Author Archives: Larry Janis

5 Ways To Evolve Company Culture In A Hybrid World

by Caroline Castrillon

The pandemic has had a major impact on company culture. According to a survey from global customer experience and digital solutions provider TELUS International, a majority (51%) cited feeling less connected to their company culture while working from home. And in another study conducted by Glassdoor, 56% of employees find a good workplace culture to be even more important than salary. Now more than ever, it’s important for employers to put company culture high on their priority list.

But with more flexible work arrangements on the horizon, what are the best ways to build and maintain an effective organizational culture? According to an article in Harvard Business Review, “it requires recognizing that culture is evolving despite being remote and that organizations need to invest a substantial amount of time and energy into keeping their cultures on track or steering them in new directions.” These five strategies will help any organization preparing to create, reinforce or reinvent its company culture to prepare for a hybrid workplace.

Document and communicate values

When you have a distributed workforce, it is even more critical to record and communicate company values. Develop a set of values that clearly articulate how employees are expected to make decisions. The documentation can take many forms. Some examples could include a handbook or posting a manifesto on the company website. It’s also a good idea to make this information public as a way to attract the right people to your team.

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Quick! Do you know your company’s values?

by Adam Bryant

Some companies’ lists of principles are short enough to be easily remembered, while others have more than a dozen entries. Maybe some editing is in order.

At some point during their evolution, companies go through the values exercise. The founder may decide to write them down. Or the company’s values could be the subject of a whiteboard exercise by the leadership team at an off-site. Or employees may be surveyed for their input. There is no “right” way to do the values exercise, because every company’s culture is unique. Ideally, the list of values should capture and codify that culture.

But the leaders who drive this important exercise have to make some key decisions up front. They need to define the rules of the road, so that there is clarity throughout the organization about those behaviors that are encouraged and those that are discouraged. In going through this process, leaders must make choices. Will they use big-idea words, such as excellence and integrity? Or will they use more concrete and specific language? How will employees be reminded of the values?

I believe another question is too often glossed over: how long should the list be? Some organizations seem to embrace the simple rule that most people can’t remember more than three or four things from day to day. At Colgate-Palmolive, for example, the values are “caring,” “global teamwork,” and “continuous improvement.”

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What it means to be a Human leader

by James Ashton

There are many types of CEOs. But in a post-pandemic world, those who connect with their staff on a personal level will thrive.

Talk to some CEOs, and it becomes clear that lockdowns imposed by COVID-19 tore down barriers between them and their workforce. One leader I know was taken aback by the response he got for a casual reference to “all 8,000 of us” in an all-hands Zoom call. Isolated staff clung to what they saw as a significant moment of togetherness, and emailed him their heartfelt thanks.

Other CEOs acknowledge the fresh divides that were erected and still need to be navigated. In an interview, Amanda Blanc, CEO of London-based insurance and savings group Aviva, highlighted the challenge of remote leadership, including presenting over “video walls.” “If you were an introvert, it would be a very difficult thing to do,” she told the Sunday Times of London.

The ambition to preserve the status quo, though, drove some CEOs to behave as normal, including Yves Perrier of French asset manager Amundi, who went to his Paris office every day of lockdown. I suspect it was just as comforting for him as it was intended to be for his staff. But others took this idea to extreme lengths, such as a CEO who filmed his Christmas message last year standing at a lectern in an empty lecture hall.

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A new role for business leaders: Moral integrator

by Liz Sweigart

With stakeholders and shareholders vying for attention, CEOs need to develop a new kind of ethical leadership to build trust in society and deliver results.

Claire was looking forward to the long holiday weekend. After two brutal weeks of late nights and early mornings getting ready for a new product launch, dealing with supplier disruptions in China, and managing a sudden labor shortage in Germany, the Fortune 500 CEO was ready to catch her breath and spend some quality time with her family. The plan was to leave first thing Saturday morning to beat the traffic headed to the shore. Instead of the alarm, though, Claire awoke to her cellphone buzzing. It was her company’s general counsel. The night before, one of the company’s top executives had been recorded drunkenly berating a waiter in racist and homophobic terms. Posted to TikTok within minutes, the video had already amassed more than 2.5 million views and was spreading like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook. Social media commentators were demanding action, institutional investors were calling, and requests for comment were flooding in from major news outlets. “Claire, how do you want to handle this?” asked the lawyer on the other end of the line.

Although it sounds like a nightmare, this scenario, a composite of actual events, has become all too real for many CEOs.

In the past, few executives might have considered addressing social issues as part of their job description. Now, in an era when a single tweet can obliterate US$4 billion of a company’s value, it’s become even more important for leaders to understand how to negotiate this sensitive territory: in fact, it’s a business imperative. Executives need to know how to make sense of and engage with these issues so they can simultaneously deliver business results that satisfy shareholders, build trust with their employees, and meet the expectation many have that organizations are responsible for driving more equitable outcomes for society.

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How to ensure the job offer you make is truly equitable

By Arthur H. Woods and Susanna Tharakan

The greatest single source of long-term pay inequity is the job offer. If we are committed to addressing pay inequity in our organizations, we have to start there.

Let’s say you have three candidates of mostly equal qualifications pursuing three identical positions at your organization: Jordan, Prisha, and Bari. You prepare three equal job offers with a starting salary of $100,000 each.

But just before you go to make your offers, someone on your team notes that Jordan is the only candidate who went to an ivy league school—and besides, he is the breadwinner in his family. Afraid that Jordan might not accept, the team agrees to add another $10k to his offer—and his alone.

You extend your offers, and Jordan negotiates. After a few exchanges, you agree to increase his offer by another $10,000. Prisha doesn’t negotiate at all. Bari does not negotiate, and then has a baby shortly after joining your company. She asks to take a one-year leave of absence on top of her paid maternity leave, and you offer to extend the same original offer when she returns.

Fast forward twenty years. Even assuming that promotions and raises were given out equitably,  Jordan has now made $400k more than Prisha and $500k more than Bari. Let’s consider the role your organization played. Seemingly small early decisions—one informed by bias and another that was merely reactive to an aggressive candidate—led to a sizable pay equity gap.

The job offer process is rife with potential bias, intentional and otherwise. And if your job offers are inequitable, your entire organization will end up inequitable, with disparities compounding year upon year. Syndio, an HR analytics company focused on pay equity, has found that the initial job offer is the single most significant factor in long-term pay equity. Get that wrong, and the hopes of maintaining equitable pay across your organization are all but lost.

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