How to build a culture in your organisation that sticks
In previous blog posts, we have mentioned the importance of building a “culture” in which team members are empowered to create, handle, process and consume data safely, responsibly, and effectively.
But what is a culture, and how do you build it?
What is a culture?
Culture is a broad concept, and not at all easy to fully define, but in the context of working culture in a team we could summarise it as:
What is expected: the behaviours that members of the team should exhibit
What is acceptable: the behaviours that members of the team can exhibit
What is widely known: the knowledge that members of the team can be assumed to have
To put those in perspective, a concrete example of “What is expected” might be that if you send an email to a team member asking them to do something, they will do it as soon as they’re finished with more important tasks, or get back to you if they can’t do it. “What is acceptable” might include missing a promised deadline because a more important task interrupted them. “What is widely known” would include everything you don’t feel the need to explain in your email to a colleague, because you assume they already know, such as which of the team’s responsibilities are more important than others.
Where does “Data Culture” fit in?
At Register Dynamics, we are data experts, and as well as helping organisations build data systems we are also helping organisations build data culture. Although our clients bring us in to help with some technical data problem, that’s always part of, and surrounded by, an organisational culture; we can’t build the right technology without understanding the culture it operates within, and the right technology won’t achieve its potential unless the right culture grows around it.
In other words, we’re always helping to build good data cultures, even if that’s not an item in the Statement of Work!
But “data culture” is just the part of an organisation’s culture that relates to people’s attitudes to data within the organisation, and the development of data culture is just one part of the overall process of an organisation’s cultural development - so to build a good data culture, we must know how to build culture in general.
Where does culture come from?
Most people who have worked at a medium to large organisation will have seen failed attempts to enforce a culture. Usually, you’re all dragged away from your jobs for a day that starts with a motivating speech by some high-ranking leader who throws up a slide deck listing the Four Pillars of your new corporate manifesto. The rest of the day is a mixture of brainstorming, retrospective, and team-building exercises that, if you’re lucky, is somewhat structured around those Four Pillars, but they’re very unlikely to be thought about very often from that day onwards.
If you trace where the actual culture of a team comes from, its origin is in a very primal human emotion, at the core of how we form teams and communities and work together: shame.
The “what is expected” and “what is acceptable” parts of a working culture are there because members of that team would feel bad if they didn’t meet those expectations. Looking at the examples of team culture given above, if you forget to get around to a task you were sent, you feel bad; but you don’t feel bad if you missed it because a more important task interrupted you.
The exception is “what is widely known”; although you might feel a little embarrassed if you didn’t know something everyone else seemed to and you had to ask, the general knowledge part of a culture isn’t driven by emotion so much as being knowledge that is so often used and referenced that it’s a good bet anybody you interact with will know it unless they are new to the team.
How to build a culture
So, does that mean we should enforce culture through public humiliation, to make the team members afraid to violate our new Four Pillars or whatever we’ve called them?
No. Please don’t do that. If you try, you will suffer a tragic loss of morale, people will seek jobs elsewhere, you will create a toxic culture where people spend more effort avoiding getting into trouble than doing excellent work, and at most you will get “box-ticking” minimal compliance with the letter of your Four Pillars, not the spirit.
People will only feel bad about violating the norms of a culture if they support that culture - if they think its norms are good norms. In other words, if the team has adopted a culture, they will feel their own shame about violating it; you can’t just force that shame on people. Any attempt to do so would just be a punishment. People might fear those punishments, and avoiding them will become more important than doing what’s actually good for the team.
For a start, give up any dreams of forcing a culture on people from the top down; cultures develop on their own. The best a leader can do is to steer the development of that culture, by encouraging it to grow in directions that are good for the team. Here are a few techniques that might help:
Start the conversation
As soon as you have two or more people, a culture will have already developed. But if you are at the start of, or in the process of, growing that team, you may well want to reflect on that culture and decide what it’s missing or what’s not good about it so you can guide its development in a better direction. If you already have a massive organisation, cultural change will be a lot harder - but not impossible.
So by all means get together and pick a list of things you think should be held dear to the team; if your team is small, involve everybody in this, and if it’s too big to be able to spare everybody for a half-day workshop, pick widely respected and trusted members to represent the team.
Whatever culture has developed already will probably have a lot of good points, but it’s probably lacking in big-picture thinking. People will naturally develop good cultural practices around the things they know about, but this is where cultural guidance from a leadership team is valuable, rather than an annoyance; it can identify the cultural gaps that can only be seen when you look at the organisation as a whole.
