Date: Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Time: 1:00pm Eastern / 10:00 am Pacific
Presenters: Christian Nielson, Chief Revenue Officer; Matthew Wride, President
Join us for an engaging webinar on organizational culture, designed exclusively for those who are passionate about enhancing employee experience within their companies. Find out how organizational culture has a profound impact on employee engagement and overall business success.
Transcript
Christian Nielsen | 00:00
Um, we will, we’ll go ahead and kick off. My name is Christian Nielsen. I’m part of the leadership team here at, at decision wise, and, uh, uh, came through our organizational, uh, development consulting program as well. I have a lot of, uh, uh, thoughts on our, our topic today. I’m also joined by Matt Wride, who’s the decision wise president and, uh, one of the, our most prolific content producers here at Decision Wise. And so really looking forward to this conversation and, and have to say for those that, that have attended our sessions in the past, Matt and I really enjoy these conversations and, uh, we’ve really come to enjoy these, uh, with the, the more participation we have, the more I think we all get out of it. So definitely encourage, uh, some thoughts from the, from our audience today. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, we are talking, today’s topic is around culture.
Christian Nielsen | 00:53
Uh, the topic title we use is Culture Shock, unleashing The Untapped Power of Company Culture. Uh, one topic we, we played with, but was the culture club. Do you really wanna hurt them? Uh, that is a, a little bit of a joke for the eighties. So for most of our audience, ask, ask your parents about the Culture club a band. And, uh, in the eighties, it had a really great song, uh, around Do you really wanna Hurt me? But we’ll stick with our, our, our original topic and try to keep the, uh, dumb jokes to a minimum. Uh, a few quotes, as you know, those that attend, and we’d like to use a few quotes just to kinda set the stage. Corporate culture, uh, matters. Uh, how management chooses to treat its people impacts everything, for better or for worse. Simon Sinek. And I should also mention before we hit a, a few more quotes, this, this session does qualify for, uh, Sherman, HRCI credit.
Christian Nielsen | 01:50
So that information will be sent out, um, following, uh, when we, after we conclude the, the session today, uh, I used to believe that culture was soft and had little bearing on our bottom line. What I believe today is that culture has everything to do with our bottom line now and into the future. So true, so true. I I think culture is such a, uh, we will get into defining it and exploring it together, but it, it is the name of the game and the, the longer I’m in this space, the more I, I really appreciate that. And then, of course, uh, something we both love a, a quote i I got from Matt, but it’s comes from Clayton Christensen, someone we, we admire and whose, uh, thoughts, um, on, in the business world are, are very profound. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. I think one of the biggest benefits of culture and understanding its its role in the, the, the workplace is that it, it does fill in the gap when we can’t script how we’re supposed to behave. Culture fills in the gaps and, and helps us understand what the norms are and, and how we should behave when it’s, um, when it’s not spelled out explicitly for us.
Matt Wride | 03:01
Yeah.
Christian Nielsen | 03:03
So let’s talk about, in fact, let’s, let’s start with one of those audience participation groups. Uh, you, before we go into kind of what culture is and, and, and exploring some of the different facets, let’s just ask this broad question, what creates a bad culture within an organization or speaking kind of corporate culture, company culture? But any thoughts? Please, uh, put ’em in the chat. What, what creates a bad culture? Um, certainly
Matt Wride | 03:29
So, well, yeah, we’ve experienced, well, those, uh, well, while people are populating the chat, I’ll share with you, I did a poll one time on LinkedIn and I asked this question, would you rather have a manager that is, um, quote unquote nice, like easy to work with? And is the relationship’s pretty good, but they’re kind of inconsistent, like they’re wildly inconsistent? Or would you rather have that tough manager that they’re, they’re maybe abrasive. Um, they’re kind of not the greatest person, but they’re, they’re very consistent. You know what to expect. And what was interesting is, is people preferred to know what to expect, right? They, they would prefer having, having some semblance of I know what today will be like than coming in. And while the person may be nice, it’s, you know, we’re, you know, everybody’s hair’s on fire for this project and tomorrow it’s something else. So I just, I find that interesting is that whatever the culture is, we, we do want it to stay consistent. Yeah,
Christian Nielsen | 04:27
Definitely. Definitely. And I, you just, just kinda scanning through it and, and please keep ’em coming. I, I’m loving these responses a lot, a lot of mention of, of trust or lack of trust, mistrust. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> communication, uh, or lack of communication, lack of transparency. Gossip. Gossip usually finds its way in. When there is that lack of communication or clarity or mistrust, you say one thing, but do I believe it? And I, you know, it’s that meeting after the meeting, some of those toxic kind of behaviors we see when culture isn’t mm-Hmm. Isn’t necessarily as healthy as it should be. Mi micromanagement, poor engagement, uh, negative comments from male and <inaudible>. Okay. There’s a lot of,
Matt Wride | 05:06
There was one about bias, right? You know? Yeah. When biases take over, and that’s also then you don’t know what to expect with biases ’cause you can’t see clearly.
Christian Nielsen | 05:16
Well, uh, really great point there as well. I love the unfulfilled promises, lack of communication, um, inconsistency saying one thing, doing another boy that, that can undermine a culture very quickly. Um, so some really great thoughts and, uh, let’s see, rewarding politics. Ooh, that’s, uh, something I, I I’m afraid many of us know all too well,
Matt Wride | 05:44
There was one, uh, from a previous organization, they get comments from male upper management to female pregnant employees. Right? That’s, and, and they don’t, you know, they don’t understand, I mean, talk about, you know, men have no really ha can have no empathy, right? So,
Christian Nielsen | 06:02
Well that, what’s interesting is, and I love that calling that out. And in terms of those, those moments, uh, really impacted culture. And I, I, I don’t think a lot of individuals, a lot of executives especially don’t realize how, you know, they just, how they’re acting in, in those informal moments really set cultural, those become cultural artifacts. Those stories. Did you hear so and so said this to a, you know, a a pregnant employee and, and that, that reverberates for years within the organization. So very powerful story there.
Matt Wride | 06:37
Yeah. People wanna be understood, right? And we’ve, we’ve talked about how belonging is a result of feeling understood. Something i, I discovered or was reading the other day, um, females in the same city tend to have longer commutes, and that’s because they have stop, they have to stop off periodically, whether that’s dropping kids off at school or doing things to, and, and so it’s just funny how the experience that one set of employees have can be, can, can be different than, than others. And, and part of a good culture is accepting that and under, and being very clear about what those experiences are like.
