Every month, I post three types of culture inspiration: a visual, a book, and an article to bookmark.
Visual: Four Quadrants to Understand an Organization
I've recommended and linked to Frederic Laloux's book Reinventing Organization's many times on my blog. But thanks to Itamar Goldminz, Director of People of Grammarly and creator of the Org Hacking blog, I found a great new visual of one of Laloux's frameworks recently.
Laloux believes that in order to fully understand an organization, we must look at four things: people’s beliefs and mindsets (top left quadrant in the diagram); people’s behaviors (top right quadrant); the organizational culture and values (bottom left quadrant); and the organizational structures, processes and practices (bottom right quadrant).
This organizational framework is based on Ken Wilber’s “four quadrants” model, which is a way to fully comprehend any phenomenon by looking at it from four different angles: objectively from the outside, subjectively as an individual; intersubjectively (subjectively from within the organization as a group), and interobjectively (within the broader context of a system or network).
Book: Dying For A Paycheck by Jeffrey Pfeffer
In our forthcoming book, my co-author Liz and I devote a whole chapter to how our emotions at work effect our health. In his new book Dying For A Paycheck, Jeffrey Pfeffer writes, "61 percent of employees said that workplace stress had made them sick and 7 percent said they had actually been hospitalized. Job stress costs US employers more than $300 billion annually and may cause 120,000 excess deaths each year."
Pfeffer analyzed the research and found that many of the most common workplace stressors are as harmful to our health as secondhand smoke. One example stressor is forced competition between colleagues. He looks at companies that use stacked rankings (where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve), like GE (where the practice was pioneered by Jack Welch), Microsoft, and Uber. These companies have less healthy and more destructive work environments, and less collaboration. On the other hand, companies like Google and Patagonia, who foster communication and collaboration create healthy cultures.
One of the most interesting arguments Pfeffer makes is that human sustainability should be as important as environmental stewardship. Borrowing language from environmental economics, he talks about capturing externalities: "Companies that do not provide health insurance benefits to their (often low-paid) employees leave these employees to fend for themselves... When they get sick, they turn to hospital emergency rooms for care... the cost of the health care are borne not by the employers... but by others." Walmart is a particularly big creator of these negative externalities, forcing state and federal programs to cover their employees health care costs (or raising premiums for those who are covered because of the costs of uncompensated care).
Article to Bookmark: Getting Human Resources Right
Every morning I look forward to reading venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, which I get delivered to my inbox. Last year Fred wrote a great post in response to Uber's HR issues titled, "Getting Human Resources Right," about how to get human resources right in a fast growing tech company. Fred wrote, "Growing from 50 to 500 to 5,000 to tens of thousands of employees is hard. Operating systems and processes that work in a 500 person company don’t work in a 5,000 company. The same is true of every growth spurt. Systems break down and stuff gets messed up. A well designed and implemented human resources organization can help. A messed up human resources organization will hurt. As Uber has found out." He provides 7 helpful tips including, "Do make your HR organization about culture and leadership first and foremost," and "Build a great employee onboarding process."
