Two great examples of workplace culture and the affects in the organisation
We will discuss two examples of workplace culture from my LinkedIn page that may resonate with where your business is currently at or may help you in the future. When reading through these examples of workplace culture try and identify how this relates to you and your team, if at all.
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1.Who decided this was okay?
In 2016, Wells Fargo admitted its staff had opened over a million bank and credit card accounts that customers never asked for, to hit sales targets the head office had set year after year without ever checking whether they were achievable. Nobody at head office wrote a memo instructing anyone to commit fraud. What they did was reward the branches that hit the number and punish the ones that didn’t, then leave everyone to work out the how for themselves. On the floor, everyone already knew exactly which behaviour kept your name off the watch list. Nobody needed to write it down.
Examples of workplace culture like this are usually filed under a corporate scandal. I think it belongs somewhere else: under tacit knowledge, gone bad.
The philosopher Michael Polanyi coined the phrase for the ordinary version of this back in 1966, in The Tacit Dimension: “we know more than we can tell.” He wasn’t describing anything sinister. He meant the kind of knowledge a cyclist has about staying upright, or a baker has about when dough is ready, that never gets translated into words because the person doing it doesn’t experience it as a rule. It’s just what you do.
(Ask any experienced cyclist to explain, in words, how they balance a bike, and watch how quickly the explanation falls apart. They know. They just can’t tell you.)
Examples of workplace culture that are unwritten in organisations develop on the same kind of knowledge, and for the same reason it’s mostly harmless: nobody could write a manual precise enough to replace it. The trouble starts when tacit knowledge curdles into tacit permission. The skill isn’t “how do I balance the bike” anymore, it’s “how far can I lean before someone stops me.” And exactly like the bike, nobody teaches this directly. New starters learn it by watching examples of workplace culture behaviour unfold and what happens to the last person who leant too far, and to the person who never leant at all.
This is the part every values poster misses. A company can print “integrity” on the wall in eighteen-point type while running, underneath it, a live and functioning permission structure for workplace culture nobody would ever agree to on paper. Both are true at once. One of them is just louder.
Examples of workplace culture and how UGRs helps transformation
Unwritten Ground Rules (UGRs) is the name we gave the quieter one, because it needed one. Not because it’s a metaphor for something else, but because it’s the actual operating system underneath the org chart, and until you can point at it and name it, you can’t ask the only question that matters: who decided these good or poor examples of workplace culture behaviour was allowed, and when did the rest of us agree to go along with it?
You didn’t. That’s usually the discovery that starts the conversation.
Pick one thing in your team that everyone quietly does and nobody has ever written down. Ask, out loud, in the next meeting: who decided this was okay, and are these the examples of workplace culture we want to set?
Our second example of workplace culture
2.The Emperor’s new clothes, reversed
In 1951, the psychologist Solomon Asch sat eight people around a table at Swarthmore College and showed them two cards: one with a single line and one with three lines of obviously different lengths. He asked which of the three matched the single line. It wasn’t a hard question. Seven of the eight people in the room were actors, and on certain rounds they all, one after another, gave the same wrong answer out loud before it was the real subject’s turn to speak.
This exercise created great examples of workplace culture formation without any real intention.
About three-quarters of the real subjects went along with the wrong answer at least once. Not because they couldn’t see the lines correctly but because everyone in the room, calmly and confidently, had already agreed on something else, and disagreeing out loud started to feel like the strange thing to do.
Everyone knows the Emperor’s New Clothes as a story about cowardice: an entire crowd can see the truth and nobody says it, until a child finally does. The fix, in that reading, is always the same: someone needs to be braver.
The scarier version isn’t that everyone’s lying about the clothes. It’s that everyone really is wearing them, and a rule nobody ever breaks doesn’t look like a rule. It just looks normal.
These examples of workplace culture show what an unwritten ground rule (UGR) looks like at full strength: nobody enforcing it, because enforcement is only needed when someone might deviate. Once compliance is universal, the rule doesn’t need a guard. It just needs time.
Personal examples of workplace culture observation
I once worked with a group of around twelve leaders who met together regularly. The unwritten ground rules at work elsewhere in that organisation were going really well, by every measure we had (yes UGRs can be measured). In that particular room, though, people stayed quiet, meeting after meeting, in a way nobody could quite explain. Not hostile. Not obviously suppressed. Just quiet.
It was an example of workplace culture that needed to change. But how?
It wasn’t until four of the most senior people in that group chose, on their own, to stop attending, that I found out what the unwritten rule forming that workplace culture of silence had actually been. Nobody had ever stated it. Nobody had enforced it. The room simply stopped being silent the moment the senior people stopped being in it.
That’s the harder question these examples of workplace culture should ask when audited: not “what are we too afraid to say,” but what are the examples of workplace culture behaviour we are all doing identically without any of us experiencing it as a choice at all?
Next meeting you’re in, try counting how many people speak before the most senior person in the room does. Then ask yourself whether that’s a rule anyone actually wrote and how it’s affecting your workplace culture.