Christian Nielsen | 07:12
Yeah. Well, and, and it’s interesting just as we talk about that one comment, there’s others around disrespect, and it’s almost a lack of understanding and empathy just, and, and, and mutual respect in a lot of cases. And communication and understanding is, is often kind of a, a, a cure for some of these ills. But boy, some really great, really great, uh, uh, examples or, or co commentary Mm-hmm, <affirmative> on, on what a bad culture looks like. And I, I think a lot of this comes from our own personal experiences working for various organizations and, and or, or managers or management, um, yeah. And where we’ve experienced that. Let’s, let’s keep going. Um, appreciate the participation there. Um, I want to kind of shift gears a little bit. Uh, you know, we at decision wise focused on employee listening. And, and so this is an example we’ve seen quite a bit, and I’m wondering if it resonates with the, with our, our population here, our audience, but often we’ll see an example where, where an organization comes to us because the executives have said, Hey, hr, we need a culture survey.
Christian Nielsen | 08:20
Um, and that can mean so many different things. And so I thought it was an interesting thing to kind of put, put out there, Hey, hr, we need a culture survey. Well, what are they really asking for? What are, what is an executive team, someone outside of hr thinking about when they’re asking for a culture survey, when they’re saying, Hey, we need to work on our culture. When they bring up that word culture, what does it mean to them? It can mean a few different things. Um, you know, one, one possibility is a classification of company culture. We, we need you to classify our culture. Uh, yeah. Yes. We’ll share our slides. We’ll take out some of the, the dumb jokes, but we’ll <laugh> we’ll share our slides. Um, yeah. And so, and we’ve learned from these sessions that that’s, um, I, we ought to put that as a, a disclaimer upfront or a, a statement upfront.
Christian Nielsen | 09:09
We’ll share these things. Um, uh, you know, one possibility would be, you know, classify our culture. What, what kind of culture do we have? Um, you know, there’s different frameworks out here. I’ve got the competing values framework shown there, where there’s the, the, uh, the, the different axes around flexibility and control and internal and external, uh, kind of focus there. Um, and that’s, that’s one possibility. There’s other, other models and, and surveys and instruments around kind of client trying to classify it. What kind of culture do we have? Give it an archetype, give it a name, and then we can, we can move from there to, you know, is that the culture we need? Um, another possibility, and we see this I think more often is that when executives ask for culture, they’re really saying, we want a broad understanding of our current co company culture and employee experience. And that’s more the space we’re, we’re playing in, where we, we run surveys and try to understand what’s, what the actual experience is. And so we’ll talk a little bit, a bit about these, but I, I think, uh, this is a question we wanna come back to. What, what are we really asking? And, uh, what, what do we go for? And in fact, that’s the, the segue to this, when we, we talk about culture, we really should understand, okay, is everyone on the same page? What are we solving for?
Matt Wride | 10:28
Um, yeah, I wanna jump in there because it’s been my experience that while those classifications are interesting, and they’re, they work really well for management and well, even for those that study management is what I should say, it’s sort of not what people are driving at. Usually there’s something that doesn’t feel right in the culture. And that’s your question here. What are you solving for? Usually somebody says, something’s not right. Or sometimes HR or others are trying to send a, a, a message to the top, Hey, we, we have something happening in this place that we’ve gotta address. And so they’re trying to uncover it or bring it to light, find a way to talk about it. And a way to do that is through a culture survey. But you have to be clear, like you said, what you’re, what you’re solving for and how that will be used.
Christian Nielsen | 11:17
You, you mentioned something really interesting a lot of times, you know, our, our listening instruments and, and things bring up some interesting insights and discoveries, and that’s a big purpose we serve. But you, you also mentioned that a lot of times they need some data to back up what they already know. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a lot of times HR knows, Hey, we’ve got these trends. We need some baseline or, or some evidence so that we can go to exec, the executive team and, and make a case for some interventions and things like that. But it, it is interesting how often we’re we’re hired to help confirm what’s already known by those, uh, kind of closest to it. Yeah. So let’s, let’s talk about some of these definitions and, and what we’re solving for within in past, um, sessions. We have, um, in past sessions, we’ve asked for definitions.
Christian Nielsen | 12:04
Uh, here we won’t, we won’t do that today. We’ll share some slides that we, we have used in previous sessions, but we love these definitions and it’s been real, very helpful. Um, so one definition of, of culture, and one, I really love a set of values, norms, guiding beliefs and understandings that is shared by members of an organization and is taught to new members as a way to feel, think, and behave. And that I’ve mentioned, or, or actually let’s jump to our shorthand definition, the way we do things around here. Um, I love that it, it captures a lot. Um,
Matt Wride | 12:38
I want to share Yeah, please. An example that we just, we just encountered, so we were last week with everybody in our company in a, all together, in a company wide meeting. And one of our, our qa, uh, the person who leads our quality assurance function, that’s, that’s testing our software. He got up and he, and he made a statement that says, look, we can have a bug once, but we can never have a bug twice. Right? Like, in other words, we can accept that once, but after we fixed it, we better not have it again. That is teaching, you know, in, in that, you know, when people say, well, how do you teach culture? That’s how you, that’s, that’s where it’s taught. It’s taught, not purposely, maybe not overtly, but everybody sort of got it. And he, what he did is he talked what I call a winning behavior. He identified a winning behavior for us, which is, Hey, we don’t wanna make the same mistake twice. And so that is then becomes part of our culture, and good leaders then establish the key winning behaviors. That’s what Al Mulally did at, at Ford. So he had that slide of 11 essentially winning behaviors that he, he made cards and he passed them out. Yeah. And he just didn’t, he just sort of forged that into the organization that this is, this is what, these are the things, this is how we behave Yeah. Here at Ford. Anyway.
Christian Nielsen | 14:02
Well, and I like, I like that. It’s a good example. It’s one of the ways you can culture build is, is coming up with these heuristics or these statements that kind of capture aspects. You know, we, we’ve talked about Danny Meyer, founder of Shake Shack and these other restaurants, and he had these, these sayings. He used to kind of tune the culture, and it would be things like everyone here was hired to solve problems. And, and these statements that people kept hearing and, and it, it taught them how to act. Um, but there’s also those informal things. Yeah. And that’s part of the why I love this definition is it talks about it, you know, it, and it’s, it’s, um, it’s taught to new members as a way to, to feel, think, and behave. And it can be taught formally through those statements or through training, but also informally.
