Here’s how organizational culture might have been handled in the past: The CEO commissions the Human Resources department to produce an effective company culture. HR designs a campaign to tout a mission statement and core values that the CEO and senior management developed. HR also implements some employee perks like free snacks in the break room or monthly birthday celebrations. Maybe they also field an annual employee engagement survey and report results back to the CEO. And then with their culture-building to-do lists completed, the CEO and HR move on to other priorities.
Company Culture Is Everyone’s Responsibility
A top-down approach doesn’t work anymore.
February 08, 2021
HBR Staff/Galaxy/vitalik19111992/Getty Images
Summary.
A top down approach to building company culture no longer works for several reasons. For one, Covid-19 has upended how leaders interact with employees and how coworkers connect with each other. Next, company culture has grown in importance, thanks to recent high-profile crises at big name companies. A new culture-building approach is already in place at some organizations, one in which everyone in the organization is responsible for it. Importantly, this model doesn’t relegate culture-building to an amorphous concept that everyone influences but no one leads or is accountable for. And it weaves in perspectives from employees to customers, from middle managers to the CEO.