An area that has been of genuine interest to me recently has been company culture and how some of the core ways we used to think about it are being disrupted. Remote working has meant companies are having to think much harder about how they work and showcasing their culture during the recruiting process has become a real challenge. Another significant area of debate has been the use of culture fit as an assessment criteria and whether culture fit even exists.
My guest this week is Bret Putter, CEO of Culture Gene and author of several books on company culture. Brett spends a significant amount of his time researching corporate cultures with a strong recent focus on companies that were already working remotely before the pandemic. He has some very valuable insights to share on what company culture now means in our much disrupted times.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ The definition of culture
▪ The culture challenges of remote working
▪ Best practices of remote-first organisations
▪ Asynchronous communication
▪ Why there is no such thing as culture fit
▪ How can employers leverage culture in a virtual recruitment process?
▪ What long time changes are we likely to see post-pandemic
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
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Matt Alder [00:01:06]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 341 of the Recruiting Future podcast. An area that’s been of genuine interest to me recently has been company culture and how some of the core ways we used to think about it are being disrupted. Remote working has meant companies are having to think much harder about how they work and showcasing their culture during the recruiting process become a real challenge. Another significant area of debate has been the use of Culture Fit as an assessment criteria and whether Culture fit even actually exists. My guest this week is Bret Putter, CEO of Culture Genie and author of several books on company culture. Bret spends a significant amount of his time researching corporate cultures, with a strong recent focus on companies that were already working remotely Pandemic. He has some very valuable insights to share on what company culture now means in our much disrupted times.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
Hi Bret and welcome to the podcast.
Bret Putter [00:02:17]:
Matt hi. Thank you very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Bret Putter [00:02:25]:
Yes. So my name’s Bret Putter. I am the founder and CEO of a company called CultureGene. We help companies define, embed and manage their We’ve got some software that we do that with. I’ve written two books on the subject of company culture. A book called My first book is Culture Decks Decoded and the second one is called Own youn Culture, which I published late last year.
Matt Alder [00:02:51]:
Fantastic stuff. Now, lots of things that I want to ask you and I want to talk about, but probably the best place.
Matt Alder [00:02:56]:
To start is to is actually ask.
Matt Alder [00:02:58]:
You for your your definition on culture. What does culture actually mean to you? As far as employers are concerned, culture is in everything.
Bret Putter [00:03:07]:
It’s everywhere. It’s the DNA of the organization. So just like our bodies, it all everything, you know, our DNA are the Fundamental building blocks of our bodies. The culture is the DNA, the fundamental building blocks of the organization. And culture ultimately develops over time. But my preferred definition of culture is the way we do things around here, which is very broad and deliberately so because it really is, it impacts every single element of how a company operates and the way a company operates.
Matt Alder [00:03:45]:
It’s been very challenging times for organizations over the last 12 months or so. And organizations have had to come to grips with not being able to be face to face and working remotely. And there’s been lots of debate and conversation about what is the impact of that on culture. But also how do you define a culture when, when people can’t meet face to face and work in the way that they, that they used to. Now I know you’ve done some research into companies that, that have always operated remotely and what they’ve done in terms of culture. What are the main challenges when it comes to running businesses remotely?
Bret Putter [00:04:25]:
So I think that the, the main challenges are around culture are around not having the osmosis that happens in a work environment. So the fact you don’t have visibility or you can’t see somebody’s availability, you can’t read the room, you can’t read body language. Those informal communication moments, the water cooler moments, the natural osmosis that happens by listening into a conversation or being in the same room as somebody while you’re having lunch and just listening in the office allowed a certain type of culture to form. And actually it allowed leaders to be lazy about their culture. And if you look at remote companies, that’s, that’s the exact opposite. They were from the get go, they were very deliberate about their culture because they had to be. If they, if you don’t work on your culture, it forms by default. You have a culture whether you like it or not. And the challenge with being fully remote is you don’t meet people, so you don’t meet them on the screen, but you don’t meet them face to face. So you don’t form that bond and connection. And the trust element doesn’t come as quickly. So you’ve got to work much harder on building that. In my research I found that there were nine best practices that remote companies over index on in comparison to typical office based environments.
Matt Alder [00:05:53]:
I mean, there’s probably not time to talk about all nine, but talk us through the highlights of those.
