How often have you interacted with a colleague and thought about how the top leadership influenced how they were toxic or supportive at work? Now, how often has your irate manager made a mountain out of a molehill for a small oversight in a project? Additionally, how often have you thought about leadership commitment to a positive work culture?
Generally, the answers to both are “hardly ever”. But why is that? Individual teams at the ground level don’t generally have the authority to set an overarching work culture that would define the entire organization. However, quite often, it is those teams that end up carving a different culture even though the organization claims to have a supportive work environment.
Besides, name one organization whose leadership admits their work culture is horrible or toxic. You can’t; not because there aren’t any, but because all leaders want to create a conducive and positive work culture.
How well it translates to individual teams and how consistent it is across teams sitting in the HQ to those in far-flung remote areas depends on how well the ground-level managers interpret it.
In our research, only 26% of employees believe that their leaders know the work they are doing. Additionally, a whopping 65% believe that they want their leaders to be more involved in how the teams they are leading are functioning.
These are surprising metrics considering that leaders constantly claim to be involved with what their employees are doing.
Leadership Commitment
Leadership Messaging
When I worked with a consulting firm, we had a townhall where the top leaders came and spoke about varied issues. As you can imagine, they were generally just empty and did not make sense when you analyzed them a little more.
However, each townhall ended with the same message: ‘We are here for you. Anytime you want to talk or discuss anything, feel free to just drop us an email and we’ll get the ball rolling’. If they were particularly trying to be funny, they would add a ‘don’t worry about your managers. We’ll handle it.’
I’m sure that just reading that will make laugh at how ridiculous and impossible those statements are. Anybody with any period of work experience would agree that those statements were just empty promises. I felt the same too.
In fact, once, I had reached out to the partner because my naive corporate self saw the automated mail say “Reach out to <the partner of the firm> in case you’re unable to join”. So, naturally, I did.
The partner, who was in the said townhall a couple of weeks ago, forwarded the mail to the director, who then sent it to my manager, who berated me, asking me why I thought it was a prudent choice to reach out to a partner.
When you extrapolate, it is tough to imagine why anyone would want to reach out to the senior leadership for any genuine concern if it would anyway reach your supervising officer. That mismatch in the message and activity is stark and a little concerning.
On-Ground Team Culture
My team had its share of shortcomings and strengths. But here’s a gospel that’s worth knowing in any corporate setting: A sufficiently large organization can never determine an enterprise-level work culture that works at ground levels too.
So, even when my firm determined the organization’s core values, my team employed a different culture. One could argue that difference is inherent and isn’t worth discussing. However, the issue here is that the same team in a different location had a significantly different culture.
Additionally, when the top leadership came to our office and had one of those rare sit-downs with individual teams, they just spoke a lot of platitudes. When it was our turn to ask questions, a colleague asked a naive one.
My team diplomatically berated them later for asking that, with the key word being ‘diplomatically’.
Why the anecdote? To emphasize that leaders can’t enforce the nuances that contribute to any work culture, much less a positive one.
What Should Leaders Do?
While it might be tough to enforce all the nuances, leaders must commit to enforcing some key principles that all teams could broadly base theirs on.
Here are some areas that employees wish leaders would focus more on to implement the work culture they claim to enforce across the organization.
Care About Employee Well-Being
You could have a hundred townhalls claiming that you care about your reportees’ well-being or their mental health. However, if you don’t support that with action, it would be baseless. If you throw a lot of words around but demand that your reportees meet unrealistic deadlines once you leave, the trust and credibility will fall.
A colleague working with one of the top legal firms narrated an incident where the partner used to emphasize that employees prioritize health. However, the same partner once berated someone in the team because they went home to take a 2-hour nap after working continuously for 38 hours.
Understandably, deadlines are crucial and projects are unrelenting. However, you can’t give positive statements as a blanket and then do something opposite.
One alternative is to set expectations straight. You don’t have to give blanket statements on employee health. When you do that and go back, your employees will be willing to trust you more. Statements about employee health are valid and come with good intentions. However, leaders should introduce caveats while giving them, not during the execution.
If you give employees realistic limitations and benefits, you help them understand and prioritize their needs without compromising the needs of the project. In the end, when you show hypocritical actions or give platitudes, you lose employee motivation and productivity, which would anyway impact the project.
Focus on Learning as Part of Employee Experience
In many knowledge-based industries, firms emphasize learning to stay updated with the job. Often, these training modules don’t have any direct impact on the role itself. Employees can learn most of them on-the-job as well, without having to set aside time to complete these modules. Other modules require an extensive time commitment to understand the job nuances better. However, for both training modules, employees are expected to complete them in addition to the tight deadlines that require them to work irrational hours.
The problem with this is that nobody really expects you to gain anything from the training module. Most leaders aren’t truly concerned about your completion. If substantial time exceeds the deadline, then the top leadership is obligated to send a reminder mail to the operational leadership. Even then, if a project is particularly demanding, the same leadership extends the deadline.
When your emphasis is clearly on the projects and not on employee learning, most modules that your team puts together are wasted. Apart from the loss of critical resources, it also diverts employee attention away from what matters. Apart from this tokenism, these training modules are created by people far removed from the reality of employee expectations and project deadlines. Unfortunately, nobody seems to update these expectations or deadlines to make the modules relevant.
The more leaders demand that employees finish their learning outside projects, the fewer employees are motivated to do it. In fact, our research has told us that almost 59% of employees want their leaders to be more involved in their learning & development. When everyone knows that the leadership only cares about the projects, these modules will always be sidelined.
Don’t Give Platitudes and Empty Statements
Young professionals consume comedy around corporate jargon almost as much as other conventional types. That isn’t surprising considering statements like “Let’s touch base about that” or “I don’t have enough bandwidth for xx” are exceedingly common. What was wrong with simple utterances like “Let us discuss that” or “I can’t do that right now”?
Understandably, much of this corporate jargon exists because corporate diplomacy requires the right thing always. However, this has spiraled into something where half the population receiving that jargon doesn’t understand it.
Now, what happens when top leadership takes that jargon, mixes it with empty statements, promises, or care, and sprinkles on some random discussion about strategies that don’t make sense for the lower levels of management? Platitudes. A platitude is an empty statement that often doesn’t mean anything but is highly verbose and long.
Employees are tired of platitudes now. They want statements that symbolize action. Old corporate wisdom used to dictate that leaders should always assuage and pacify employees in tough times, even if it is with words that just sound nice. Today, everybody wants action statements. They want you to give them the matter the way it is, no matter how troubling.
As long as leaders understand that employees are intelligent humans who deserve non-empty words and the truth about situations that affect them, employees are willing to go through all the other motions that are now inherent in any corporate culture.
Conclusion
Leaders always play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy work culture. Even though they might not be able to affect everything happening at ground-level, they have much power in affecting how the macro culture shapes itself in the organization. Keeping a finger on the pulse and a tab on things is great to make employees that leaders care and that they are dedicated to maintaining a positive work culture.