264. How to Measure Culture Like a Business Metric - Great Mondays Radio X Truth, Lies and Work

0:02Josh Levine:Hello and welcome to Truth, Lives and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Well, it's the first week in January and we're on holiday this week, North East Italy, if you're curious. So we're going to bring you a great interview with Leanne on Great Mondays Radio. You're probably going to remember Josh Levine as our guest on episode 239, who was also one of the predictions as well, which would be episode 262 or 263, but listen to them both because they really could.

0:39Josh Levine:Well, he is here in the host's chair interviewing Leanne on creating amazing workplaces. If you enjoy this episode, and I'm pretty sure you will, then you should go and subscribe to Great Mondays Radio wherever you get your podcasts. Also go and check out his great YouTube channel, which is at Great Mondays on YouTube. The link will be in the show notes, obviously. And then if you want to learn a bit more about what he does and more about Great Mondays, go to greatmondays.com. Okay, here is the interview. We'll see you on Thursday. I'm off for an app roll. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers.

1:11Josh Levine:And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content. But with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish. Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, help them write and optimize their content in just a fraction of the time. The results? 30 % more page views, and visitors now spend 27 % more time on their site. If you're ready for impossible growth like this, visit HubSpot.com.

1:50Leanne Elliott:It's Great Mondays Radio. I'm Josh Levine, your host, founder of Great Mondays. We help executives from hyper-growth, technology, and social enterprise organizations build cultures that attract, engage, and retain top talent. If you'd like to be a guest on our program, hang out for about 20 minutes, and I'll tell you how.

2:14Leanne Elliott:Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Great Mondays Radio. As I have said for a long time, company culture is really important. And if you're listening to this, you probably believe that's true. But today's guest is here to share with us some of the trials and tribulations that she's been through when it comes to organizations not understanding what culture is and how they can kind of get lost in the ill definitions. and maybe she's got some problems to pick at with me. And I'm excited to have a colleague on, Leanne Elliott. Welcome to Great Mondays Radio.

2:59Josh Levine:Thank you so much for having me.

3:00Leanne Elliott:So, Leanne, you're the host of the host, the co-host, which I've now dubbed it coast, co-host of Truth, Lies, and Work, the UK's number one business and management podcast, which is awesome. So thank you for coming on here because you are a professional and have such reach. It's amazing. You're also an occupational psychologist and you have a group called Oblong, helping business leaders create amazing cultures. So in your experience, Leanne, what is going on in the world of business when it comes to thinking and talking about culture?

3:44Josh Levine:What I enjoy about what's happening in the business world right now is how we're talking about culture. That is a big win, right? Finally, finally. I know, I know. You know, when I started my career, what I did was confined to HR consultancies, maybe some big corporates, maybe something in the public sector. Now everyone's talking about culture and that's awesome and I'm here for it. My slight issue though is that I worry that Because we're talking about it so much, without much understanding at times, culture is becoming a buzzword.

4:20Leanne Elliott:It does happen that way. I mean, I think there's a lot. We've seen it with design is, you know, finally it was in the ether and then it became a buzzword. And then innovation and even back in the day, management was a buzzword. So how do we push through? So, OK, well, what's so you and I agree. Thank God we're finally talking about it. I don't know about you, but when I first started talking about culture in 2008, I would go, I told everybody, hey, I'm really interested in this thing called culture. And they would turn to me and say, do you mean like ballet or like opera? I was like, are you fucking serious?

4:59Leanne Elliott:Like, what are you talking? Of course, no. But like there was no reference for it. So I do appreciate that we now have an awareness and we're talking about it. But when you say buzzword, that's, you know, got this negative connotation of I'm going to say something for effect without having impact. What are you what is what is happening? Why are why is that? Why is it occurring? What is what's going on there?

