Workplace technologies are developing at a staggering speed. With mixed reality, generative AI and other workplace technologies revolutionizing ways of working, it’s easy to get distracted and overlook your organization’s most important asset, its people.
What is technology without people? Beyond some expensive silicon and plastic, not much. When we take a step back and look at what’s really driving change, the answer soon becomes clear: It’s us. We live in a human-powered economy. That’s why an investment in people is an investment in business. And getting that investment right starts with workplace culture.
What is workplace culture?
It’s important to define what we mean when we talk about workplace culture. But it’s not easy to pin down. Is it a set of values? Behaviours? Attitudes? Or customs and traditions? It turns out it’s all these and more.
Harvard Business Review describes it as “an organization’s DNA. It is the shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterize a workplace. It is reflected in how people behave, interact with each other, make decisions, and do their work. It impacts everything — including your happiness and career.”
Perhaps the simplest explanation comes from celebrated US management guru Marvin Bower, who describes it as “the way we do things around here”.
However we define it, workplace culture can be tricky to measure. It’s how it feels to be at work rather than a set of written rules. Every organization has its personality and atmosphere – and that’s not something easy to engineer, especially among dispersed hybrid teams.
Peter Drucker, the renowned management consultant and writer, said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And in the wake of huge upheavals in the way we work, organizations are waking up to the fact that you can have the greatest strategy, cutting-edge technology and the best people in the world, but it doesn’t matter if your culture isn’t right.
Culture is the very air you breathe. If it’s toxic, your organization dies.
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