A fine line exists between spelling out company culture and inadvertently engraving it as policy.
Culture offers your staff the company blog’s “publish” button 24/7 so that they can write when their own iron is hot. Policy forces topics and a posting schedule to chip away at the company marketing quota.
Culture inspires your programmers to discover typographic rhythm and scale in their free time. Policy puts a “lunch and learn with designers” meeting on your calendar at 12:00 PM.
Culture nurtures pet projects so that they grow into everyday company tools. Policy steals 20% of your staff’s work hours to gamble on forced research and development.
Culture does.
Policy says.
Culture encourages.
Policy requires.
Culture empowers.
Policy mandates.
Culture simply happens—it isn’t created.
Rahul
on 20 Feb 13That’s a nice dig at Google, but I look at 20% time as encouraging Googlers to spend some time on their own stuff so that they can nurture their pet projects. Programmers have a tendency to dig in and entrench themselves in their current project and overlook their own ideas. 20% time is a good, gentle way to say “hey, you should spend some time on your own stuff for a bit and see where it takes you”.
Still, the difference between the two is worth mentioning. Good post.
Mark
on 20 Feb 13If you have to write down your culture it can’t really be in your blood, can it?
MaxLTV
on 21 Feb 13That “lunch and dream” meeting is classic. Yes, let’s come up with brilliantly creative and innovative ideas at 7am PST every Thursday.
Don Schenck
on 21 Feb 13Forgive me, but a lot of us live in bum-fuck little towns where we slave away with the “old white guys” who don’t know the difference between Reddit and “read it”.
We’re lucky to get a mere scolding if we’re caught browsing A List Apart—oh, no … wait, we can’t … it’s BLOCKED because “it’s a blog”.
The closest thing I get to “culture” is listening to Florence + The Machine with my earbuds, streaming to my phone since Pandora - you guessed it - is BLOCKED.
So forgive me if I’m jaded and cynical. Work sucks, small towns suck, and being stuck in one sucks even more.
‘Nuff said … Ima go write some Ruby code now on my own BECAUSE NO ONE IN THIS AREA EVEN HEARD OF FUCKING RUBY!
Sodium11
on 21 Feb 13Re “Culture isn’t created” ... If you mean that culture isn’t created by fiat, true. However, culture also doesn’t just “happen”, culture is created and re-created by the choices made by individuals every day … and it can be reshaped by conscious effort applied gently, subtly, and consistently.
Sheri
on 21 Feb 13Culture is shaped by policy, or the lack thereof. It can be good or bad. Good culture doesn’t simply happen—it happens when your policy is action not meetings, encouragement for initiative, learning from failing, empowerment, and trust.
Yossi
on 21 Feb 13Sounds beautiful and fluffy and while there is some truth to it I don’t agree. Culture and Policy are two sides to the same coin. They can’t happen without each other. We can’t encourage people working from home without a policy to allow for it. You can’t tell people that we have a culture for innovation and want you to work on your own things without a policy that gives every employee 20% of their time off (think Google). It’s company policy to allow people to bring their dogs to work, come and go as you please, and we don’t care what hours you work as long as you produce the results etc which creates a culture of autonomy. Not the other way round. Policy should help enable the culture. BAD policy is a different story – but you need both. In summary, Policy is not the enemy of the Culture.
GeeIWonder
on 21 Feb 13“Culture simply happens—it isn’t created.”
Perilously close to misquoting your boss, and certainly missing the point. This snippet takes a perfectly valid argument – that culture is the byproduct of consistent behaviour, and turns it into something that violates not only common sense and experience, but also the laws of thermodyanmics.
Jayson Feltner
on 21 Feb 13Really funny examples and a great reminder that culture is cultivated organically, not forced. Policy is forced implementation, culture is organic.
Jonathan Stray
on 21 Feb 13Maybe culture can’t be directed from the top down, but it’s definitely created, by everyone involved… and encouraging and, yes, even initiating that creation is part of a leader’s job. Culture doesn’t “just happen,” necessarily. It takes nurturing.
Jesse
on 21 Feb 13Once we articulated what our culture was, we realized that we wanted to protect it, because we liked it. I’m glad it just “happened” so far, but that’s just because we’re still small. Creating/maintaining the culture you want takes a lot of effort, especially when it comes to policies that will support it.
The greatest advantage, so far, in clearly articulating our culture, is in the hiring process. Our interviews can screen people that wouldn’t fit, and we’ve ended up landing some great talent that wants to work with us as bad as we want to work with them.
Michael
on 21 Feb 13Good post. I’d add that rules and conventions do help when changing a crappy place into a better one. Recently, my friend took over a department of developers that had a nightmare passive-aggressive boss, and he is using the “Wednesday is work-from-home” guideline as a rule that the devs can use as a walker to escape into the light. Once they’re caught up with the other teams, they won’t need it, but it really helps right now.
plogger
on 21 Feb 13nice post Mig, thank you, great points, still wish you would revise this blog design though, actually hard for me to digest content presented in this way, I know your old blog design was stale and dated, but this new one feels to abbreviated, too whitespacey, too much scrolling,
Dharmesh
on 21 Feb 13Great article—and I agree with the basic premise. It is indeed a fine line.
Culture, done correctly is organic. But, as a company grows, just leaving culture to grow organically in whatever direction it chooses is dangerous. I think there’s value to be had in communicating what you stand for and what you believe.
Not policy. Not rules. But context.
Don Schenck
on 21 Feb 13“Culture” DIES the second a lawyer or legal department gets involved.
Pro Tip (33+ years experienc here): RUN RUN RUN from large corporations.
You’re welcome.
Bubba Watson
on 22 Feb 13@Don… “Your welcome”? Hey, that’s my line from how I end all of my online videos (see @bubbawatson). Where’s my lawyer? HA, just kidding.
Seriously though, want more culture… don’t practice, just play.
You’re Welcome!
Kåre Garnes
on 22 Feb 13Nature happens, culture needs seeding and weeding.
Ron Kato
on 22 Feb 13Culture and policy are not two ends of a spectrum. Policy must enable culture, not enforce it. Culture simply happens if people, especially leaders, act a particular way. I believe culture is top down, but it is communicated through action and not rules.
Marc Niola
on 24 Feb 13Great post… My thoughts: Values are what guides the growth of culture, policy is dogmatic and ruins creativity.
This discussion is closed.