5:27Josh Levine:The problem starts, I think, is that as occupational psychologists, organizational psychologists, same thing is what we call it in the UK. Org psych is what we call it elsewhere in the world. We don't have a shared definition that we agree on. there's more than 50 definitions of culture out there so if we can't agree on a definition how do we then navigate how to help organizations create an effective culture so i think that's that's the the first problem my preferred definition of culture is by an incredible psychologist called john amici who defines culture as the worst behaviors tolerated and i love that for two reasons one it makes it behavior based we can we can influence behavior we can change behavior which means that culture is a living breathing thing that we can all be responsible for in all shape it also puts the light on the worst behaviors tolerated in that an effective culture a positive culture a productive culture however you want to define what a good culture is um doesn't have room for toxicity, doesn't have room for behaviors that are counterproductive to both the individual experience, the employee experience, and what the organization is trying to achieve.

6:42Josh Levine:So for me, that definition is really a nice one because it brings in things that we can change, things that we won't tolerate. And as leaders, if our focus is on the things that we won't tolerate, the behaviors we will not tolerate, that is an incredible first step to creating an awesome workplace culture. I love it.

7:00Leanne Elliott:I use that statement, I think, just last week I was talking to somebody and I do find it very powerful. My my definition is has a similar goal. And I say it's the cause and effect of every decision that we make. So behavior based, absolutely. And I think of it like a system so that it sort of it trades a little bit on that. Hey, it can influence it in a good way or a bad way. So that's how I think about it. But I do like that we're talking about behavior. So what is the misunderstanding that most business leaders, what is it that most business leaders get wrong about culture? When they say culture, certainly they, I don't know, maybe they are using it as a buzzword and just trying to quote something.

7:56Leanne Elliott:I prefer to think that folks are doing their best, maybe naively. What's the biggest misunderstanding that you've seen in your experience?

8:05Josh Levine:The biggest misunderstanding I've seen, and I thought we were getting over it, but now I'm not so sure, is that culture is something tangible in that it is the offices we build, the cool break rooms that we have, the ping pong table, the general vibe around the place. that for me I thought we were getting over it until we saw all the return to office mandates and the claims from senior leadership that we can't create the desired culture we can't create collaboration communication without people being in the office don't get me wrong there are challenges that come with having a remote workforce a hybrid workforce absolutely it requires an incredible amount of intention from leadership as to how to nurture those relationships and the trust we need to see in our organizations but I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding that culture is something almost physical culture is psychological and if you think of culture psychological as behavior culture is science it's not fluffy it's not a nice to have it is you have a culture whether you whether you know it or not that's right you might not know what that culture is, but it's there because it is something that is formed from human behavior.

9:23Josh Levine:And that's the psychology people. And that's the science of work.

9:26Leanne Elliott:The science of work. Why? This is something that I've struggled with. Right. So my my whole pitch to the world is that we need to start employing and deploying culture as a strategic business advantage. It needs to be something that we treat like finance or IT. And the question I am asking is why, I mean, I have some hypotheses, but I'm going to ask you, why can't we, why can't, why are people in business, business leaders or managers having the hard time wrapping their minds around that it is something beyond just the physical? Is it just that it's been that way for a long time? We haven't needed to think about it that way?

10:28Leanne Elliott:What do you think is the challenge?

10:30Josh Levine:The challenge stems from, and I will take some accountability for this one, occupational psychologists, organizational psychologists aren't very well known. You ask the average person, what does an occupational psychologist do? They might go, oh, I don't know, something to do with occupational health. I'm not sure. So there's a fundamental kind of misstep from the psychology community of being like, this is our space. This is our thing. This is what we do. And we can help you do it. And the big part of that, we're scientists. Scientists love data. You mentioned their finance and IT. What are the two big things they have in common?

11:06Josh Levine:They create strategy and implement strategy based on data, based on insights. Same with marketing, same with sales. for some reason we're not collecting the right kind of data or the richness of data we need about how people are thinking and feeling within our business to understand how to best influence that with to have the most positive impact and you're absolutely right in that this isn't fluff this isn't nice to have even if you are the most cynical business owner leader in the world and you think this is fluff trust me when I say all the data shows us all the science shows us that this is just fundamentally good for business.