Christian Nielsen | 14:44
I, I share the example. When I, when I got my first job working in healthcare in their, in organizational effectiveness within a large health system, um, my male colleagues were wearing ties, I noticed the first day, so guess what? The next day I wore a tie. No one told me that, Hey, you’re supposed to wear ties. But I, I very quickly saw the norms and, and it was, you know, the culture is a very powerful thing, even when we’re, we don’t realize it’s influencing us. Um, but the way we do things around here, and I also added this slide of, of puzzle pieces, um, because a lot of times we’re asked, Hey, we need to, you know, we’ve, we need your help with some culture change. And, and yes, culture can be changed, but it’s, it’s an important thing to recognize that that’s a, that’s a big task.
Christian Nielsen | 15:30
Um, because there’s, uh, and the reason I have these puzzle pieces there, because a million plus variables interlock to form your current culture and to reinforce it. And so sometimes we’ll say, oh, we wanna change the culture and we’ll try to change three things. Well, there’s a million other things still reinforcing that previous culture. So if you really wanna change culture, it’s, it’s important to recognize you have to, to change enough of the components that are, are building the current culture that you actually sway it and can influence it. Otherwise, the culture will just snap it back to what it was. And, and you won’t, you won’t realize the benefit. So it’s a, it’s a big ask when, when an executive says, Hey, change our culture. And, and the, the larger the organization, the longer it’s been around, the stronger the, the, you know, the personalities of the founders and things like that can make those, those culture changes even more difficult.
Matt Wride | 16:24
And you can make all the, and, and that old quote by Warren Buffett that you, you spend a lifetime, uh, forging a reputation and you can lose it in a minute. Oh, yeah. Well, that applies with culture. You can spend hours and, and all these initiatives. And the minute a senior leader doesn’t follow the program, <laugh> Yeah. You can lose the culture in a minute. Right? Because it’s, yeah. I love it. It’s, it’s so vital that leaders walk the walk.
Christian Nielsen | 16:50
Well, and, and, and, you know, you noticed all those mentions of trust in the, in what creates a bad culture or, or distrust or mistrust, whatever. When trust is gone, it can take years and years and decades to rebuild. Or it can take a, a, a completely new leadership team <laugh>, you know, in installed to, to rebuild some of that damage. And so it’s, uh, it’s not a small thing. Um, and I, I do love the mention of of change management. Yeah. Change management, and we’ll talk a little bit about, and, uh, kind of actively managing a culture, um, and not just letting it happen. And especially where there’s culture change. Um, some very, very good change management is gonna be needed. So that’s their definition of culture. Let’s talk about employee experience. And we will also define employee engagement. ’cause they’re all related. The sum, uh, the sum of perceptions employees have about their interactions with the, the organization in which they work or how we experience the culture. So we have culture, we have the way we do things around here, when we add people to that they have an experience, and that’s the employee experience. And, and they’re very related, but I think it’s important to make the distinction between employee experience and culture.
Matt Wride | 18:03
Yeah. I want to jump in there, because culture, you can’t measure directly, right? You can only measure it indirectly. And the way you do that is each person has an experience. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You figure out what those experiences are, and then you add them together, and that gives you a sense of what the culture’s like. Yeah. Um, and so that’s why experience is important, is you have to take each of these individual experiences and stitch ’em together. Um, you can only measure experience. You can’t measure culture, but you can measure culture through the eyes of, of each individual and then, and then, and then aggregate.
Christian Nielsen | 18:37
Yeah. E exactly. And a lot of times, you know, so when, when we get the request for measuring culture, we’re really trying to see culture through the employee experience. Exactly. As you said, it’s almost sonar. We’re, we’re bouncing sound waves off to kinda get a feel for what, what we’re, we’re trying to, what the culture actually is under underneath. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So let’s get to our next definition. Employee engagement, an emotional state where we feel passionate, energetic, and committed toward our work. In turn, we fully invest, invest our best selves in the work that we do, or our response to the employee experience. You’ve, if you’ve attended one of these before, you’ve probably heard me talk about we’re not building employee engagement. We’re building an invitation to engage. People get to choose, uh, the extent that they will engage. We’re inviting them by creating a, trying to create an employee experience that draws them in. That is something they want to engage with, but ultimately they get to choose. And so engagement is the, the response. And I think if we put ’em all on one page, we can kind of see the way we do things around here. That’s our culture. How we experience the culture, that’s our employee experience and our response to that employee experience, how much of ourselves we choose to bring to that is employee engagement. Um, go ahead.
Matt Wride | 19:50
Yeah. And well, I was just gonna jump in. So engagement’s really interesting. ’cause we can ask people, well, how do you feel about the culture? And I’ll tell you one thing, but then when you see their actions as a result of the culture, that’s another thing we can measure, right? Yeah. So we can measure engagement, and that tells us, well, how, that’s another indirect sign of how healthy the culture is, because it’s not just what you told me. I can now see that you do things, whether that’s retention, whether that’s high scores in belonging on a team. All of those become data points that tell us a lot about the health and relative strength of the culture.
Christian Nielsen | 20:28
Yeah, I love that. And, and it kind of, uh, just seeing how they work together is, is helpful and, and having this language to occasionally, uh, inform the executive teams and help connect the dots and, and understand really what we’re solving for, uh, can be very, very powerful for an HR leader to have. Mm-Hmm,
Matt Wride | 20:50
<affirmative>.
Christian Nielsen | 20:51
Um, well, let’s, let’s shift into an area that you and I care quite a bit about the world of, of surveys and employee listening and, and, and, and empowering that employee voice. But I, I kind of wanna come back to that question we had where executives are asking for a culture survey. What, and, and I’ll pose it to the group, uh, the collective kind of wisdom that we have in, in our attendance today. What are executives really asking about for, or what are theyre, what are their underlying concerns when they’re saying, Hey, we want a culture survey. I mean, how do we articulate that? Is it what, what’s at the core? What are they really trying to solve for? Uh, I’d love to hear some thoughts from the group here.
Matt Wride | 21:32
Well, I, I think one thing for sure is there, you cannot engage in change management unless you have a baseline, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So one thing they want to do is, is figure out what is it the current state before they can imagine a different future state. And the other is the adage that you can’t fix what you don’t measure. Hmm. Um, and so if you just sort of, uh, approach culture in this sort of nebulous, it is what it is, or it’s sort of organic or self perpetuating, that that’s, that just means that you’re just gonna continue to be subject to whatever it is. But you can, if you measure it, it gives you some ability to begin to shape it. Yeah.