Bret Putter [00:05:58]:
Yeah, so the two that I see sort of the immediate pain points around are process and documentation. So remote work companies have between three and five times the process definition requirements in comparison to an office based environment. Because processes typically live inside people in an office based environment. And that you can’t have that in a remote environment. So remote companies are very, very deliberate about defining their culture, sorry, defining their processes and making sure their processes are alive and operating. They don’t just go, you don’t just define the process and forget about it. And then as a, as a function of that, the process has to be documented. So their documentation skills are exceptionally good. And actually a company like GitLab, which is 1,300 employees, are in 65 countries fully remote. One of their recruitment requirements is hiring people who can write well and are not. Don’t find documentation a burden because documentation for remote companies is a critical business asset. It’s a competitive advantage for these companies. If you look at some of the other areas, the other big challenge for companies transitioning in this sort of remote hybrid transition is moving from synchronous to asynchronous communication. So synchronous communication requires presence and availability. And presence and availability are expensive commodities. Because if I’m talking to you now, I can’t be working. If I’m in a meeting, I can’t be working. And if somebody has to contact me because I haven’t defined the process and they have to find out the process from me, that’s a waste of time. And that’s happening a lot now. It’s happening all the time. When I interview CEOs, I ask them, how many, how many meetings do you have a week? And if the low side is 25 and the high side is 50, when are they doing work if they’re in 50 meetings? So moving to asynchronous communication, where you will communicate in a way that doesn’t require an immediate response, means that people can choose how and when they respond and they can prioritize what and when they respond. And the remote companies are built around this capability where unless there is an emergency, we work in an asynchronous manner. We don’t expect an immediate response from people. So those are a couple of the difficult ones for companies that are transitioning to remote or hybrid work.
Matt Alder [00:08:35]:
I think the asynchronous working thing is so interesting because as you say, it’s been the thing that I’ve seen most companies struggle with. So I know people who are required to attend a 9 o’clock meeting every morning to, to kind of to check in and do all those things, and people who are literally kind of back to back all day in meetings on teams, because that’s the only way that the company know how to communicate. It’s obviously quite a big shift to go from this sort of synchronous to asynchronous communication within, within a company culture. What would your advice be to, to, to companies in terms of how they might be able to start to make that shift?
Bret Putter [00:09:16]:
I would advise them to start small, but be very, very disciplined around starting small. So for example, meetings are really the core fulcrum of where everything happens. And you’re not going to stop having meetings, but you can make meetings more effective by using asynchronous communication. So the best remote companies have a pre meeting, pre work capability, a meeting capability and a post meeting capability. So the pre meeting capability is create the agenda, invite the right people, find their availability, book it in their diaries, and then create a working document on the subject. And the working document forces people to think through their thoughts. So they actually have to write down the purpose, the drivers of the meeting, the desired outcomes of the meeting, the blockers of the blockers that you’re experiencing, the research you’ve done. And you would then share that working document with everybody else at the meeting. And if somebody doesn’t respond to that working document or doesn’t comment on the working documents or doesn’t interact with the working document, then they’re eliminated from the meeting. And there are these disciplines that promote work companies implement. That means that a lot of the meeting happens before the meeting if they need one. And ultimately often the meeting doesn’t need to happen at all because they’ve done the work, the pre work in the documents they realize, okay, we’re fine here, we don’t need the meeting. Or if they do have a meeting, it’s a much shorter meeting, it’s a 15 minute meeting instead of a one hour waffle. And then the outcome of the meeting is shared with, you know, the actions, the next steps, and who’s responsible for what. But that shared both to the team, the immediate team, the impacted individuals, but also to the whole company because it’s all documented and anybody can read the document of that meeting. So by doing that, you shorten or eliminate meetings or you improve the way meetings are held, which immediately starts to move you to more time, less meetings, and more asynchronous communication. There are different ways you can do this. Taking small little steps along the way to becoming more and more asynchronous.
Matt Alder [00:11:35]:
One of the biggest things that gets talked around when it comes to talking about culture is this whole nature of culture fit and it’s Something that’s sort of been increasingly challenged in the last few years. What’s your view on culture fit?
Bret Putter [00:11:50]:
There’s no such thing, there’s no such thing as culture fit. Because when I ask a leader, any leader, to accurately describe their culture, they can’t. They waffle it maybe they may waffle about their mission and their values, but that’s not your culture. Your culture is this random combination of good and bad behaviors, norms, principles, habits, beliefs, communication styles, operating styles, different departments, subcultures, etc. Etc. So it’s impossible to define. So if you can’t define it, how can you recruit for it? It, it’s really, what’s happened is people have come up with this phrase which is an, which is a, which is a cool sounding phrase for really gut instinct or intuition. And it’s your gut instinct, your biases, deciding whether this, whether it feels like this person will work well with me or not. Which means that if your culture of 10 people and you, you’re basically hiring for somebody who can work in a 10 person organization. But if you grow really quickly and you become, you know, 60 or 100 very quickly in 12, 18 months, then you’re in a situation where that culture has changed the way you do. Things have changed over these, the last 1218 months. Is that person still a good fit for your culture, the culture that you had interpreted to feel in a certain way? So I, I believe it’s impossible to hire for culture fit. I believe it’s, it’s more sensible and possible to recruit for fit with values if you’ve done a good job with your values. They are consistent. They, they, they won’t necessarily change as often or change as radically as your culture will. And you can build really smart interview questions against values.
