement score? Let's ask everybody a million questions generate heaps of disengagement in order to get a score. I think you're absolutely spot on. I'm a big fan of pulse surveys short, sharp. What's that feeling right now? I think that too many surveys ask too many questions. When shorter is better. I think organizations need to, especially now reputationally. I'm doing a speech on Thursday about cultural reputation. Governance, which is a big one for leaders and boards is they need to pay attention to the Glassdoor score. So Glassdoor is a website where employees talk about their experiences, and so there's now an external measure of culture, because it's not a black box, as we've said in previous podcasts. But you're absolutely right, those qualitative measures are key.

Cath:

Typically, boards don't actually have good data at the moment on their culture. They're responsible and if there's a reputational crisis, it's going to land at their door and they'll have to bring in some independent reviewer to look at the culture, because they don't actually know. They might have a staff engagement survey, but that is just the tiny, tiniest bit. In fact, really it's a hint about what you need to find out more about. You need to then dig underneath it, not look at engagement survey and go, oh great, well, let's just get 5% higher in some of these areas next year. Really understand what has led people to score this high and to score this lower. We want to find out about both those things. So, yes, there's a lot to do to change the information that senior leadership and boards get on this. Okay, let's move on. Next question this is for you, and I think this is one you've thought about a lot, so I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on this. How do we bridge gaps between generations?

Colin:

It is, and I'm doing a talk on this tomorrow night. I did one last week on generation. How timely is this? So the short answer is is start talking about difference. Most people still just generally don't understand generations. You know, often we'll hear people say, oh, they're different generation. I was like, okay, well, you know, what generation do you think they were born in? And there are four generations in the workforce for the first time ever. We've never had four generations in the workforce because of the extension of the retirement age, because people are getting into work earlier as well. So we've got baby boomers, we've got Generation X, we've got millennials, we've got Generation Z and, of course, a generation.

Colin:

We're kind of brought together by the world events that shaped us really and the things that we had access to, the things that we didn't have access to, and, of course, a big part of this is how we were raised by our parents, and typically for those I'm a father myself, Cath, I know that you're a parent is what we do is we take our own experiences and we say I will do this, I won't do that. And then we, you know, we kind of look at what's happening within the social context and we say, okay, well, this is how we'll bring our children up. But managers don't really understand this. You know, I've said this in the past. I feel for managers because they're never really given the skills to create great culture. They're never. There's never a program. There are leadership development programs but there's not really anything that gives them the practical skills on how to build culture, because it's not as simple as putting everybody into a box either and saying, right, okay, so you were born in 2013,. Therefore, you're Generation Z. You can't do that because there's also your personality, there's also kind of where you were born and the family and all of these kinds of things that shape us.

Colin:

So I think, taking the time to actually build connection and talk about, well, you know, kind of, what was your upbringing, what shaped you, how familiar are you with technology, what language you use? You know, I had a manager who said to me last week, after I did this talk, he said do I have to change the way that I speak? I was like well, absolutely not. We're not asking you to work against your biology, but you have to be cognizant of the different language, the different terminology, the different ways that technology is used. And he then went on to say, oh, management's getting harder, which you know.

Colin:

I replied well, managing other people's kids has always been hard, but it's what you're paid to do and it's your job to understand the nuance within each generation without putting people into a box. You know, for me, as soon as you look for ways to create division, then you've got literally no chance of setting up a vibrant culture. But you know what are those events that shaped kind of the baby boom generation, the Generation X, you know millennials and Gen Z and just have an open conversation about. You know, this is what I'm familiar with. These are the experiences and I don't think we put enough time We've talked about this before, Cath we don't put enough time within our organizations to actually create those relationships and create that level of understanding.

Cath:

Yeah, I love that.

Cath:

I'm still really thinking about your comment early on where you were saying that so much of our upbringing impacts on how we parent, how we lead, how we manage others, and I always think about that when I'm doing work, developing teams, thinking about the first team we experience is our family or the environment we're brought up in, and that has a huge impact on how we see power relationships influencing.

Cath:

And if we're brought up in and that has a huge impact on how we see power relationships influencing, and if we're not careful, we could be taking some bad habits as well as, hopefully, some good habits from our childhood. But do we really stop and think about it? Gosh, am I like acting out almost how I would with a sibling when I'm feeling defensive about something, and a lot of that goes on. So we have this kind of incongruence between being intellectually very clever as an engineer or a lawyer, whatever our technical skills is, but potentially behaving still a bit like a teenager. So we need to really understand our behaviors. Don't we Think about the impact on others and bring that lens to work alongside our technical, cognitive, intellectual lens?

