How to prioritise culture when optimising your systems / corporate anti-patterns to avoid!

Read time: 5 mins 

In the field of people-first organisations, there is plenty of writing and talking about culture (all the stuff that helps people work well together). The importance of culture for a healthy and high-performing workplace may seem common sense, but in my corporate history it was often disregarded entirely. Luckily, there’s a growing understanding that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

Now that I’ve spent 10 years living and working in environments that do care about the social and emotional dimensions of collaboration, I have seen how important it really is. However, what I think our movement has been missing is the place of information systems and knowledge processes to empower that culture.

Putting culture first requires us to rethink how we optimise our systems (all the web apps an organisation uses). Thanks to Simon Sinek’s golden circle, we know to “Start with why”. In a similar way, processes and systems start with culture and we think there’s a natural overlap between that model and the culture, processes and systems of organisations that prioritise people first.

What does this mean for how you should develop your own workplace systems? For a start, don’t let the cart come before the horse. The systems are enablers, they shouldn’t be defining your culture.

My experience in the corporate world is an example of how NOT to build your systems; here are some of the biggest anti-patterns and the people-first / culture-first antidotes.

1. Silver bullets

The corporate way

“We’ve created a new system by bolting it onto the existing ones, but it’s become a beast because everyone wanted everything in it”

The people-first way

Most people-first organisations are smaller than the big corporates, which makes them more flexible, but I find many groups get distracted by the allure of “the silver bullet”.

The problem with these all encompassing solutions is they invariably require compromising culture-first approaches. That’s because the tool has an “opinion” about everything. It’s built for the average user, not your unique organisation, and you’ll have to reverse engineer your processes and culture to fit it.

The silver bullet also ends up being way larger than what you need, which makes it much harder to change later.

2. Engagement without change

The corporate way

“Our employees gave us feedback, but addressing it would require a big IT overhaul that’s way too costly”

The people-first way

Use a collection of integrated, smaller tools, rather than trying to build or buy one massive one; this allows you to make smaller changes which don’t impact everything. This frees up your workplace to authentically ask for feedback and act on it.

3. IT over Human Resources

The corporate way

Large corporate IT systems have evolved over a long time without any plan to prioritise people, and HR is unlikely to have any say on how those systems should be configured.

The people-first way

Before your workplace gets too big, align your systems with your processes and culture.

• Include the feedback of non-technical people in your team to make sure system changes will work for them.

• Where possible, tools that allow you to customise language are really important. Language is culture. If you’re a unique organisation, like a teal org or a co-op, but you’re using a tool made in Silicon Valley, you may find the language the tool uses isn’t enhancing your culture. You can feel the difference between, eg, Sales vs Relationships, or Deals vs Prospects.

• Make sure you’re getting advice from people that understand the importance of culture.

4. Rigid systems

The corporate way

“To change that you’d have to talk to this division, and that division, and legals, and compliance… changes could break things!”

The people-first way

• Assuming you’re not working with the massive scales of some corporates, your systems likely impact fewer people and have lower security risks, so it can be tempting to swing to the other end of the spectrum, and go really flexible. Trust us, we’ve learnt the painful way, that isn’t always the best option. Setting up a system on a very flexible tool such as a spreadsheet or Airtable can feel very satisfying, very quickly. But, if you haven’t had much experience developing low code systems like these, down the track it can be very hard to optimise, automate or migrate to another tool. Some thoughtful design in the beginning, with some understanding of the implications of what you’re doing, can make everyone’s experience a lot better.

• If you’re a nerdy systems optimiser like us, be careful building too much automation too soon. Small experiments keep your system flexible and give you time to tweak and optimise based on the feedback of the people that are using the system the most.

• In general, go slow and observe. Take a leaf out of Permaculture’s book: ”by taking the time to engage… we can design solutions that suit our particular situation”.

Key tips

An organisation that puts people first needs to make sure they put the horse before the cart. Optimise your information systems and processes with your culture front and centre. A few key tips:

• Be intentional with your design before you get too big

• Include the opinions of people who aren’t strong on tech

• Take the time to observe and gather feedback

• Small experiments keep your systems flexible

• Use a collection of integrated tools so you can avoid “silver bullets”