I’m starting this section off with an introduction to what’s meant by business culture, how it can differ in technical areas, and a quick summary of what I’ve seen and how it fits into the overall story of this blog.

“Business Culture” is one of those buzzwords almost every American company is attempting to define and advertise, but what it actually means to the people within the hierarchy can be kind of confusing. Harvard Business Review defines it as a set of 6 components: Vision, Values, Practices, People, Narrative, and Place. This is a reasonable enough framework to begin with — the biggest problem with this, however, is the transfer of these components for top level to bottom level.

As companies become more and more international, as well as more and more connected on social media, Vision and Value Statements are popping up everywhere. Everybody’s got one. Or two. Or several. Or a list, trying to influence what you think of when you think of That Company.

These sorts of business culture statements need to be read two ways. First, they’re the company’s way of telling their customers / consumers who they are and what they are about: a type of “soft advertising”, posed as a set of reasons to do business with Company A instead or B or C. This external view gives context to these kinds of statements, but I find business culture has a much more significant impact internally – to the employees on the floor.

I’ve worked with crews from the bottom up. And when you’re the pair of hands out on the floor, opening valves and taking samples and fixing leaks, you end up making your own company culture, because the vision statements never end up being translated effectively down to those levels. This creates conflict, every time. I’ve never seen a site whose technicians and operators and maintenance crew work happily, hand-in-hand, smoothly and efficiently, with the engineers and managers and scientists they should be working with.

You end up with a company culture that has layers, usually by level but occasionally by department, and layers create boundaries which create silos – roadblocks standing in the way of an optimized workplace.

The problems here unfold into a number of problematic situations. Upper management and executive leaders need to figure out how to transfer the company’s values and vision into something meaningful; middle management is stuck between what always seems like the “lofty” statements from above and the “gritty” talk below; and individual contributors end up judging their own work and research, unsure what aligns with their own goals and what they’re supposed to be working on.

This is especially impactful for technical industries. Engineers and scientists have a mind of their own, and on top of that, R&D work is such a well-known but poorly-defined career that it almost always ends up confusing the issue more rather than less. Someone with a business degree can say “We want a green production site,” but ask the engineering manager with the budget and they’ll tell you we have to buy the used pump rather than the new, more efficient one, because said executive management is cutting the budget. That’s just one example of how miscommunicated these things can be — and how technical managers need to learn to interpret vision-speak into concrete things their employees can do.

This category will also hit on toxic workplaces. I ended up in one. In the end I learnt a lot about how they work and what I would do over if I had the chance, but it took a huge toll on me that I’m still recovering from, over two years later. It’s very easy to get caught up in a sick system; I feel it’s important to recognize if you’re there.