Four ways to invigorate your culture in 2021

Writing note showing Culture. Business photo showcasing characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of showing.

If there’s one thing that business leaders should have learned about 2020 it’s that without a vibrant culture comprised of highly emotionally intelligent people who care about what the organisation is trying to achieve, it’s impossible to deliver anything.

They cannot simply wait for their culture to sort itself out or walk past the kind of behaviour that undermines psychological safety. It is their job to provide the time and money for employees to define the culture they need to be successful and then to role model this themselves, in plain sight.

Many business leaders still put culture in the “too hard” basket, when the reality is that a few simple tweaks can transform the way that work gets done.

Here are four examples that any business leader can encourage:

1. Hold a “bureaucracy-busting day”

This is something that Google encourages across their teams to ensure that the organisation never mires itself in inefficient ways of working. It requires that all departments spend a day looking at the way that they work and asking themselves, “Is there a better way that we can do this?”
Agility is something that every CEO long to achieve, yet what gets in the way of it is the mindset of people and needless process or hierarchy. Continually challenge the way things get done rather than waiting for them to break.

2. Stop holding 30- or 60-minute meetings

Yes, meetings can be an important structure for decision-making and progress evaluation however, when the organisation has become lazy about how they are run, hasn’t given any thought to the amount of time actually required to make a decision or else and has decided to be driven by the calendar application instead then the importance is lost.
Change the timings to 20 and 40 minutes (in the first instance) and being more disciplined around the way that they’re run to give employees more productive time back in their days.

3. Hold regular “chat with the chief” sessions

In one organisation that I worked with last year the CEO wanted to improve his visibility, so we implemented monthly “chat with the chief” sessions. Anyone could book in and the numbers were limited so that everyone got an equal amount of facetime and opportunity to ask questions. The CEO shouted coffees and biscuits and talked openly about the organisation, its culture, goals, challenges, risk and opportunities.
During the pandemic these moved online and demonstrated a more vulnerable side of his nature (his cat made a regular appearance). The CEO trust score went up and employees appreciated the opportunity to hear undiluted messages. Open up your calendar and listen regularly.

4. Hold an “honesty half hour” with your team

As a former senior manager myself courageous conversations were often a challenge. So in order to improve our ability to do this crucial skill well we introduced Honesty Half Hour sessions. These ‘Triple-H’ meetings were purely centred around providing feedback to each other on the things that we could individually improve.
Netflix do something similar and CEO Reed Hastings said in his book No Rules Rules, “At Netflix it’s tantamount to being disloyal to the company if you fail to speak up when you disagree with a colleague or have feedback that could be helpful”. Get better at being honest to drive personal and organisational growth.

Of course, these things won’t ever replace taking the time to formally define a culture, however, they are all things that any CEO can do to create positive micro-experiences within a culture to lift engagement from which results are achieved.

Colin D Ellis, project management & culture change expert and author of “Culture Hacks: 26 Ideas to Transform the Way You Work”