Colin:

Yeah, and I've long been a fan of reverse mentoring. So this is where you take different people from different generations. You know, I remember working with the CEO of an organization I think it was in New Zealand and he he said I'm afraid of what I don't know in today's generation, and so I paired him with someone who was 20, who just started, and they created this relationship based on different viewpoints, how they saw the world, how they saw social events. You know, one of the things that's in our workplaces right now is employee activism.

Colin:

It's not something that, cathy, you and I are both Generation X. It's not something that we were familiar with outside of the union movement. But employee activism is where, as employees, you get together and say we don't agree with what the organization's standpoint on this particular thing, and it really opened his eyes. He was just like I would never have done that as an employee. I would never have pushed back on my organization and told the CEO I disagreed with him. I said well, you know that's the world has changed, as we see it as our responsibility as humans, not just from an environment perspective, but also from a global events perspective, to actually question what our organization is doing in the world.

Cath:

Yeah, and there's a. There's a book that I think I might've mentioned one before once before which is coming out. It's by Megan Wright and John Higgins and they wrote a book Speak Up, I think about 2018, 2019. But they've got a second edition coming out and it has extra chapters around employee activism, which is part of Megan Wright's speciality of research at Asridge. So look out for that. That's coming out, this whole concept of, yes, having a voice, having autonomy at work, which is really crucial to motivation and to making sure we get the best ideas from everyone in the organisation. But it can feel something that leaders and managers might feel nervous about, when really we want them to get excited about.

Colin:

Okay, next question, Cath, for you. No one talks about culture at work. Imagine that no one talks about culture at work. How can I start a conversation about it?

Cath:

It wouldn't happen if we were there, would it?

Colin:

It wouldn't be a problem. Oh, definitely not. We'd be talking about it too much, can?

Cath:

we just get on with some work. Yeah, let's go do some tasks, Cath Colin. So yeah, it's a good one, because actually it is an issue. The rhythm of work is so task obsessed that there's all these unspoken experiences going on that everyone's aware of but no one's talking about, and it's the elephant in the room how we do things. So how do we start to, yes, recognize the elephant, sort of lift the lid of what's happening underneath that we all go home and think about and are painfully aware of?

Cath:

I think one of the tools that is of most help for us in terms of conversations and behaviors is to think about learning and to keep using the word how. So I'm probably going to say this quite a lot in lots of our conversations, the word how is your friend when you're thinking about culture. We tend to just think about what, the tasks and when, the deadlines. But culture gives you a way of thinking about how you're going to do those tasks and it gives you a way to continually improve and a way to learn. So if we can think about how we do something, then we start to recognize the culture we have and we can then start to think about well, how will we do it better next time, because the way to improve is not just to do more work, work longer hours, do more tasks. It's often about doing your tasks with greater quality, creating more value, collaborating, making sure you've had the conversations you need to have, open and honest and challenging early to avoid problems later down the line. So I think to start having conversations where we say how could we do something better, let's just review, reflect how we did something last time and we can look at sort of little moments in time so you just start again with a small error and you might say how could we improve the way we make decisions so that everybody's even clearer about where we end up, so that we make sure all the diverse views that we've carefully recruited into this team are fed into that decision, to make sure we're then really fully aligned afterwards. Or you might just take something small but regular, like your team meetings, and say I like our team meetings, but I wonder if we could do them even better. How might we make them better? And I reckon everyone will have two or three points about how you could make them better.

Cath:

And once we start to involve people's views and we start to notice how then people will want to join in that conversation. It's not that we haven't noticed it. We sort of subconsciously take it in, maybe even consciously. When things are difficult, we all have those feelings of discomfort, of awkwardness, of embarrassment, of oh, I'm really uncomfortable with the way something's been phrased. We all have those moments. They're happening in our bodies. Often there's a physiological reaction we blush, or our temperature goes up slightly, or our hands get a bit sticky, and so it's really starting to help conversations about how, and a good way to do it is to get that sense of how can we do something better?