11:43Josh Levine:Great for your bottom line. It's great for your customers. It's great for your growth trajectory. Name a commercial metric. That'll be better if you're creating an awesome workplace for your people.

11:53Leanne Elliott:Yes. And there's two things that I have come up against in that logic chain. um one is what data do we collect and how do we collect it and i'll get to the second i'll get to the second after we get through that what data do we need to collect what do we need to collect and and isn't it like yes i'll just yes what data do we need yes yeah um as a psychologist

12:29Josh Levine:is the data I say you need to collect are what we call the psychosocial risk factors within the workplace and that from a science theoretical perspective is much more connected with research in employee engagement and well-being rather than culture and this is where I think the shift is needed. Culture of course is a hugely researched area of psychology but as we've said we can't decide on a definition and it all feels a bit intangible and it all feels a little bit hard to get your hands around as a business leader to really have an impact on whereas employee engagement or understanding the psychosocial risk factors they're really simple transactional elements of our business how are relationships faring within the business how much control do people have over how they work how much trust they have in their colleagues in their peers in their managers what resources they have available to do their job including the skills that they need to do their job?

13:30Josh Levine:What development opportunities do they have? What's the mission of the organization? How do they connect with that? And how does that, how do their role, how do they understand their role in influencing and pushing that mission delivery forward? How is change managed in an organization? These are all psychosocial risk factors that we know directly impact how people think and feel in our business. That directly impacts how people behave within our business And that in turn will directly impact the outcomes of our business.

14:01Leanne Elliott:And is the only way to get the data through surveys? Is that what you're going to... I don't remember. So I did take psychology in college and I can't remember what it's called, but there's sort of this direct measurement and indirect measurement, right? Direct measurement is like how many steps you take. It's inarguable. Indirect is that your human brain comes in between the question and the answer, which which is how much trust do you have? And, you know, or how safe do you feel sharing your, right? And so you have this big, juicy, you know, bit of organ in your brain in between the question and the answer.

14:46Leanne Elliott:And I just wonder if the methodology is part of our problem, question mark?

14:53Josh Levine:Yes, the methodology is absolutely part of our problem. because I think the word survey is triggering for most people in organizations.

15:02Leanne Elliott:I think that's probably why I used it. Yes. Yeah. No, another one. Another survey. I'm not completing that. Yeah.

15:09Josh Levine:Exactly. Exactly. And it's because there's two things to it, right? There's not surveys, not all surveys are created equal.

15:16Leanne Elliott:That's correct.

15:17Josh Levine:And my biggest advice to any business leader who is looking at gathering these insights and what we'd call quantitative data, so more numbers-driven data that you'd get from a survey, a questionnaire, is what is the psychological model that's sitting behind that survey? What is the intention of the questions? What are they measuring? What we call construct validity within the questions you're asking. And there are loads of question banks out there that have been studied and scrutinized and evaluated as effective questions to ask to get to get an answer to the exact thing that you're asking about and the problem is there are a lot of surveys and platforms out there that are very popular and very well known and from very respectable companies that can I find the science behind them no and I've tried really freaking hard Josh I've tried really hard to understand the actual psychological model that's behind that what we'd call the predictive model of employee engagement and what I mean by that is we can follow the science through it's like a flow chart right so if we know that people are experiencing positive relationships in their workplace we know that that through research and through study we know that that means that people are more likely to be enjoy um positive job satisfaction more likely to experience psychological safety that means they're going to be more agile to change and that means that companies are going to be more innovative and typically more profitable so we can follow through the science if I don't know what that model is if I can't then look at the data that has been spun out from this questionnaire and go right okay my people aren't quite happy with how they're experiencing relationships within the business and I can also see in the data that that's being reflected in job satisfaction and our speed to market is a bit low at the minute I followed that through so I know then that if I invest time in interventions and activities that are going to improve relationships within the organization I should be able to follow the data through six 12 months later when we run it again when we evaluate what we've done and see the impact if I don't know what that impact that data is going to have if I try and manipulate it then is the blind leading the blind what does that even mean and the problem is is that so many of these surveys will spill out data like this that business leaders go I don't really know what to do with this I don't really know what to what to change to have the desired impact so I don't do anything and then employees go well I answered this 100 question survey nothing's changing nothing's been done I then lose trust in this process so next time it comes around I'm just clicking buttons until it's done if I fill it in at all.