Just make sure that what you come up with is practical, rather than idealistic. Rather than “We will always be on the leading edge, keeping up with and adopting the latest industry trends and techniques in data management” - a bit of a burden for, say, somebody working in your customer support call centre; and do you necessarily want to adopt all the latest trends? - how about just “We will keep an eye on new developments in data, and be ready to adopt new technology when it might be useful to us”.
Our emphasis here is on “data culture”, helping teams and organisations develop in a way that makes the best use of data, but bear in mind that this just refers to the aspects of your organisation’s culture that pertain to data. Don’t try and create a separate “data culture” manifesto; you need to include data alongside security, quality, personal development, and the other things that are important.
And when you’ve come up with a list you like, by all means have an away day to present them to everybody, but be sure to present it as a starting point for discussion rather than a top-down pronouncement. Explain that you have merely attempted to capture what the organisation aspires to. Then open it up for discussion - and accept people’s feedback and update your manifesto!
Set a good example
So, you’ve decided what kind of culture you aspire to, and written it up somewhere as some kind of manifesto or list of principles. Great!
Some people will be excited about this, while some will be more cynical (especially if they’ve sat through too many “away days” that announce a new manifesto that is swiftly ignored).
How do you make it “stick” and actually be adopted, rather than being forgotten?
As a leadership team, firstly, you must live by the cultural norms you claim to support. Do so transparently and publicly. Explain how your decisions fit in with your list of principles. When you’re faced with a difficult decision and decide to violate a principle as an exceptional case, point out that you did it and explain why. If you reward employees for things, either in front of the whole team or privately, emphasise how their actions fulfilled the principles. Bringing it back to data culture in particular, your principles probably include something encouraging the responsible sharing of data within your organisation - so whenever somebody builds some infrastructure to make that easier, or uses that infrastructure to share some useful data, or makes good use of data from another part of the organisation: showcase that as a great example!
Remember, culture is largely the set of conventions that people feel bad about violating, but they will only feel bad about violating guidelines they respect. Part of the reason to build a data culture within a team is to make people aware of the wider benefits of their actions. Somebody on the customer support call centre team might consider categorising support requests a pointless chore; but if they see how much it helps the product development team understand what kinds of problems customers are having with the product, and how that drives the product to be easier to use, then they will have a reason to feel proud of putting effort into filling in that form, and a culture of collecting and sharing useful data will start to develop. Also, make sure to support people taking the initiative; if you have decided that keeping up with new developments in the industry is an important value, let team members take time out of their day to read industry news, research technologies, go on training courses, and try experiments; and give them opportunities to share their findings with the team - and make those venues prestigious. Some people will glow with pride if they get to stand up in front of everybody and present something; others will be traumatised by the experience, but having an essay they wrote on it forwarded to the entire company by the CEO with “I think we should all consider this insightful essay” might be a suitable alternative.
Not everyone will get enthusiastic about improving organisational culture, but if the people who are are supported and encouraged to do so live by that culture and share it, you stand a good chance of the actual culture shifting towards the culture the team wants.
Continue the discussion
So, you’ve chosen a culture you aspire to, and you’re putting it into practice whenever you can, and supporting everybody who does so. Great!
After a while, you will hopefully find that things start to settle down. As your aspirations become actual culture, people won’t need to talk about them so much; they just become normal. The celebrations of great uses of data in your weekly show-and-tells, people actually talking to people in other teams to agree how to share data, all that good stuff - it becomes business as usual.
It’s at this point that you need to have a review. Bring together the same group you first gathered to write up your aspirational culture, and have a look at:
What parts of the aspiration actually made it into the organisational culture, and what made them a success?
What didn’t, and why didn’t they stick?
Have our aspirations changed, based both on what we’ve learnt about ourselves, and how the world has changed around us?
Do we have the right group here? Who should we invite next time?
How long should we leave it before we review this again?
It should soon become clear what changes you need to make to your aspirations, and how to apply them. If you do this just before your next team away day, you can present your analysis of how the culture has moved towards what everyone wants it to be, and present your proposal for what to do next for discussion.
Conclusion
You can’t force a cultural change onto an organisation, but you can help an organisation decide what culture it respects, and help it realise that culture. Not only will this directly improve the culture in the ways you aspire towards, it will build a meta-culture where everyone feels they have a stake in the culture and are motivated to improve it. Plus, it’s good for morale!
There is a lot more to an organisation’s culture than just how they handle data, but data is increasingly crucial to the operation of modern organisations - and it’s an area that many organisations are struggling to find their feet with. Let us help you build good data practices into your culture, so your organisation can use data effectively and confidently comply with regulations and ethical standards. Work with us via our CDO as a Service and we won’t just help you define your data culture—we help you build it, reinforce it, and make it stick.
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