Cath:

How else might we do it? What alternative is there to the way we currently do something? So learning is your friend. Learning is what we like to see in our cultures, because it creates that sense of momentum and personal growth and development and performance, and so you know, it sets off a whole positive chain of behaviors, and so I that's how. That's what my recommendation would be for starting a conversation. Start thinking about learning and asking some more how. Questions.

Colin:

And I love the team meeting. Cath, an initiative I understood with one team a couple of years ago. We had on the a standing item on the agenda called One Thing, and every month it was a monthly team meeting. Every month they had to pick one thing that they were going to work on within the team, and I specifically remember they had already started to think six months out and it was like emails, number of meetings, emails and meetings for corporates still but it was also about feedback. It was like what's one thing that we want to address, what's one thing that we can improve on to help us get better at doing what we do, and so I love that idea. I think that's really great.

Cath:

Okay, last question, colin how do we hire people who can improve our culture?

Colin:

Yeah, of course it's a great question. You know, building a vibrant culture, when you actually take the time to methodically build a culture and making it sound like a long process it needn't be a long process, but what it becomes is a magnet for great employees. So I think you know how do you hire people to improve our culture. Well, the first thing you do is build a great culture in the first place, and I'm not just talking about writing about culture on a website. Make it something that people talk about with their friends. What is unique about your culture? What do you do that's different? It might be slightly off the wall in terms of the activities that you undertake. I'm not talking about being wacky, but what are those things that we do to enhance employee wellness? What are those things that we do to enhance employee wellness? What are those things that we do to maintain a level of productivity but also give people a sense of purpose? And for me, the best thing that you can do is to connect it to the values that you have as an organization. We'll definitely do a show on values, because most organizations are really bad at values. I think the Maitland Group it might be about eight years ago now, they did a survey of the FTSE 100 companies in the UK and found that most of them had the same four values, like innovation, collaboration, integrity, none of which are actually values, they're just words. Integrity is what you get when you live your values. But I think when you have a strong set of values, what you can then do is use them as a basis to hire people.

Colin:

Often we hear cath is like oh, you know, we need to hire for culture fits, and that's not really a thing, because certainly, cultures are made up of lots of different subcultures, and so really, at an organization level it's at sports teams are the same. You generally got a vision, a sense of aspiration, a set of values, which is kind of emotional principles that bind us together, but then you have different ways of working with each other depending on which team you're working in, and so the interview really needs to focus on how does this person or how will this person contribute to the values of the organization? And too often I think organizations hire people because they're just desperate, they just they'll just take someone with a pulse, rather than because they've got so much work, rather than, oh, this person can really contribute in the values. You know, a great example of this is asking standard interview questions.

Colin:

Like, if you get standard, if you ask standard questions, you're going to get a standard person, someone who's revised, you know, who's very good at interviewing rather than being, you know, a little bit agile, a bit nimble, and asking people well, how they would actually contribute to values. So I think that you know what you want to do is make sure that you spend an appropriate amount of time in hiring. What are those values, what are those emotional states you're looking for? You know, for me, your CV gets you an interview, but it's your personality and it's your contribution to values that gets you the job, and they are, then, the people that can really add to your culture.

Cath:

Yeah, that's a great phrase, so I definitely echo that. Get away from the CV. Once you're in the interview, CVs really only tell you about access to education. They're really quite narrow. They won't help you find out about culture. So you need to ask some different questions and I think then you're right. The values focus for me is part of understanding the intrinsic motivation. So what are the things that are going to motivate you to do your best work? And so asking questions around purpose and values, learning. So what are the things? How do you want to grow and develop? What do you want to learn? What do you want to get better at? And asking that sense of what are the things that would help you to feel you belong. When have you felt that you belong to a group before you know? Get that sense of how a person tunes in to groups and communities in their life and the sorts of things that they will bring to and kind of contribute to your community at work. So, yeah, get away from the CV. Intrinsic motivation and values.

Colin:

Okay, well, that's it for our first questions episode. Cath, that was some really gnarly questions in there, but what we want to do is really encourage people to email us. You know we'd like to do these episodes regularly. We recognize that there are people out there with a burning question. Often you don't know who to turn to, so why not, Cath and I? You can email us at insideoutculture at gmailcom.

Cath:

Yeah, brilliant. We hope some of those answers were helpful. We'd love to hear more feedback and thank you for testing us. Pretty tough questions, too. Fantastic. Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture.

Colin:

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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