Christian Nielsen | 22:12
I love that. And I’m, I’m looking,
Matt Wride | 22:14
Let saw blind spots show up. Yeah, go ahead.
Christian Nielsen | 22:16
Yeah, I was just gonna go to the chat for a minute there. And I wanna come to Dustin’s question as well in a minute. But let’s, let’s look at a few of these answers. Uh, do we have blind spots? Yeah. Employee feedback’s a great way to surface though, uh, Johari window. Um, uh, let’s see what’s good and what needs improvement Are we who we say we are? Oh, I love how that’s, that’s put. Uh, and there’s often a disconnect. You know, we put it on a vision statement or mission statement. It’s posted in the break room. Of course, we are who we, we say we are. Well, are we walking the walk? Um, are we living up to, you know, our aspirations, uh, in terms of culture? Uh, they wanna know if employees are working together or at odds. Yeah. Do we have silos? Are we, we aligned?
Christian Nielsen | 23:02
Um, employees are not being truthful in the survey because there is no trust. Well, that’s, that can be a tough journey. And, and we actually see that quite a bit. Oh, I lost my chat there. It opens back. Um, and often that’s, that’s why we reckon recommend such a, a, a very consistent listening approach, because that first year, uh, we might not get a completely honest responses because they’re testing the organization to see, is this safe? Are you going to listen to our feedback? Um, and often we’ll see scores go down as trust goes up, because I trust the organization. I’m gonna be more honest in my, my response and I’ll be a little bit more critical. And so it, it’s, it’s an interesting thing to navigate. Uh, what do we
Matt Wride | 23:47
Need? Yeah, I wanna, oh, go ahead. I wanna highlight that, that you, you measure and then you’ll see a dip. It’s the opposite of the honeymoon effect. You’ll see a dip, but that dips actually for you and I, a really great sign that we’re headed into a positive era of feedback. So if you see a dip like that, don’t give up. Use it as a, as a, as a marker that things are actually working. And the other thing is, is this stuff works. We had an organization who had significantly low scores about caring this, the simple question, my organization cares about me. This, these were not, and you know what? Everybody became aware of it, and the scores improved because awareness leads to action.
Christian Nielsen | 24:27
Yeah. I, I, I like that. And I, and I love the, the, just to focus on, we, we wanna know what we don’t know. And that, you know, there’s the blind spots. It’s, you know, how well are we aligned, you know, living the, the, the culture that we we’re aspiring to. Um, and, and a survey can be, can be a very powerful tool to help with that. But it also, um, if trust is low, it’s gonna take a while. You’ve gotta be consistent and measure and, and recognize there will be that dip and,
Matt Wride | 24:58
And all that. And you used a phrase, a survey. It’s really, as, you know, more than just a survey, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a set of listing campaigns, right? Because one survey in itself won’t work. It’s, it’s a mixture of different things that you bring in to keep tuning, as you say, the culture.
Christian Nielsen | 25:16
Yeah. And, and, uh, just looking at this comment from, from Eric, it looks, uh, like with background in, in change management, most leaders don’t know what culture is. So when they ask for an assessment, they are really looking for something specific, communications, decision making performance. And that’s inter that’s a really great point. And often that’s a really great, great follow up to, uh, when, when you’re, you’re asked to run a survey, well, specifically what, what are you concerned about? And just to make sure, in fact, in, in a moment, we’ll get into some of those common sections of, uh, the assessments we run or the surveys we run, rather. And we can, we can get into that. Lots of really great responses. Appreciate again, the, yeah,
Matt Wride | 25:56
So he’s right. They, they’ll have an idea of a theme or an area, and you’ve got, and it’s very helpful to know that before you sit down to start measuring.
Christian Nielsen | 26:04
Yeah. And I apologize, the next two slides are pretty text heavy, but I think it’s a, it’s worthwhile to go through kind of some of this, uh, text together. Uh, what is a culture survey? I’ve got a couple slides where we can explore this. A culture, a culture surveys rather typically consist of a series of questions that cover different dimensions of organizational culture. Not everything we can’t ask <laugh>. Trust me, there’s a big part of me that wishes I could ask 10,000 questions in an employee survey, uh, because I’ve got 10,000 areas I’m curious about. We can’t, we’ve gotta be more specific and deliberate. But they, they covered very various, um, uh, and usually pretty consistent, uh, dimensions of organizational cul culture. Questions may inquire about employee satisfaction, engagement, communication. We heard a lot of that in the chat. Leadership styles, teamwork, diversity and inclusion.
Christian Nielsen | 26:55
Innovation and other relevant cultural factors. The survey responses are typically collected, uh, anonymously to encourage honest and open feedback. And it was mentioned even when it’s, uh, anonymous, sometimes it’s, there’s a trust building period in that listening, uh, campaign. Um, purpose of a culture survey is to gain insights into the organization’s cultural strengths and weaknesses that was mentioned as well. What are we great at? Where do we have room to improve? And, and I, I, going to that strengths piece, I say this a lot when we’re asking for feedback. We’re not only saying, Hey, what’s broken? We’re also saying, what’s working well, what do we wanna protect and lean into and, and really own and celebrate? And so, you know, we all have a bias to look at the lowest scoring items, but it’s, it’s worthwhile to say, okay, what’s going well? What, what’s special about our culture that we wanna, uh, uh, protect, especially if you’re in a high growth period?
Christian Nielsen | 27:50
Because as, as you’re growing those things can, can, uh, be diluted or, or, or not prioritized. I keep interrupting myself. Uh, identify areas that need improvement and align the culture with the organization’s values and goals. By understanding the existing culture and obtaining feedback from employees. Organizations can make data-driven decisions, uh, to enhance employee, uh, experiences, increase productivity, foster, uh, a positive work environment, and ultimately achieve better organizational outcomes. So I think that that covers a lot of the goals of a, a, a culture survey and what, why we’re we run them. But it’s very different than just trying to name what type of culture we have. We’re trying to understand where we’ve got some bright spots, where we have some blind spots and areas, uh, to make some adjustments.
Matt Wride | 28:37
One thing as you sit down and discuss with someone who’s may have tasked you with measuring culture is there are, there’s differences in the questions you can ask. One question can say, tell us how you feel about culture. So you’re asking a broader sentiment, how do, how well do we communicate? Um, or the alternative is to say, ask for sp to measure or ask about specific behaviors associated with communication. So my leader frequently, you know, once a week, uh, gives me updates about pro about our organization’s progress and successes or something along those lines. So you need to be clear with leaders what they’re looking for, because it’s great to hear a thumbs up, thumbs down about communication, but sometimes it’s better to say, we’re, we’re doing this behavior well, but we’re not doing this very well. And so you just need to consider what type of question we’re gonna use.
