Culture is Contagious
Consider these scenarios:
Explicit rule stating that meetings must start promptly on-time; unspoken custom that meetings start 10 minutes late
Messages not sent after 5pm to respect work-life balance; most of team work from 3pm on Sundays
New joiners must work in the office 5 days per week for first 6 months; fully remote and async from day 1
Company policy that team socials cannot centre around alcohol; company sponsored drink cart with wide range of alcoholic beverages stops by people’s desks on Friday afternoons
Swearing reported to HR; swearing frequently used in presentations to convey a point
Depending on your experiences and values you may have had a strong reaction to some of these. Or laughed with incredulity. Some may have seemed completely normal and reasonable. The above are all real examples of workplace practices that I or my friends have encountered. None of these are values displayed on career pages. Nevertheless, they are the values (whether acknowledged or not) of a company in action. These scenarios are company culture.
Company culture refers to the set of shared values, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and attitudes that characterize an organization and shape its ways of working. It is often described as the personality of a company and encompasses everything from how decisions are made and how employees are treated, to office design, work hours, and more.
Company culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is not something your parents likely considered. Your grandparents probably wouldn’t even understand the concept. Now, in tech at least, culture interviews are standard. Offers are made and accepted based on notions of culture fit. The hiring boom of the past few years allowed candidates to be discerning about the companies they joined. However, in a world of mass layoffs, hiring freezes and rising bills, selecting opportunities based on culture for many feels like a nice-to-have. I’m not here to tell anyone to not take a job that isn’t their preference. Life is complex and tradeoffs sometimes need to be made. Regardless of the reasons for starting a new role, or staying in a current one, it’s worth taking stock of the culture, and being mindful of what you are about to enter or choosing to stay in.
Our environment shapes us. The people we spend time with influence our worldview and habits. What we do at work, and how we do it, become the skills we strengthen and what we become known for. The culture we operate in isn’t a force external to us, but rather one we absorb. Culture is contagious as we can’t ignore it. We react to it. It’s a pathogen that permeates our thoughts, words, and actions. Once exposed to a particular culture, it leaves an imprint on us, forever shaping our perspective. The size of the imprint is reflective of the culture’s strength.
Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
Company cultures are either strong or weak. Strong cultures can be good or bad. They have a distinct operating approach, unique to that organisation. They tend to live their values as principles. They are opinionated and intentional about the type of company they want to be. Employees accept that way of operating or leave the organisation. Typically companies with strong cultures are founder led (Shopify, Stripe) or have been taken over by a long time lieutenant whose operating approach was moulded by the company’s former leaders (Amazon, Apple). Weak cultures tend to be neutral or bad. Without a defined sense of being and operating principles companies tend to default to what I call ‘business bland’. They operate in a generic, soulless way. These organisations can be incredibly successful but rarely inspire or innovate. Weak cultures range from perfectly pleasant to poisonously political depending on the people hired and the behaviours tolerated or encouraged by leadership. A strong culture is more contagious than a weak one, yet, both infect us, leaving their mark.
A word of warning, the contagious disease analogy gets heavily laboured from here on.
Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking.
When you join a new company one of the first things you notice are the differences. Differences in how people behave compared to what you’re used to, how business is conducted and the unique quirks of the environment. You may even be asked to share your observations while you still have ‘fresh eyes’, before the cultural pathogen enters your mind, adapting your view of what is normal, or at least tolerable. Having worked with quite a few companies in my career, I’ve noticed that cultural ‘green flags’ and ‘red flags’ become apparent in the first 2 weeks and cement as your operating norms soon after.
Green flags are wonderful. They uplevel your way of operating. Green flags are the teams who respectfully challenge each other, and leadership, to produce their best work. They are the people who demonstrate high levels of EQ and humanness uplifting those around them in each of their encounters. They are the teams who think deeply, who aren’t afraid to reimagine the status quo and are passionate about what they do. They are the leaders who create environments of relentless optimism, where boundaries can be stretched, and failure understood in the pursuit of innovation. Green flags are the forces that fight against an organisation becoming ‘business bland’. They change your view of what is possible for the better, forever.
