COVID Culture...Here to Stay?
…an opportunity in the making?
Kenneth Miller | July 2020
In a recent article entitled The Office is Far Away–Can Its Culture Survive? published in the The Wall Street Journal, Chip Cutter observes that business leaders are concerned that COVID-induced remote working arrangements may jeopardize the pre-COVID culture of their companies.
For us, this concern evokes a couple of what we see as rather obvious questions:
- Is this necessarily a bad thing?
- Do we accept that ‘COVID Culture’, in some form, is quite likely to be with us for the foreseeable future?
If the answer to either or both of these questions is ‘yes’, the logical next question is ‘so what are you going to do about it?’ In his article, Mr Cutter describes a number of techniques various companies are employing to confront the challenge. Most of these are directed at maintaining interpersonal camaraderie, both among the workforce and between employees and their leadership. These techniques range from guided meditation via Zoom to virtual dance parties and happy-hours. One can imagine such devices meeting with varying degrees of success in broad terms, but there’s no denying that in the circumstances, a ‘try-everything-and-anything’ approach is to be expected and probably worth a shot.
We recognize the role of good working relationships as an important element of an engagement culture, but likewise have seen far too many examples of jovial camaraderie in companies with some of the least productive cultures imaginable. Our view and experience is that lasting culture improvement requires a sequential, comprehensive approach. Have we mentioned that culture is the Force that drives performance, and the true Brand of every organization?
Before we get to that, let’s consider the above questions individually.
Most leaders are likely to say that jeopardizing the pre-COVID culture of their companies is an inherently bad thing. But is it, or is this a mere reflexive reaction? Consider this: the 2019 US workforce engagement rate, according to Gallup’s latest annual survey, was a meager 35%. So nearly two-thirds of US workers were disengaged at work before we ever became aware that Corona could be anything more than a Mexican beer.
And this–writing under the Banner of Culture University, Daniel Forrester, Dr Philipia Hillman and Eliza McDevitt make this ominous point:
“Companies that entered the pandemic with a weak or poorly managed culture will find that the level of improvisation and resetting required is beyond their capacity for change, creating potentially existential risks and lowering the likelihood of future growth.”
Yikes.
If, on the other hand, you believe all of the workers you lead are among the engaged 35%, congrats! Because you created a culture of engagement, your workforce is almost certain to have already demonstrated the resilience to adapt efficiently and productively to the COVID-induced disruption in how we work and live. You need read no further! Unless, that is, you realize that when it comes to organizational culture, there is no finish line or endpoint; no Culture Nirvana–there is only BETTER, and it’s a perpetually moving target. We think of it this way: if you’re not moving forward, you’re losing ground.
For the significant majority with less than optimal engagement levels—or worse—it’s clearly in your interest to recognize that workforce engagement is now and will ever be increasingly more–not less–critical to the prospects of your organization. So it’s well worth your time right now to consider how you can improve your culture and thus the engagement of your workforce, albeit in a still pandemic-driven environment that makes such transformation all-the-more difficult……or does it?
We already know that humans are hard-wired to resist change (Google Amygdala for details). Some even resist change when doing so is palpably contrary to their best interests–insert your own recent example here. So we can be forgiven for intuiting that attempting to inculcate a voluntary change of mindset and behavior in the midst of the forced dramatic changes in how we work and live we’ve endured these past several months, and continuing into the foreseeable, is likely to be a non-starter……but is it?
Does it?
Is it?
We think maybe not.
Notwithstanding Forrester, et al, we believe that though there are no absolutes, no universal truths—nor even much data—regarding the prospect of change in a time of pandemic, it is observably the case that most companies and institutions have been forced to take or comply with unprecedented actions–ie, change–to assure the well-being of their workforces and the continuity of their businesses.
These include a substantial acceleration of the pre-COVID trend toward remote working. Indeed, stay-at-home orders in most states compelled companies to adopt work-at-home policies for periods of time ranging up to multiple months. During March 2020, over half of all employed Americans transitioned to working from home, and 65% of them report that their productivity increased as a result, according to a contemporaneous Harris Poll. By early April, a Gallup study reflected 62% working remotely, while three of five of them expressed a preference for doing so ‘as much as possible’ in the future, confirmed by a subsequent Metova study published in May revealing that 57% of Americans would prefer to work at home in the future.
Interestingly, with most or all government stay-at-home orders having now lapsed, many companies are electing to continue the practice—at least temporarily, many at the individual employee’s option. Others, from the likes of Nationwide and Barclays to Twitter, Square and Shopify are planning more of a paradigm shift that will have many employees working from home at least some of the time on a permanent basis.
So it’s fair to say that Greek philosopher Heraclitus had it right when in mid-first-millennium BCE he told us that ‘change is the only constant’. In the current context, change has been imposed by a virus and public health efforts to control it, but we’ve seen a growing number of examples of organizations seizing the moment to effect changes in their basic operating models to optimize productivity, cost-effectiveness, and workforce safety going forward. Having entered the age of Zoom, can ‘Zoom-VR’ be far behind?
Such changes in how and where we work by definition impact an organization’s culture, and will continue to do so as the process of adapting to a new reality continues in ways yet to be imagined. The inescapable fact is that culture happens. And culture by design is vastly preferable to culture by default—full stop. We would emphasize that the urgency is greatest for those companies with the weakest cultures and thus the least likelihood of being able to formulate and accommodate change without professional assistance.
So rather than impeding the intentional transformation of organizational culture, it seems quite likely that the imposition of the ‘COVID Culture’ may actually pave the way for greater receptivity to more broad-based transformation efforts and the sort of improvement in workforce engagement that drives performance–pandemic or no. Change is palpably in process, and I daresay a shift in priorities is discernible, if subtle, at this point (July 2020). In every case, the goal is improvement–or what we call BETTER. The extent to which this becomes the goal of every stakeholder every day will determine the relative degree of our success.
We are reminded that nearly a year ago, the Business Roundtable significantly revised its Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation from the decades-old shareholder-centric model to a ‘fundamental commitment’ to all stakeholders in an implied priority order that left shareholders on the list, but at the bottom. We suggested at the time that the 181 major corporate CEOs who signed the Roundtable’s Statement might just be aware that refocusing on the needs of employees and customers, as well as suppliers, communities, and, yes, shareholders, is in fact the most direct path to greater productivity and profitability—indeed, recent research published by Bain & Company shows that companies with strong cultures are “…3.7 times more likely to be business performance leaders”. We see this as a well-documented fact, but one that may even now fly in the face of the ‘Conventional Wisdom’.
So we would argue that despite the challenges we have faced, are facing, and no doubt will face going forward, this episode in our history may actually be presenting us with a unique opportunity. An opportunity, perhaps to ‘tweak’ our organizational culture, or to recommit to the purpose and values upon which our organization was founded. Or perhaps it’s the opportunity to reinvent the organization altogether. As Bain also points out: “Culture always matters, but it matters now more than ever”.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to culture—quite the contrary. But whatever the specifics of the approach leaders decide upon, the general motion must be inexorably in the direction of BETTER. But the inescapable fact is this: organizations for which profit is an outcome rather than an obsession simply do better.
Yes, COVID Culture in some form seems here to stay–not just as new methods of how we work, but a new paradigm for how we think about work and those we work with.
#Think about it.