Matt Alder [00:13:39]:
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. And, and that sort of really does take us to my next question, which obviously the culture of a company is, is something that can be a huge selling point in a recruiting process when you’re persuading people to join, join the organization. And again, this may be something that companies have been particularly lazy about, particularly if they’ve got a nice office or great kind of physical working environment that they could show off during the interview process. Now that everything has moved to remote, how can organizations talk about and leverage culture as part of a recruitment process?
Bret Putter [00:14:18]:
There are companies that do this very, very well and there are most companies that do it badly. And what I’m doing is I’m basically comparing a company like Zen Cargo or a company like salesloft. With your average company, where your average company will put, might put something about their culture in their career section and it’s a little bit of slap dash here and there but actually if you take your recruitment process and you think about the candidate interaction points, where does the candidate interact and you know there’s in no particular order, the candidate pre interview will look at your website, they will receive a job ad, they will look at your LinkedIn, they will maybe talk to a recruiter, they will receive a job description. And the best companies have the culture communicated in different ways on the website. On LinkedIn when I work with my clients we give the recruiter a cheat sheet to talk about the culture and, and actually give the recruiter a couple of questions to evalu the candidates against. We then if you look at the job ad or the job description, it’s very clear what the culture is, what’s expected of you and why if you don’t fit this culture you shouldn’t join. And if you do, you should consider joining. And then when it gets to the interview process, we’ve built a database of values based interview questions that you can interview the candidates on and you can score the candidates out of the the fit with the values. There’s a data point here, it’s not about gut instincts. Then you bring them through onboarding, probation and their first review. And if you think about that as a, as a life cycle of a candidate, you start to weave your culture into those different touch points. You can do that in a remote environment, you can do it in a hybrid environment or an office based environment. And you shouldn’t, especially now. You can’t rely on that osmosis people to get a feeling of your office office. But you’ve got to be able to communicate a consistent message about your culture at every touch point.
Matt Alder [00:16:19]:
Obviously it’s been a very disruptive 12 months. Lots of things about work have changed. We’ve talked about the whole aspect of remote working and remote hiring as hopefully we begin to sort of move out of the pandemic and employers are thinking about what they do next. What do you think the long lasting changes are likely to be?
Bret Putter [00:16:43]:
So I think this is an area that a lot of leaders are behaving a little bit like ostriches. They got their head in the sand. They’re hoping that when we go, when the new normal happens, they’ll be able to lead their businesses the way they did pre covert and that this is just a 12 or 18 month blip in the way they lead. But ultimately that’s not the case and it’s really what what leaders need to realize is that whether it’s hybrid or remote, your leadership style and your leadership modus opera have to change. You’re going to have remote people in your organization. There are very few organizations that won’t have people who will be working remotely out of their choice, not out of your the leaders choice. And if you don’t build a remote first hybrid environment, in other words, an environment that recognizes how important your remote people are. And if you don’t build that environment, then your people will ultimately end up feeling like second class citizens because they’re not included in decision making. They’re not communicated with in the same way. They don’t experience the culture or the work in the same way. They need to advocate more for their work, they need to advocate more for themselves. They don’t feel as as, as considered for promotional opportunities. This will result in your people feeling like second class citizens. And right now it doesn’t matter. We’re all remote so there’s no second class citizen status. But in six months or whatever the period of time is, that will start to happen and people will leave your environment to go to a first class citizen status environment where the culture has been designed appropriately.
Matt Alder [00:18:24]:
Finally, where can people find you and your work?
Bret Putter [00:18:27]:
So My website is www.culture G E N E A I I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter, both my books are on Amazon. Own your culture and culture decks decoded and if people, if your audience would like to have a chat to me about their culture. I spend 25% of my time doing this like learning about other people’s cultures and companies and how they do things. I’m always happy to have a chat so they can reach out to me directly at Bret at culturegene. AI Bret.
Matt Alder [00:19:04]:
Thank you very much for talking to me, Matt.
Bret Putter [00:19:06]:
My pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:19:07]:
My thanks to Bret Potter. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting future. You can search all the past episodes of the show@recruitingfuture.com and on that site you can also sign up for the mailing list to get the inside that’s.
Matt Alder [00:19:34]:
Coming up on the show.
Matt Alder [00:19:35]:
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
