Culture Check-up: Q&A with Corporate Culture speaker, Josh Levine
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Organizational culture is in a tug of war right now, with some companies trying to balance demands of leadership to return to the office and the requests of employees whose productivity at home speaks for itself. As the generational workplace tries to adapt to another generation of employees entering the workforce (Hello, Gen Z), it’s never a better time to have a conversation on corporate culture with Outspoken speaker, Josh Levine, whose expertise lies in designing an organization’s culture that inspires employees in order to promote organizational growth. Learn more about what he’s seeing in the workplace and the most recent considerations for your organization’s culture in today’s Q&A: video style!
Transcript included below.
What are some of the biggest work from home failures we saw and what have we learned in the past 3+ years?
JL: I think that the biggest thing that we've learned and causes failures is that the square footage that we had in the office that we shared did a lot of hard work for us in that relationship building piece. And when we went virtual or distributed, we no longer had those interactions. And so I don't know about you, but I experienced this sort of back to back meeting zoom fatigue where we just got on. We had a lot to do, and we just went boop boop, boop boop boop. And we did not continue to build those relationships, and that is a huge fail.
What are the current trends with workplace culture and how is virtual and/or hybrid work being affected by this, if at all?
JL: The big trend, I think not surprising anybody is this idea of hybrid work. We all have this kind of new work mode. Sometimes we go in the office, sometimes we're at home. And what's happening is that we're having to relearn how to interact and work together in this way, and everybody's kind of scrambling, and people are having different reactions, right? They're, hey, this isn't working. Oh, I love this. We're going to be home forever. We're going to be virtual forever. How do we connect when we're away? How often should we come back into the office? These are all things that we're starting to see emerge and we're all experiencing, right? This isn't news. All right, next question.
What are some of the most common mistakes that organizations are making right now with workplace culture decisions or changes post-pandemic?
JL: Okay, so number one, if people are not coming back, there's a lot of organizations that are saying you have to do X, Y, and Z, and they're saying you have to come back four days a week. I have a client who's doing this right now, and the question that employees are asking is why? I don't understand. I'm more productive at home. I don't know that being at home 100% of the time is the right answer for everybody. For each company, it's going to be a different thing. But the mistake is the forcing of just because I said so sort of the parental you have to do it because I'm the parent, because I'm the CEO or the chief executive or whatever it is. The solution here is we need to make sure that we're giving people reasons to come in. So what I like to say is onsite is the new off site. What is the plan? Why am I showing up? What is the reason that I need to be there? Because otherwise I'm going to end up on Zoom anyways. In a room, in a conference room by myself or with one other person. It is possible. Coming in to be physically in a place is productive. It's about connecting. It's about solving problems. You can do all of these amazing things, but you have to make sure that you're organizing it. So before it was the default of everybody just show up and then we can decide what we're going to do. We're going to have a meeting or whatever. Now we have to be more diligent about that.
How can organizations create a sense of belonging and community in a hybrid workplace?
JL: Great question. So this goes back to my point about those relationships. What we need to do is really think about the groups that we belong to. So small one on ones or small teams, how do you build that relationship? How do we build the organizational relationship and how do we build the entire company's relationship? And those connectivity, those connections between people and teammates and company wide colleagues are not happening. And that's really a problem. It's going to be a problem and continue to become more of a problem. And so what we need to do is focus on building and strengthening those relationships. Like I said before, the square footage, the water cooler, or the conferences that we're going to, or the sales kickoff, those are the places that we actually created those communities. That isn't happening automatically anymore. And so we need to actually lean in and create what I call rituals that build and strengthen relationships. These are the things that we're going to purposefully find moments of connection. We need to learn to relearn, to trust our immediate peers, but also the folks that we don't see anymore. Right. One of the benefits of living in an office or not living, but being in an office is you get to see people and you get familiar with them. Hey, how's it going? So we need to actually reestablish some of these rituals. And some of the rituals that I've been helping my clients with are really about learning who your peers, your colleagues are, what their work styles are. Really listening. We do a lot of active listening work, and that's really important because you get to be heard and you get to be seen and you get to learn about them. We want to learn about them outside of work, inside of work, how do they work? And what we really try to do is slowly and methodically and rigorously build up those trust bonds again, because we've lost them. We've all gone into culture debt and that's been a big problem.
What are distributed rituals to build and strengthen relationships?
JL: Okay, so one is this idea of active listening. You need to be able to establish ways at the beginning of perhaps once a week at your team stand up. Let's say you have a meeting at the beginning of the week. What's going on at the beginning? Maybe what you want to do is have people ask or ask one question that people can share. Now the question depends on how much the team trusts each other, how much of a bond there is. If it's a brand new team or it's questionable about how trusting it is, then we're going to start easy. Favorite place that you'd always want to go? What's your favorite movie and why? What did you read recently? What podcasts are you listening to? As you get further and build more trust, you want to build into some more a little bit deeper questions. What are the ways that you like to work? What are challenges? What's a failure that you might have had and what did you learn from it? And you can do this with an entire team, or you can split off into pairs and have a little bit of a safer space. These are really great ways to do this.
