Category Archives: Business Culture

What makes a workplace.

17 Feb

Business Culture: Walk the Talk

One of the biggest problems I see with today’s industry is the way that corporations rely on “communication” to convince employees that they’re on the right path.

Note: I’m certainly not digging on communication; I believe businesses should be as transparent as they possibly can, because I believe employees have the right to much more information than they’re given, especially in technical fields where executive budgeting decisions can have a huge effect on project direction. I feel like communication of a corporations goals is a bare minimum where both employees and shareholders are concerned. I think it’s a pretty low fucking standard to sincerely communicate the company’s goals in a way that makes sense. Good corporate communication is a requirement in today’s environment.

My point is this: I think that businesses have, for a variety of reasons, stopped at that low bar; in today’s world, that isn’t enough.

Too many executive boards spend too much time discussing how they are going to deliver their message: what words to use, what perfect slides to include in a brief presentation, what they want people to take away from this message. They’ve forgotten that there’s a key step after making the bold announcement: namely, the actions that will be taken to make this announcement reality.

Too many times I’ve seen management forget that ground-level employees hear words, but value actual actions ten-fold. A corporation can announce anything – and they do – but if executives are unable to explain exactly how and what is going to happen, that announcement quickly loses credence and becomes yet another slogan that was “all talk and no walk.”

It’s incredibly important for employees to hold management accountable for promises made; for middle managers to figure out ways to translate the executive vision into actual reality; and for executive management to understand and provide resources to prove to employees that they aren’t all talk. People judge on actions, not words. Anyone can put together a pretty sentence; what’s valuable is actual, real, notable change.

13 Feb

Business Culture: Sick Systems & Toxic Environments

Much of the language I use to talk about sick systems comes from this excellent piece, which gives you the analogy both for a toxic workplace and an unhealthy relationship; warnings for discussion of toxic abuse.

I’m sure all of us have brushed up against some sort of toxic environment in the workplace before. The guy who makes those comments that just make you feel a little bit awkward. The supervisor who likes to talk shit about his employees. The manager who always wants to gossip with you. The feeling that someone’s out to get you; the secretary making all the power plays she can; the person always complaining about how they do all the work — we could cast an entire movie staff with the individuals we’ve met who can ruin a workplace.

What do I mean by toxic? Well, it’s actually different from a sick system, but they can be related. A toxic workplace is hard to define, but at its core, consider the word toxic: there’s poison in the water. There’s something in the environment that’s keeping employees from trusting each other, from building real cameraderie, from being comfortable and happy at the workplace; there’s something blocking the path from the ideal. It isn’t always a concrete thing: it’s the morale, the environment, the general ambience in the workplace and the attitude of the employees.

But even if a toxic environment isn’t directly defineable, it will most certainly have an effect on employee morale, output, and dedication. It makes people difficult to work with, and can often end in a workplace adopting a set of “workarounds” to avoid having to deal with someone toxic. This seems ridiculous! It’s one of the things we’ll discuss in this category.

A sick system, on the other hand, is there to keep good employees “trapped” in this kind of environment. It depends on actual “good” employees – the ones who are invested, who really care about the workplace and the people, who are already going in hard and doing extra and working more – who end up so overworked and overloaded that they can’t even take a second to see the big picture. The trick about a sick system is that yes, you’re trapping yourself.  

Sick systems don’t always develop intentionally, either. You can find yourself stuck in that cycle of stress, always thinking you’re close to a break, that as soon as you get this one thing done everything will be better; a promise that continues to extend its deadline while you’re continually trying to meet yours. It’s a terrible feedback loop, and it’s really easy for technical folk to end up slipping into that mindset and losing the way.

This section will address both of these from employee and management points of view, talk about how to recognize and fix these sorts of environments, and how it can change the business culture for the worse.

25 Jan

Intro to Business Culture

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.