The shortcut of making Great Workplace Culture
By: Ashish Deora
Tags: Workplace, Workplace Culture, Continuous Improvement

Okra basket — photo by Mirko Sajkov from Unsplash

Since I’ve started to work from home the task of buying vegetables, fruits and groceries have been assigned to me. My parents do this job allocation and I always find some logic behind this.

In my family, always the male partner is supposed to do the shopping for daily routine items. My grandpa started this tradition, my dad followed it and now I am supposed to follow. The female partners are expected to go shopping only for specific items that need a different kind of expertise. Thus, males manage small expenses whereas females take care of special ones. Before the pandemic, I used to accompany my dad on Sunday to buy vegetables. That time I was not confident enough about my buying decisions. I used to refrain from bargaining, an essential skill for Mumbaikars. They always worried about how I will learn to buy these essentials. Because of lockdowns, I got to learn, experiment, and grow in this family tradition thing.

Though I am still far away from the decision making and eye-for-detail which my dad has, I’ve learnt some basics of it. Also acquired some bargaining skills and started to enjoy saving 5–10 rupees in every purchase. However, I am particularly proud of a recent hack created while picking Okra (Ladyfingers) from the heap. Let me explain.

Like all vegetables, for Okra, the instructions are very clear from parents. Buy small and thin Okra as they are raw and takes less time to cook (less time means saving on cooking gas). So, whenever I went to buy, let’s say half a KG of it, I had to select one by one from the heap. With the weight of other vegetables in one hand, this process usually took 3–4 tiring mins. I eventually started to hate to buy this vegetable. One day I realized my method was ineffective. Instead of selecting the ones as per specifications, why don’t I grab a handful of them in one go and pour them in my basket and then eliminate the big ones, the ones that we don’t want? This way, I ended up reducing the selection time by 3 mins. Now, in one min, I can buy 1 KG okra. I realized that “ elimination is far easier than selection “. I made my life slightly better.

Continuing on the lines of “elimination vs. selection” a very remarkable and effective strategy can be developed for creating Great Workplace culture faster. The beauty of our lives is that some tricks can be applied to an array of processes irrespective of their scale. Let’s explore one such method which leverages the hack that we saw in the example of Okra.

Fig. 1.0 — The two-by-two connecting frequency of feedback with the frequency of actions.

As a tradition, I am starting the conversation with the help of a two-by-two. In figure 1.0, we have two axes, on one we measure how frequently the organization collects feedback and on the other how frequently the organization acts on feedback.

The quadrants are self-explanatory. However, they do deserve a short description.

Static Workplace Culture: In such organizations, employee feedback is seldom collected and rarely acted upon. These organizations don’t grow at the pace of the market and competition. They find it hard to manage their top talent and ultimately struggle to keep customers satisfied. I don’t want to call out the fate these organizations meet in their eventual future. Vulnerable Organization Culture: In such organizations, the employees have more opportunities to express themselves compared to Category A. However, this high-frequency employee feedback soon fades away. Employees get the feeling that their feedback is not acted upon. Soon the employee’s lose motivation to give constructive feedback. As a result, the organizations of this category slip to the bucket of “Static Workplace”. Ineffective Organization Culture: In such organizations, the actions are taken at a much faster rate than the organizations of Category A and B. However, there’s no validation of the actions. A lot of actions that are inspired by competition guesswork, ego and books are deployed without customizations. The actions are not validated with employee feedback. As a result, many employees don’t feel the impact and eventually decide to leave. The attrition rate is generally higher in such organizations (not talking about the organizations where the attrition is high by design) Great Organization Culture: In such organizations, there’s an optimum balance between employee feedback and actions taken on feedback. The employee feedback loops are closed with actions and validation of the effectiveness of the actions. These organizations soon attain equilibrium. These are the high-trust high-performance workplace cultures with credible management and not necessarily always happy but engaged employees.

If you agree with the above classification then the following part will make sense. Otherwise, you can skip reading. I can be contacted at ashish.deora@greatplacetowork.com for discussion if you like.

This two-by-two looks extremely simple. Thankfully, many organizations have understood the importance of seeking feedback and acting on the same. The simplest thing to be done here is to make linear progress. Linear progress in this quadrant translates into episodic employee feedback surveys collected periodically. Organizations schedule once or twice a year surveys and seek feedback on parameters that define their workplace culture and business strategy. The following figure depicts this linear progress.

Fig. 2.0 — Linear progression by routinely seeking feedback and taking actions.

This linear progression is a sure way to reach the fourth quadrant. It is conspicuous and easy to follow. Because of the compounding effect, the feedback gets accumulated year-on-year resulting in amplification of actions taken. Hence, the previously collected feedback and actions are taken act as a proxy for every news cycle as a benchmark and the organization culture progresses towards being a Great Workplace Culture.

Figure 2.0 is a two-dimensional chart. Imagine in a three-dimensional space where the third axis is of time. You will realize how slow this process is. It’s a guaranteed process but very slow.

In this Pandemic hit world, the one thing we have realized is that 1 year or 365 days is a too long-time frame. Our social norms, working conditions, safety guidelines, geo-political situation, all can change too fast. Faster than a human being can understand it.

Fortunately, like many data algorithms, we can apply a strategy here which is fast as well effective.

Fig 3.0 The fastest way to achieve a great workplace culture.

What if we accelerate the frequency of collecting employee feedback. We collect a lot of employee feedback and gather all perspectives about the key parameters. Then, using analytics we conscientiously sort the ones that will have maximum impact and act on them. We eliminate the feedback that’s not required and selects the one that will make maximum impact. The actions need not be higher in number but should be impactful so that they address problems of key parameters. By doing this, the organization engage in constant dialogue with the employees and build a two-way expressway to manage employee feedback.

Two-way expressway because employees’ feedback is not just acted upon, but also gets validated for effectiveness, inclusivity and acceptability.

With this hack deployed, organizations can speed up their journey to become a great workplace. To add credibility to this strategy, organizations can partner with third-party which provide accurate necessary analytics to keep survey respondents anonymity intact.

In this case, the organization not just benchmark themselves, but can also compare themselves with the competitors and the market. And hence, taking faster decisions. It is an Agile Soft Development equivalent of Workplace Culture Development.

Lissen.io is one such product that can facilitate the deployment of this strategy. This is the fastest way of building a great workplace culture.

This hack is also useful for sustaining great workplace culture. The hack is sensitive to small changes in employee perception and flags anything that needs to be worried about. Organizations can prevent avalanches by capping the incidents and their intensity at the source itself.

Whether it’s selecting 500-gram Okra from a heap or building great workplace culture, an individual always have alternatives. And the spirit of the human race is always in the direction of developing and adopting better options and make real progress.

Note: Views expressed are personal.