The Foundations of Workplace Culture

Community, Trust, and Communication

A community is a group of people with something in common. In a workplace, this is a group of folks willing to work together to accomplish shared goals. 

Trust is the basic bond that connects a group of people working together. I trust you to do what you need to do, and I need you to trust me to do what I need to do. 

Communication is the flow of information around a community between its members, and to provide any value, it requires trust. We need to trust the information we receive.

When the foundation is weak, things start to break or stop working. 

Most organizations take the foundational aspects of culture for granted. They aren't sexy or exciting. Most of us would instead work on more important things, but when we focus on higher-order concepts, we struggle to succeed. We need to know if there are cracks in the foundation of our workplace culture. When we try to build something that our foundation isn't ready to support, it goes badly. Progress on the more complicated high-performance aspects is slow and more tenuous; we need to get what we ought to for our investment of time and energy. Concepts like feedback and recognition are the next layer of tactics. We use them to increase efficiency and productivity. At their most basic level, they are a form of communication, and you can easily imagine how much trust impacts their successful implementation and how having a healthier community sets them up to function better. If we work to ensure the foundations are in place, we save everyone's time, focusing on the right things. 

Think of your workplace culture as a house.

When you build a house, the foundation is the most important thing to get right. You want it to be strong, with no cracks, and level so the House can be balanced, and it needs to be the right size for the home you want to build. The House you would like to build matters. How big is the House? How many people will live in it? Where do you want to make it? Is it a cottage or a mansion? For most organizations, their "house" already exists. It was built in the past, sometimes by different people. The Vision and Mission are like the House's dream and reality. They may be the same or may have changed. Indeed, the times have changed. There have been some storms and long winters. How well has the House been maintained? Have you checked the foundation?

This is the place where I find most organizations. They feel like something needs to be fixed or healthier, or they can't make progress doing whatever is next in their strategic roadmap. I usually start talking to them about what they want to do and how things are going. After hearing about their challenges, I asked, "How is the house's foundation?" The answers range from "pretty good, I think," or "I don't really know, that is a good question". Other times, the leader leans back in their chair and has the first moment of seeing the real challenge. The House isn't the problem. The Foundation is. It needs to be healthier to support the House we live in today.

Foundations don’t last forever. They require maintenance along the way.

We have to revisit the foundation of our workplace culture frequently, check on it after storms and long winters, patch it up. And, if we decide to do a renovation or build an addition, the first question we ask is whether the current foundation can support it.

Seasons change, but we always need trust and community

Everything is constantly changing. People change; some leave, and others new ones arrive. When people change, our Community changes. Suppose you have grown your number of employees, shrunk, or just turned them over (60% of employees have turned over since the pandemic). In that case, you need to check that the foundations of your workplace culture are still healthy enough to support your work. If the Community has changed, we must identify if we have the trust required to function well. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have lost trust.

When we have a lot of change in the people who make up our Community, it is more likely that we haven't lost it, but we just haven't built it yet with the new folks doing the work. When a new leader is hired or promoted, do they have the trust they require from their team? When a leader is struggling, have they lost or are they losing the trust of their team? Sometimes, the people haven't changed, but something happened, and we lost trust. Now, it seems like everything else is slipping with it. How do we rebuild trust? Can we? How long will it take?

When the Community has changed significantly, communication will become more critical than ever. The level of trust that exists or doesn't will impact that communication. Make sure you have the right people. Ensure they trust each other, and then focus on the quality, timing, and channels of communication that support success.

Hopefully, by now, you can understand why I believe Community, Trust, and Communication are essential and likely complicate the success of very many workplaces. The good news is that these concepts can be easy to learn, and their lessons can be applied immediately. You must invest some time and energy and make them a priority, but when they receive the attention they require, you'll start to see problems becoming smaller and less frequent, issues getting handled faster and better, and success coming more efficiently and predictably.

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