How to avoid the snapback to stagnant culture

In my previous article I talked about the opportunity that senior managers had to redefine the culture required to recover quickly from the COVID-19 crisis. The recovery is not going to happen magically or organically, deliberate effort has to be put into defining what’s required to create the foundations upon which this year’s performance can be built.

For years now, senior managers within organisations have been great at talking about culture being the most important thing and, of course, the research backs that up. How people get things done together is still the biggest contributor to an organisation’s success.

But many have neglected this in favour of quick-fix responses and these were the organisations that found it hard to change when isolation reconfigured work. Over the last eight weeks I have spoken to many senior managers and teams from around the world about how they’ve responded to the pandemic. These conversations have helped me to shape a presentation around three crucial stages all senior managers need to think about and plan for — Respond, Redefine and Recover.

Most organisations are now at the crucial second stage of redefining the culture they need to recover.

Many practices — good and bad — have revealed themselves through the response to the virus and if organisations aren’t careful, the desire to ‘get back to work’ will inevitably lead to the return of some of those poor behaviours or inefficient ways of working.

These hallmarks of stagnant cultures must be rejected as part of the culture redefinition phase and expectations reset on how to behave and work together if recovery is to be sustained.

They include:

• A lack of understanding and empathy for the working styles of others
• Change stymied by indecision or the need for constant proof
• Unproductive meetings
• Unnecessary travel
• Acceptance or tolerance of poor behaviour or performance
• A lack of management visibility or communication
• A disconnect between strategy achievement and culture development
• Inconsistent use of collaboration tools
• Over reliance on the latest management system
• Concentration on the ‘future of work’, not the ‘present of work’
• A lack of understanding around what it means to be a leader
• Over promising and under delivering
• Saying that ‘people are the most important thing’, but not acting this way.

Workplace culture continually evolves and only those organisations that take deliberate action and invest in the long-term maintenance of the way things get done consistently achieve their goals.

Culture is the sum of everyone’s attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, skills and traditions, which is why everyone needs to be involved in this exercise. Anything other than that will lead to a culture stagnation and the emotional capital that organisations have built up with their staff will be forever lost.

As an organisation you have just been through something incredibly challenging — why would you snapback when you can leap forward?