Another one, if your company has employee resource groups, that is an awesome way to do it, to build these relationships outside of just your immediate team. That's great. Great resource ability to understand one another you're coming from. You have a commonality, a cause or a shared experience. And the third one is a really fun, easy one. You can get a big pop from this immediately, which is build or allow people to start channels in either your slack or your team chat that are of sort of common interests. So if you're a baseball and so if you're in the Bay Area and you're a Giants fan, then start a Giants channel, hashtag Giants. Most organizations have some sort of cat or dog channel, so expound on that idea. New parents, great opportunity, fly fishing, dungeons and Dragons, video game, specific video games, whatever it might be. And the more specific the better because people are passionate about it. And the great news is they want to make these connections. They want to talk about baseball, they want to talk about whatever it might be and so you don't have to motivate that. And so they get to know one another and that's a really powerful way to continue to build relationships.
How can organizations ensure that all employees have equal access to opportunities and resources, regardless of where they work?
JL: Good news, bad news. Bad news is we're talking about making it fair for everybody no matter what. And I can tell you that that is unlikely to actually come to fruition. There are a number of organizations that I have spoken with have this challenge of, well, why do we have to come in if this group can be work from home? But I have to come in. I have to come in all the time. That's just the nature of the role. And you have to just be clear about what are the expectations. It is not going to be equal now. It's not to say that you can't the good news is that you can actually lean into this. You can make sure that people are represented equally. So, for example, if you have a meeting where some people are at home or away from the office and some people are in the office, as the leader, you should show up on the screen, not in the room. I was part of a meeting for a company that had one of these. The chief human resources officer came in, said hello to everybody and then said, I'm going to jump on this call from my desk. And what that enabled them to do is actually be part of the folks at home. Because what will tend to happen is that the folks in the room will take over and not remember to have the people on the screen built in. And so if anybody is distributed, if anybody is on the screen, then probably everybody should. So those types of adaptations, which connects back to my first point, those types of thinking about considered ways of adjusting the way that you're working is going to be really critical. And that's the hard part. That's the big work of the next, I would say 18 to 36 months is reimagining how we're working. Even if everybody's coming back into the office, it's not going to be like it used to be. It's just not. And so we need to establish some of these rules and be conscious of who's around and what opportunities they might be missing and then provide those to them.
Any advice to retaining top talent during this time of workplace evolution?
JL: Yeah. So one of the big factors in someone staying engaged is do they have the ability or the resources to do what they need to do and do they see the impact of their work. And that's hard. The larger the organization, the less likely that person is actually going to see the impact of that work. And so my advice is to make sure that managers are repeating and sharing what it is that you guys are doing, how you achieve those goals, and how that fits into the larger picture. What are you doing? There's a lot of different ways to do it, but that's going to be one of the big ones that I go to, is just make sure that employees, that your staff understand that what they're doing is making a difference. Because there's nothing more demotivating more demotivating than someone who feels helpless and feels like what they're doing is just a waste. You're going to lose people pretty quickly if that's the case.
What’s an a-ha moment you watched play out in-person with a client or an attendee of one of your trainings or events?
JL: I don't think anything that I'm sharing here is groundbreaking, but it is this idea of cultured debt where for the past three years we have not invested in the team trust and the bonding. And so recently I was talking to somebody and I was sharing this idea and I said, look, this is how if you're looking at how do you get your teams to be higher performing, more engaged, you need to rebuild those relationships. It's all about trust and you're in the hole, right? You haven't done this. And so you need to reinvest in building those relationships. And on the front end it's going to feel like it's a lot of work, but at the back, once you've done it and you've continued to invest in that and rebuild that trust in those relationships, that's going to pay you back ten hundred fold. And that kind of like, oh my gosh, right? Totally. That makes a ton of sense. That's the kind of AHA moment that we're sort of seeing now, right? That's the problem. And so when we're pointed out anybody can point it out, right? It's not just my observation, anybody can point this out. That's when people the light bulb goes off.
Give us an example of feedback or praise after a speech on this topic that you gave that was life-changing or life-affirming.
JL: All right, finally wanted to share one quick quote about a talk that I gave earlier this year. Not only was Josh's talk energizing, I knew exactly how to start creating a new ritual monday morning for the team new team ritual. And that is, I think the goal of what I try to do is not only be inspiring, right, share insights, but be able to provide a kind of tick list of here's what you need to be doing, right? So let people start their own, encourage them to start their own slack channels. It takes zero resource. People are already passionate about stuff. That's the kind of simple, quick way to get some really early wins rebuilding these relationships.
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