Why Micro-Experiences Are The Lifeblood Of Your Culture

When I was 18 I worked in a counting house in a bank in the UK. Everyday was spent in a light saturated, window-less, airless, heavily fortified office counting thousands of pounds worth of cash. At 11am, we would down tools, have a cup of tea and listen to Our Tune on Radio 1. Our Tune was essentially a really sad story, with a happy (sometimes sad) ending. The Glasgow Times labelled it as ‘dial-a-depression’, yet listening to it and then breaking down how we felt about it was something that we did as a team every day.

Still at the bank, but some years later, a group of us went 10-pin bowling. We had bonded over the pool table in the staff room and decided that we’d like to try our hands at something different, whilst still socialising as a team. We loved the experience so much that we decided to form a team and join a business league. We didn’t win the league (which I’m still sore about!), but we created stories and relationships that further enhanced the way we worked together.

In my first senior management role in New Zealand I recognised early on that as a team we were often working on — and stressed about — our own things (as is natural) without any of the other team members knowing about it. In those pre-stand up days we instigated a ‘Chourei’. I’d read about it in a book about Japanese culture. It’s a morning routine to help employees to better understand each other’s workday. There was no time limit, but the emphasis was on speed and knowledge sharing. It brought us closer together and actually led to a greater sharing and understanding of workloads.

Also in New Zealand, one team that I led wanted to have more courageous conversations to enhance the products and services that we delivered to clients. In order to facilitate this we introduced Honest Half Hour sessions. These ‘Triple-H’ meetings were purely centred around providing feedback to each other. What’s going well? What’s one opportunity that you have? They were clunky and challenging to begin with, but after a few weeks the conversations started happening naturally and we were able to disband the Triple-H meetings.

In one organisation that I worked with last year the CEO wanted to improve his visibility so we implemented monthly ‘Chat with the Chief’ sessions. Anyone could book in and the numbers were limited so that everyone got an equal amount of facetime and opportunity to ask questions. The CEO shouted coffees and biscuits and talked openly about the organisation, its culture, goals, challenges, risk and opportunities.

Other organisations have their own cultural micro-experiences, for example:

• Google holds bureaucracy busting days to find ways to remove wasteful process
• Atlassian (and others) hold regular hackathons to stimulate creativity
• Admiral Group has a Ministry of Fun that organises social activities
• Zappos has quarterly all-hands meetings which are followed by food trucks and beers (I’ve been to one, it was awesome!)
• National Instruments (and others) have an award scheme for people to recognise the good behaviours of their colleagues
• Bankwest launched an ‘Orange Juice’ podcast that focused on what staff members were working on across the organisation.

Given that workplace culture is evolutionary an organisation should not only take the time to define its culture but also ensure that micro-experiences exist to maintain the vibrancy of it. They need to be well planned and add value (technical and emotional) to staff to ensure that engagement in them stays high.

To take the legwork out of creating these micro-experiences yourself I’ve written a book about them and you can be one of the first in the world to get a copy! Culture Hacks will officially be released on February 1st 2021, I have secured a limited supply of early copies, which you can get before Christmas and I’ll happily sign and personalise ylour copy.

It would obviously make a great Christmas present for that person in your life that often talks about how good/bad their workplace culture is or else provide you with a much needed dose of inspiration as we head into 2021.

You can take your knowledge of what it takes to build great culture and create micro-experiences that keep people engaged to the next level by joining our community of almost 500 practitioners from around the world.

Click here to order your copy!