Christian Nielsen | 29:36
Uh, just to just notice another question. I know I’ve been a little bit inconsistent on questions, but should the results be compared with benchmark or with the previous survey? Yes. Um, but those comparisons are very valuable. Uh, the most useful comparisons, yes. And we have robust benchmarks externally and industry and all those things. And as proud as I am of those benchmarks, and they have, they certainly have a place that most Im important benchmarks are gonna, those be those internal comparisons. How does one department or team compare against another? Are we creating an a a consistent experience across the organization that we’re comfortable with? And also over time, are we better today than we were yesterday? Those are the comparisons that matter the most. But, uh, there’s no way to get around leaders care about external comparisons and how do, how are we compared to the rest of healthcare or manufacturing or this side of the country, or that type of thing.
Matt Wride | 30:32
Let me offer an analogy. Most people say on a performance review, please don’t measure me against someone else. Measure me against yesterday’s version of myself. And that’s far more powerful. And that same thing, don’t measure the organization against others. Measure it against yesterday’s version of the organization, because that’s ultimately what we want. Now, those benchmarks have a, a place, and they help identify maybe areas where things aren’t working well, but it’s, it’s ultimately a measurement against oneself that matters.
Christian Nielsen | 31:04
Yeah. And, and it, it, it’s interesting to see how often organization, I mean, we live in a world where we absolutely have to have those benchmarks. And, and we, we, we, as I mentioned, we take, go to great lengths to make sure they’re, they’re fair and accurate and, and do what they’re, they’re intended. But we certainly see our clients try to overuse them or misuse them, or over fixate on, on an external comparison where it’s really, let’s just look inside and, um, and let’s do some introspection, uh, and, and those internal comparisons that are really gonna move the organization forward. Now, sometimes, uh, one of my favorite uses of external benchmarks is if there’s a lack of urgency, sometimes you can say, okay, no, we can’t be complacent here. We are really in, in, in a bad spot here. And we can use those external comparisons to, to generate some energy at the top if, if that’s not there. But that’s kind of, uh, less often, Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, uh, usually, usually it’s those internal comparisons that’ll get the ball rolling,
Matt Wride | 32:10
Right?
Christian Nielsen | 32:11
Um, and I love the, the, the chats here. I think a lot of this is resonating. Um, let’s keep going here. So I just to simplify, culture surveys are really about understanding and action. Um, if you wanna build trust, uh, understanding and action will, will help you get there. Understanding the current culture and experiencing the employees. We wanna understand, and, and I didn’t put it this slide in, in this presentation, but it’s been in, it seems like the last six presentations I’ve done, but the slide that says two vital questions. What experience are we creating and is it the right one? That’s really what we’re trying to, to, to, um, understand. What experience are we creating to for our employees right now? And are we okay with it? Is it going to lead to outcomes we’re comfortable with? Um, and if not, what action can we take to, to better align our culture to those desired outcomes?
Christian Nielsen | 33:02
Now, desired outcomes might be, uh, greater alignment with our organizational strategy and operational metrics. I love when we’re connecting the dots between our employee experience and, and our, our operational performance to, to a few of our clients, uh, make that, that, that connection. Um, but it can also be a, what experience are we committed to for our employees? Not just retention, which is, is certainly important, but also engagement. Are we creating an experience that invites people to engage? And if we’re going even further with it, are we creating a, a workplace where people can explore their potential and grow and develop and, and really, you know, on, on a human level, are we creating environments where people can, you know, maximize their own experience and, and see what, what’s possible?
Matt Wride | 33:49
You know, I was talking, talking to a friend the other day, we’re he, he’s a CPA. He was commenting about something that I, I think is important. He says, on our balance sheet, we often fail to account for or record a company’s largest asset, which is their workforce. You cannot create, deploy, um, continue to make money without the largest asset. And, uh, culture is the environment that this asset is. You know, we would, if, if, if we ran a hotel chain, we care about the look and quality of our hotels, right? We care about what they, but culture is where this, this most important and singularly most, well, most important and most expensive asset resides. So why do we, why do we just sort of let it be out there in an unknown environment? Yeah.
Christian Nielsen | 34:43
I, I think that’s what keeps me excited about the work we do, is there’s something really powerful to me about the idea that, hey, this org an organization’s competitive advantage is largely, you know, uh, <laugh> is disengaged in their cubicle right now, and we could ignite some, you know, just by simply creating a stronger experience, we can invite more innovation, greater alignment, e energy and effort towards the strategy of those things. And, uh, that’s something where it’s, you know, it’s not, it’s deceptively, uh, simple and, and, and complex at the same time just to try to unlock the, the human potential that’s sitting in, in cubicles right now and in within the organization or remotely, or the production floor. But, um, that’s what I, I’m still excited about the work we’ve, we’ve done, even though I’ve run hundreds and hundreds of, of different organizational project listening projects.
Christian Nielsen | 35:41
Um, I, I wanna jump into a, a little bit of di diving into some of the components of a culture survey. I know, um, I’ll try to stop my self from going into the weeds on survey design, but I think that for this conversation, it’s, it’s useful to talk about kind of the common components, um, because it, it helps us understand how we measures our culture and how we come back to it. Now, often, we’ll, we’ll use, um, we describe it as an engagement survey, but by this definition of a culture survey, it’s the same thing. We’re, we’re broadly measuring these different facets of the organizational experience or the employee experience as it relates to the, the way we do things around our culture. Um, our standard surveys are roughly about 40 to 50 questions for, uh, to get a, a baseline but not overwhelm employees.
Christian Nielsen | 36:31
In fact, we’ve, we do a lot of studies to see how long it can take them to take a, a survey like this. We use the same survey scale throughout to try to optimize that survey taking experience. And, um, it is about 10 to 15 minutes to, to answer 40 to 50 questions, which is, uh, a pretty good trade off in our experience. Um, we use different frames of reference, meaning we have items in a survey that are about the, the job, the work itself, the experience on the team experience, working with their direct manager, and then experience and perceptions around the, the broad organization and senior leadership. Uh, and we kind of go in that order too. We start closest to the employee, and then we get more broad as the survey experience goes on. And that’s very deliberate because we’re, we’re, uh, kinda getting them thinking warmed up as they’re thinking about the things closest to their work.