Red flags aren’t necessarily the opposite of green flags. At times they can co-exist. Generally they are behaviours and customs that have a negative effect on the working environment. They are bad practices that are accepted. It's managers mistreating employees. It's personal relationships dictating company dynamics. It's incompetence overlooked. It's sycophantic behaviours rewarded. They often imbue cognitive dissonance. Red flags are the things that when you tell your friends outside of the company about them they reply, “huh, that’s a bit weird/inappropriate/questionable”. Overtime we tend to adjust to them as normal and acceptable, even when they are objectively not. That particular cultural contagion takes hold of us.
Once the organisational pathogen has infected us, we become strengthened or weakened by it. If you’re working full time, it’s likely you spend over a third of your weekly waking hours working. That figure is a lot higher if you account for the hours spent thinking about work also. That is enough time to shape who you are and impact what you’re capable of. Does the culture you're operating in enable you to hone your craft beyond what you thought was possible? Does it cause you to grow? Does it energise you? Does it help you become who you want to be? The right culture (and that is an individual preference), can strengthen us by pushing us past the limits of what we think we can achieve. As cheesy as it sounds it can make us better people which we carry into other parts of our lives. A culture that strengthens us may not be easy. It may not always be enjoyable. It may even lead to burnout if not managed properly. However, overall, it makes us stronger/better in some way than we were before that experience. Cultures can also have the opposite effect. If for example you find yourself working in a sea of negativity, politics and low-performers you may find yourself adopting those traits, or developing reactions to them, such as becoming more cynical and apathetic. For most of us it is impossible to not be affected by our working environments. In more negative or weaker cultures, we can sometimes develop antibodies which protect us from its worst effects. This can take the form of a healthy detachment. However, sometimes it leads to the creation of an outer shell. An attitude that shields us from being too hurt by a particular circumstance. But it comes at the cost of not allowing ourselves to lean into the positives and finding joy in our work. It can prevent us from embracing enthusiasm, generating inspiration or building bonds with colleagues.
You are not your job or your company, but you do absorb its culture. What you expose yourself to and how you choose to react to it will become part of you. Its effects are contagious. You will spread it to other parts of your life unless you very intentionally choose not to. Luckily, that is an option. We have far more agency than we often believe when it comes to how we influence a culture and how we allow it to influence us.
You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
Behavioural contagion can be powerful. On an individual level we can influence people far more than we think. If there is something that you don’t think is optimal about the culture you’re operating in you can deliberately take action to change it. For example, if people tend to operate in silos you can take micro-actions which foster a more collaborative environment by changing the way you approach work from the default operating norms in the company. Ask for input on a doc. Prompt a discussion on Slack. Schedule a workshop. Let others know you’re willing to bounce around ideas with them. You may need to be pleasantly persistent to embed the change within your sphere of influence. As a manager, changing the culture within your team can have a ripple effect across the organisation. Studies have shown that when teams interface differently with other teams, with positive effects, it spreads. Culture is contagious.
Of course, there are times when the organism of the company can perceive this change as an infection that must be stopped. It may reject the changes quite viciously. You will need to decide how you react to that. Whether you choose to adapt to dominant culture, try again or leave for a better fit.
We carry the effects of culture with us long after we leave an organisation. For example, that workplace I mentioned where meetings started promptly on time, did have a lingering effect of making me slightly more punctual in my personal life. If you’ve worked in a culture that values and enables high-performance, you will know what is possible. Your baseline of possibilities alters and you carry that knowledge with you even if the next culture you operate in is the complete opposite. Conversely a bad culture can lead us to assume all cultures will be bad. We can calcify unhelpful learnings in our minds, over-reacting to triggers in our new environments which remind us of the old. The effects of the cultural disease we exposed ourselves to can lessen over time. We can make conscious decisions on how we allow it to impact us. We may not always have the best options to choose from (especially in more challenging economies), but before accepting any new role it’s worth evaluating what culture you are exposing yourself to, what you are infecting yourself with. How do you want to make the most of it? How will you mitigate against the worst? How will you allow it to shape you?
If you enjoy reading about culture below are a few more articles that may be of interest!
These are great articles. They have plenty of depth and nuance. 👍