Company Culture: Six Questions

As we enter the second year of the pandemic and companies start to talk about the new world of work there is a lot of discussion about company culture. How does culture get created and nurtured in a world where there is no “water cooler”? What is culture? How is it created? In this post I’ll outline six principles for you to consider. As you’ll see, these ideas are borrowed from many sources. Creating company culture requires Purpose, Language, Roles, Etiquette, Rituals and Place.

Purpose

Back in the late 90s, Amy Jo Kim led a cross-departmental team from marketing and engineering to define eBay’s community strategy. Based on those experiences she ended up writing a book, Community Building on the Web, which goes thru nine different design strategies for building a community. While I always thought her insights were important, they are even more important as our companies move away from enterprises organized around a central building to a distributed workforce in many places. While she uses the word “community” I’m going to also add “company”.

Her first design principle is “Communities (Companies) come to life when they fulfill an ongoing need in people’s lives. To create a successful community (company), you’ll need to first understand why you’re building it and who you’re building it for — and then express your vision in the design, navigation, technology and policies of your community (company)”

What is the purpose of your company?

Language

No culture is created without language. Language defines a tribe. The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, standardized the written language which unified China across 2,000 years. And when Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China he standardized the spoken language as well. No great cultures have evolved without a unifying language. So what is your company’s language? What words carry meaning in your business?

When we first launched Oracle’s cloud business it was at the same time Larry was preaching standardization. He was telling customers and the field not to customize Oracle’s enterprise apps. Of course everyone learned to say they weren’t customizing, they were configuring, extending, or modifying, but they weren’t customizing. After a while I was confused and went to Marian Szefler and asked him to identify every reason why a customer or consulting added or changed the software Oracle shipped. I wanted to understand every configuration, extension, modification, localization or integration. He came up with 17 different classes of reasons why customer changed the software and while I hate acronyms we named them CEMLIs., which stood for Configuration, Extensions, Modifications, Localization and Integrations. Marian used to say “I wanted to make customization a four-letter word”. Early on we had to teach people how to pronounce the new word. It’s ChemLee just to be clear. After a year we would go into meetings and people we didn’t know would tell us about how many CEMLIs their application had. More importantly we knew they were part of our tribe.

What is the language of your tribe?

Roles

About ten years ago I assembled a team of Stanford students to do a black box analysis of the famous MMORPG, World of Warcraft. We were trying to figure out how groups of people from a variety of backgrounds could come together, accomplish a goal and go away, hundreds and thousands of times. Why does it work so well in World of Warcraft, but is so difficult in the World of Work?

I won’t go into all the mechanisms we uncovered, but one important idea was every player had a role and roles were complementary, non overlapping and equally necessary. To oversimplify in World of Warcraft you needed to have warriors and healers to go kill the dragon. Warriors can’t heal. Healers can’t kill. But you need both to accomplish the goal. In addition, looking at the character you would know whether they were a Warrior and a level 60 Warrior. Specific tasks result in you be able to increase your level.

So in the new World of Work, what are the complementary, non overlapping roles in your culture? How are these visible to the team? How do you level up?

Etiquette

Again quoting from Amy Jo Kim’s book “Every community (company) has it’s share of internal squabbling. If handled well, conflict can be invigorating — but disagreements often spin out of control, and tear a community (company) apart. To avoid this, it’s crucial to develop some ground rules for participation, and set up systems that allow you to enforce and evolve your community (company) standards. “

I just returned from a board of directors meeting where the head of the product organization said s/he was beginning to see in the Slack channels, emails and texts an increasing number of negative, back biting comments. S/he said he let the community, the teams know in no uncertain terms it wasn’t acceptable.

What is your etiquette?

Rituals

Ritual is an important part of any culture. Whether that’s celebrating a graduation, a wedding, Hanukkah, or the lunar New Year. All cultures use rituals to acknowledge their community and celebrate important social transitions. We need to do this in our company cultures.

At the beginning of Covid I assembled a team to work on a moon shot project focused on connecting all 1,000,000 healthcare machines in all the children’s hospitals in the world to create a digital infrastructure that will transform children’s healthcare. We were scattered across the country, so while many people knew each other, we also wanted to establish our own rituals. So now, at every all hands meeting we start with the question of the day. It’s already called QOTD. Every meeting begins with one of the team members asking the question and then calling on the rest of the team to answer it. Questions include: Can you teach curiosity? What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received? What historical event would you most like to have experienced? Would you rather be able to control space or time and why?

What rituals do you have?

Place

Finally, Amy Jo Kim’s 2nd design principle is to build flexible, extensible gathering Places. She writes “To build a successful community (company), you’ll want to set up gathering places that reinforce your purpose and meet the needs of your target audience. And to accommodate growth, you’ll need to start small and let your employees have a hand in the evolution of your community (company)”

We all know there has been a significant investment in our corporate physical spaces. The Silicon Valley beanbag chairs, open spaces, ping-pong tables and espresso machines have been widely replicated globally. But as we move into this new hybrid world, what does place mean in the virtual world. A few of my former Stanford students think they have an answer. Nooks was born from their experiences working at startups while studying computer science and going through the transition to remote work and learning. Almost overnight, they saw the energy, camaraderie and culture disappear, so they decided to pioneer a new approach to address the lack of human connection. So during the pandemic they designed Nooks as a new place to do for remote workers to create a fun, energized, and connected culture. Nooks spurs creative collaboration with customizable rooms for huddles, co-working sessions, hallway chats, social hangouts, presentations and more — all in one place.

“We’re solving a sociology problem, not just a technology problem. In our hasty transition to remote work, we forgot about the human elements of working together,” said Daniel Lee, the CEO and co-founder. “Working in the same room as your team is magical — remember what it was like to have normal conversations that weren’t scheduled? Sharing an idea was as easy as turning your head. We bring that magic online.”

So what’s your new place to work?

Summary

There have been a lot of bad things caused by the pandemic, but perhaps we’re at the beginning of building more inclusive, better company cultures that are not tied to the company HQ building.