Christian Nielsen | 37:23
And then we go broader as we go further in the survey, we all usually include a direct measure of engagement. I heard engagement mentioned, um, uh, as a key concern in the, in a, in when we’re talking about culture in the chat earlier. And so we do it in almost every survey includes some measure of engagement. We use anchor questions to do that. I won’t go into details there. We also wanted the survey to be broad enough that we can have a sense of what’s driving engagement. We wanna know engagement, but that’s, that’s an outcome. Um, you know, uh, we want to understand, well, what’s influencing engagement? What’s helping it be stronger or otherwise, and where are do those opportunities lie? So we, the survey in most cases needs to be 50 questions. So it’s broad enough that we can understand those cultural elements that are impacting engagement.
Christian Nielsen | 38:15
Uh, we also include satisfaction elements. I’ll talk about the difference between those in, in a bit here. Uh, but we, we include some of those satisfaction elements and we often, uh, to, to make sure that we, um, are considering things that are outside the survey. Also, we have two open-ended comment questions, um, that can, uh, either confirm what’s found, uh, throughout the survey or introduce topics that aren’t included in the survey, and let us know what’s on, on people’s minds. And there’s some really strategic ways to use comment questions, uh, that we’ll speak to in a minute. There’s some things, areas we don’t recommend asking a question about, but if it shows up in those comments, we know it’s on employee’s minds and you can follow up with a pulse and, and, and do some things there. Um,
Matt Wride | 39:03
Well, I just want to, I wanna cover that because you, you brought up a point the other day that it’s just as important to know what’s not on the survey as what’s in the survey. Yeah. Okay. And comments are your best. Look at what you didn’t cover in the survey. Yeah. So they help you kind of get that, and that’s why, that’s why they’re important to include them because if something’s surfacing, they’re either reinforcing something that’s already there, or they’re telling you you missed something.
Christian Nielsen | 39:29
Yep. And, and the, we have a slide on this in a bit, I think, but for example, a question about compensation, you may have a lot of legitimate questions. Well, how do they employees feel about the, the, the incentives and the compensation structure? Well, guess what? If you ask a question, it’ll be the lowest scoring item in your survey. And I’ll give you an example. Ask me if I should be paid more. Yes. Uh, and so it’s not always the most productive item to put in a survey. In fact, it can cause some damage if you’re not willing to adjust comp based on, on that survey. So we don’t often recommend it. We have those benchmark items, but it’s, uh, you, in most cases, more productive just to see how much that compensation comes up organically in a comment question. And if it’s on their mind, then you do some additional follow. Yeah. But you don’t stir it up unnecessarily.
Matt Wride | 40:17
Just had that the other day. We did not ask specifically about it, but it dominated the comments. Yep. And dramatically changed the, the debrief that went to the employees because it was like, okay, we’ve got, we’ve got some real pay equity issues because new employees came on during covid that were paid very, very close to what people had, who had been there 10 years were making, and it was causing a lot of problems.
Christian Nielsen | 40:40
Yeah. And, and if that is really a, an organizational concern, it will certainly show up in those comments. And that’s a much more productive way to, to make that discovery versus asking some, uh, uh, scaled questions that, that will, uh, maybe create some more noise and, and, and some false positives unnecessarily. All right. So engagement and satisfaction, I’ll, I’ll be brief here, but we do make the distinction between the elements of the workplace experience that CRO create, uh, more of a sense of a satisfaction. Those are usually transactional in nature, uh, versus those that are more transformational and lead to that deeper engagement. Satisfaction items are things that are, if they’re in place, great, we don’t think about them, but if they’re not, it’s all we can think about. So, tools and resources would be a good example. Uh, or safety. Very important, critical. But they don’t drive that deeper level of engagement.
Christian Nielsen | 41:33
They drive a base level of satisfaction. Uh, so we need to make sure they’re in place, but we also recognize that there’s limits to what they can create in the employee experience. Um, the, the example many of you have probably heard me say is, I, I don’t go home from work and say, honey, I, I had the best day my computer turned on, but if I didn’t have that tool to do my job, that would be a point of frustration that I would be complaining about. And so, and safety is the, the same way as if it’s in place. Great. If it’s not, boy, it’s a big distraction. And it’s, it’s something that’ll be very hard for us to, to, um, get over or focus on anything else if, if we don’t feel safe. Um, so we’ll, we’ll look at some of those satisfaction items as we go to engagement.
Christian Nielsen | 42:15
That’s where they, we see that deeper connection that people are accepting that invitation to bring more of their best self. Uh, we, we use a magic, the magic model here at decision wise to talk about elements that are in that engagement side of, of the house. So do we, are we creating an, a sense of meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection? And so we, just to introduce some of the language that we use here at decision wise, if you haven’t run a, a survey with us, but making that distinction culturally of the elements that are satisfaction based and those that, that really drive engagement. Uh, I thought it’d be interesting to throw in some of the common satisfaction areas. So e especially also, this is, these are good things to consider. If, if there’s an executive that’s really interested in a survey, these might be some of those components. They’re, they’re concerned with, you know, um, communication, pay and benefits, workloads, stress collaboration, training, safety resources, those type of things, um, are, are frequently asked.
Matt Wride | 43:14
And if you, if you wanna be helpful, right. Uh, to your, to someone who’s come and said, I, I wanna talk to you about culture, don’t just don’t make them identify it. Come with a list of 20 topics or themes, and then say, which of these are on your mind. Yeah. Um, just a tip that it’s really hard just to sometimes express what, what they’re after. And so if you can help provide a first draft or even something to select from, then it, it, it helps refine the process.
Christian Nielsen | 43:42
Yeah. Or I even love to go the other way and say, Hey, describe to me the, the ideal culture for what we’re trying to accomplish here. What’s, what’s there? And then we can make sure we’re, we’re measuring some of those aspects in our, in our survey. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, some other key metrics. Um, uh, I we’re, we’ve always been a big fan of the employee net promoter score, but I think increasingly we are one way to think about this, and, and this is, would you recommend this organization as a great place to work? You know, if I as an employee feel like I can strongly agree with that statement, that tells you quite a bit about the health of, of the overall experience. It tells you a lot about the culture. But also if I believe that the organization is headed to a pa, a, a, a place of success, are we gonna win?