17:52Leanne Elliott:Do I have to or does one have to define what outcome we are looking for because there are some organizations that want efficiency and some organizations that want innovation. And, you know, and then there's just also like team efficacy or something like that. In your expertise, does the model change? Does the logic change depending on what we're trying to achieve at the organization?

18:26Josh Levine:Yes, the logic changes. The model, not necessarily. because if it's a strong robust model that would have been studied for decades in terms of how this how this all plays out and how these psychosocial factors influence human behavior in the workplace and those outcomes you bring up a really good example in terms of efficiency versus innovation and it's really hard to have both actually because it's a it's a very different very different thing because innovation isn't typically very efficient because you need to kind of make mistakes no you

18:59Leanne Elliott:need to cycle through yeah that's that's right yeah exactly so then that comes down to the

19:03Josh Levine:strategy of the organization which where all ties together this isn't a standalone area of organizational life this should feed directly into your operational strategy into your business strategy into where you want to take your company in the next two to five years because if you're a company that success relies on innovation then yes you're going to want to prioritize those psychosocial factors that are going to really nurture psychological safety, allow people to make mistakes safely. And a lot of that is going to come from the relationships people have with their managers. If you're chasing efficiency, then that's very much more steeped in something like resources.

19:42Josh Levine:What are the structures we have in the organization? How do they flow together to help people be productive? Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination of business professionals. Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures and hard lessons of the creme de la creme. So you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business and in life. Maybe start with episode 124 where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube define leadership.

20:14Josh Levine:Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

20:21so wouldn't you ask some um different questions i'm gonna i'm gonna continue to

20:31Leanne Elliott:like push back right because you're like well the logic changes but not the model so let's continue on this innovation versus efficiency aren't i going to be like you just said, like, isn't aren't we going to ask different questions? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what model might mean. Educate, educate me. Tell me, tell me what I don't understand, because it seems like you need to change the what you're asking.

20:56Josh Levine:It's not that you need to change what you're asking. You just need to understand what that means. So typically we take relationships. Relationships in an organization are typically very dependent or interdependent. Dependent means that I'm looking to my manager very frequently i need their advice their guidance their more hands-on support in terms of what we're achieving so in that scenario it's probably likely to be an organization that is fairly compliance based think financial services yeah we can have innovation within financial services but we have very strict guidelines that we need to to work within yeah so in that scenario we're going to have quite a dependent style relationship to not organizations where people need to feed into each other check on each other check those levels of governance and compliance to get make sure those outcomes are delivered in the way they need to be in an organization that might be more tech-based for example we're much more likely to see or in startup especially much might see interdependent relationships where it's very much like what I do feeds into you but it's not absolute in terms of if I mess up everything breaks down the line it's that I have my autonomy of control around my workload and what I can do and that is more likely to breed innovation because there's more autonomy within that there's more more trial and error within that there's more freedom to to work differently within your teams in the context of a large organization so it's not that we're asking different questions about they will help us understand if relationships are dependent or interdependent it's understanding then the relationships we do have is that serving our organization if we have relationships that are very interdependent in an organization that very much requires very strong and strict governance that's likely to cause a problem and that's where we'll typically see organizations that will derail through some scandal because you've got pockets of people working very independently in an organism where they actually need to be much more dependent on the ebb and flow of other departments within the organization so n1 would be a very famous example of that exactly uh that's really interesting