Christian Nielsen | 44:27
I don’t wanna, if we’re a sinking ship, but I, you know, it’s a fun place to work. I wouldn’t recommend the organization to my, my friends and family, but, um, this employee net promoter is a really great shortcut to, to, to make some broad kind of, uh, gen general understanding of the, the culture and the health and how people view it. Um, so we’re seeing, um, some success with organizations. One, we always bake this into our, our culture surveys, unless a client specifically doesn’t want to. But we also are, are seeing more short pulses around employee net promoter score and asking at, at anniversary surveys, you’ve been here a year, you know, please give us, um, uh, respond to this two question survey.
Matt Wride | 45:13
Um, yeah, it often has an open-ended comment, which is helpful. ’cause that allows us to sort of get ahead of, and I have to wait a full year to, to see if things are bubbling or, or, or whether something’s on their mind. And that’s the power of comment. Uh, you know, if you don’t have a system that’s, that’s categorizing your comments and running them through sentiment analysis using some machine learning and ai, then it’s, it’s really hard to sort of surface what’s on people’s minds.
Christian Nielsen | 45:38
Yeah. And, and a real powerful strategy is run the, run the culture survey, the broad 40 50 questions survey, get it the broad understanding, and then implement some kind of ENPS follow up pulse so you can monitor, are we getting better? Are we moving the needle? Are we getting worse? Are there pockets of urgency? Hey, this team is really struggling. And so that, it’s almost like cultural monitoring, uh, by implementing a, a more frequent ENPS number. It’s not the big survey. You’re not gonna get fatigue. Um, there’s different ways to implement it. Um, you know, either promotion or, excuse me, anniversary surveys or, or, or even just kind of department pulses.
Matt Wride | 46:16
And there’s another one you can choose if you don’t want the promotional one. We call it a net belonging score. It’s the same thing, but it’s based on a single question. I feel like I belong here with an open-ended comment. And that too can create a score that’s structured similar to the same scoring, um, ME methodology used in ENPS. But that’s a, a really powerful cultural Yeah. Check in as well, not just sort of like retention and sort of how I morale, like belonging’s a really powerful driver as well.
Christian Nielsen | 46:46
Well, and I’m glad you brought that up. ’cause ENPS has some cache because it, it’s similar to, you know, the NPS score from marketing, you know, how, what our customers recommend it. And so it’s kind of a shortcut to, executives are familiar with it, they like that metric, but you and I both know the power of this belonging item is, is really undeniable. So, you know, we’re big fans of this net belonging score. It’s the same approach, but it’s a different item. It’s that I feel like I belong here. And it, it is a, a really powerful metric to, to monitor and, and watch, but just know that the, there, there’s other kind of cultural indicators, health indicators, that you can, you can, um, bake into your listening strategy that, that can be very, very helpful.
Matt Wride | 47:30
And, and I sometimes think it’s easier for a manager to understand how to build belonging than to understand how to make someone a raving fan. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s another advantage to it.
Christian Nielsen | 47:41
I’m gonna looking at ahead, I’ve, I was more audacious in our slides than I, I realized in terms of how much content we could get through. So I’m gonna kick it into gear and might skip through a couple of these, but again, we’ll send the slides out and love to follow up with any specific questions. Attrition, that’s a common thing to add into, uh, some kind of attrition prediction and another health indicator if we’re losing people, probably not the strongest culture or the culture that we want. Um, DEI, uh, this certainly can be its own series of webinars and, uh, but a component, an increasingly component, and I’m glad Matt brought up that belonging item, because that’s a, a really key component. Do not only do we have strong aggregate belonging score, but do subpopulations, uh, feel like they belong? Do we have a consistent sense of this, or are there different populations by gender or ethnicity or, uh, age, what have you that feel like they don’t belong in our organization?
Christian Nielsen | 48:42
That’s a very key component of a, a healthy culture, is that it’s an inclusive culture, a culture that is, um, consistent across, um, all subpopulations and segments. Um, again, uh, uh, apologies. I’m going a little bit fast here, but, uh, where to expect to do, well, uh, this is a fun part of the conversation, so I can’t help myself. I can tell you what parts of your, your survey are gonna do well, and where you’re probably gonna see low scores. The ones that are related to the team typically is trend high. You ask a lot of team questions, they’re gonna trend high. And because of that, we can usually learn what we need to learn about team dynamics with fewer questions, because Yeah. But those trend high
Matt Wride | 49:25
Where you are expected to do well, when one of these have a flip value of, uh, other side of the value, and you and I know this, if you score low on any of these, you are in trouble. Yeah. Right? So if, if you have low confidence in the future, don’t worry about anything else. You gotta fix that. Right? Or if you have direct managers that are scoring really poorly, yeah. Those are ones that need some serious help.
Christian Nielsen | 49:49
Yeah, great point, great point. And what’s interesting, um, so questions about my direct manager. I, I’ve seen servers where we’d ask 15 questions. I can give you the shorthand. This is the not an official data science rule, but what I’ve learned is, if you ask the question, I trust my manager. You can learn about everything else you need for, for the manager. Now, uh, it’s usually good to add some, you know, my manager’s invested in my growth and things like that as well. But what we’ve learned is if, if they’re, if you ask manager questions, um, they’re gonna move together. So you can ask fewer questions and, and things. But to your point, Matt, it’s because those typically trend high. If they, if they’re scoring low, it’s really a, a red flag, and especially that confidence in the future. But these just, uh, historically are areas that score pretty high.
Christian Nielsen | 50:42
Um, and, and I mean, tools and resources is a good one too. If that’s low, by the way, that’s, it’s kind of a gift if it’s low in, in some ways because it’s a very actionable item. Now, if you don’t have any resources to provide or funds to do that, that’s a different challenge. But it’s a very tangible thing and very symbolic and visible thing to say, Hey, you were asking for these tools and resources and we delivered it. Feedback works where to struggle, cross team collaboration. Anytime I’m talking about my team, those, those scores trend high. Anytime I’m talking about how my team interacts with another team, those typically tend to score lower. Um, and so part of the work we see organizations do is let’s expand our definition of team. Just because you don’t share a manager doesn’t mean we’re not part of a team, and can we all be working in kinda this organization as team concept, but they typically trend low.
Christian Nielsen | 51:30
We can show you with benchmarks. Those trend, low workload and stress typically trend low. And we saw some interesting things during covid around stress and workload comp and benefit. As I mentioned, those trend lower growth people were always looking for growth. In fact, that’s similar to a growth, uh, is similar to compensation. General. General, um, generationally, boy, I’m struggling to to speak today. Um, younger generations really want to be paid in growth. We’re looking for merit badges, uh, LinkedIn buttons, things that we can do to, to say we’re growing and, and our, our marketability is increasing. So, um, those questions will often trend low because they want more of that at all times. Not saying don’t ask them, just recognize that that’s, those are some areas, here are some areas that consider not asking. If you have no intention on a acting, on a, in an area, don’t ask a question about it.
Christian Nielsen | 52:22
If you’re absolutely not going to address comp, doesn’t mean you’re gonna give everyone raises, but you’re not even willing to, to explore, you know, comp surveys in the, you know, are, are we paying fair in the market or, or even more transparency and compensation, those types of things. Do not ask a question. You’ll, you’ll, you’ll, uh, just undermine the efforts and, and hurt trust. Um, there are real reasons to ask, and as I mentioned, we, we, we have a number of clients that successfully do ask comp and benefit questions. But, um, sometimes, uh, if, if, if it’s, it’s not something you can act or there’s not a really great reason to do it, uh, it’s better to see if it surfaces organically in the comments. Um, if you ask que questions where employees are evaluating themselves, they’ll give themselves a pluses. You don’t learn a ton from that, um, culturally. Well,
Matt Wride | 53:12
And there’s also, there’s no reason to ask any a lot of evaluative questions because if you asked a question, this organization’s on the right track, a what does that mean? Yeah. It’s better to ask questions of thing people, people on surveys, it’s been proven that folks are, uh, poor at doing evaluation, but good at, at telling you what they observe. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So ask, so ask questions about observable behaviors that lead to success or indicators of success, rather than asking about just strict up straight evaluations, because they’ll either always evaluate themselves high, they sometimes will always evaluate their peers low. Yeah. Like evaluation. We’re not great at it. So what we want to ask for is tell us what you are observing and that yeah, people are pretty good at,
Christian Nielsen | 54:00
That’s a big benefit of working with, you know, really spending some time in the survey design, uh, phase to, to make sure we’re you’re, and using folks outside of, of the, the organization as a sounding board to really understand, okay, am I gonna get something valuable out of this, or usable out of this? Or what are the unintended con consequences? Because there’s this concept of survey as communication tool. What you ask in the a as a survey item also communicates what’s important to you, to the population. So you’ve gotta be very, um, uh, strategic there. Alright, culture buil builders, and these are three groups we talk about quite a bit, but I thought it was useful in this conversation. You have a culture survey, you’re getting information, you’re trying to understand what, what experience you’re creating. If you want to start to take action, it’s helpful to parse that data for three different audiences.
Christian Nielsen | 54:55
Uh, and, and these, these different audiences. You know, ultimately every employee plays a role in shaping what it feels like to work in an organization. Every day we co-create the culture of an organization. That said, um, I’ve learned that it’s very useful to consider these three groups, not these three me cats, but these three groups. Um, senior leaders, HR and managers and teams, senior leaders. Uh, we kind of gave some examples there. Their behaviors, either deliberate or, or just, um, kind of inadvertently, they shape culture everywhere they go. They tell a story that impacts the way people view. Oh, that means, oh, Matt’s the president of the organization. They just told a story about this. So now I know that that’s important to Matt, that’s important to this organization. And that might not have been Matt’s intent, but there’s certain things that you get outta that culture survey that need to go to the executives.
Christian Nielsen | 55:46
They need to understand how they influence and shape that culture and where they can, uh, make some adjustments. hr, HR is sometimes tasked with as the only owner of it, and that’s, that’s inaccurate. Uh, limited things are gonna be possible if, if HR is expected to move the culture by themselves. Uh, no one can move a culture all the way by themselves. It, it, you know, it takes, um, uh, the, the entire organization. We have to think broadly. We have to expand ownership of culture and the employee experience. That said, there are some things that, uh, certainly fit in the HR wheelhouse. They’re connecting the dots. They own sy people systems, communication, uh, L and d, um, and so forth. Um, and then of course, managers and teams. So much of the culture and the employee experience is shaped right at that manager, manager and team dynamic. And so it’s, it’s worth, uh, making sure that they get the piece of the culture information, the survey that they can, uh, then take and, uh, modify their approach. Again, we could spend a lot of time there.
Matt Wride | 56:47
There’s a point to be made though with these three groups is make sure that you give differentiated data. And what I mean by that is, if you give everybody all the information, the, the noise to signal ratios too high, there’s too much noise. You need to di dissect it so that the signal is clear in the data, right? Yeah. So give managers, don’t just don’t just give everybody the survey results and say, good luck. Take the time to figure out the signals that are applicable to each group and make sure those stand out. Otherwise, the noise of the general survey may, may dampen or, or sort of obscure the, the key signals we want. And we’re really looking for key one or two things, not a lot. Yeah. Like a, a laundry list of of 10 things is not helpful. One or two things is much more valuable. The, the, the strong signals are what we’re looking for.
Christian Nielsen | 57:38
Yep. I love it. We, uh, clearly this could have been a two-parter, <laugh> probably a, a 12 parter, but, um, we’re, we’re coming up on time, so I’ll, I’ll jump to our heartfelt conclusion. I, I’ve used this slide before, but I think it paints a really good, great picture. Whether you’re actively managing it or not, you have a culture and that culture is creating an employee experience and based on that experience, people are choosing to engage or disengage in what you’re doing. Um, and if we don’t, uh, you know, if we liken it kind of to this concept of a garden garden will grow, it might do some good things, but it much more is possible if we’re taking an active role in shaping it. Especially if your organization is growing, you wanna make sure you have some fire tenders, some people that are, um, aware of what the current culture is and, and what the desired culture ultimately should be and helping to steer the ship towards that.
Christian Nielsen | 58:32
Uh, you’ve gotta have some measurements to, to help make that possible. You’ve also gotta have some ownership and understanding, uh, within those three groups to help steer this this way. We obviously have a lot of expertise on the, on the call today and, and, and folks with some, uh, real, uh, impressive background in this space. And so hopefully I’m, I’m speaking things that, that resonate with you. Um, uh, just to kind of wrap it up here, uh, I love this quote. Uh, culture isn’t just one aspect of the game. It is the game. And the longer I’m in this space, the more and more I believe that, that this is, um, you get culture right. And a lot of the other things will, will take, uh, Paul into play. So I wanna thank everyone for the time. We will send these slides out as well as, as Eric mentioned, there’s a recording of this session and we will, um, uh, of course be happy to jump on, uh, additional phone calls if, or interact by email if you’ve got, uh, other questions, uh, email sent info at decision wise. And thanks again for attending these sessions. We, we certainly love putting them on.
