Is Culture Change Just a Corporate Cop-Out?

5 hours ago

5 min read

I came across a line online recently while doing some research, and it stuck with me.

Peter Block, one of the big names in organisational development, famously called culture change “the cop-out of the 80s.”

More than 40 years later, I think he had a point.

Workplace culture matters. A lot. That’s not the problem. The problem is the way we usually go about changing it.

What did Peter Block mean?

The way leadership author Bob Anderson tells it, Block noticed that the people working on culture change often didn’t see their own part in the culture they were complaining about. They spent their energy blaming everyone else. (Mastering Leadership)

We talk about “the culture” like it’s a thing floating around the building on its own. Something out there that someone else needs to fix.

So it goes round in a loop.

Leaders blame the staff. Staff blame management. Management blames HR. HR launches another culture initiative.

And everyone waits for someone else to change.

If you work there, you’re part of the culture

This is the bit I feel strongly about.

If you have a job somewhere, you’re part of the culture. Every day, through what you do, what you put up with, what you reward and what you stay quiet about, you’re adding to it.

That goes for everyone. Leaders carry more of the weight, because they set the conditions everyone else works in: the workload, the incentives, the systems, what gets noticed and what gets ignored. Everyone else still plays a part.

It also means you can’t push someone into a culture. You can’t announce it and expect people to fall in line. Culture is what people actually experience, day in, day out. Change that, and the culture follows.

Why culture change programs miss the mark

I’ve seen this one up close. I once worked somewhere that rolled out an incentives program to boost morale and lift the culture. It was well intended. It had the opposite effect.

A lot of it was short-term drives, a month or so at a time. Motivation lifted while the drive was on, and when it ended, people were less motivated than before. The worst was a "power hour" where someone got a prize for having the best attidute during that hour. The people who put in the effort day to day without reward were dubfounded and felt neglected. Also, who even decides who wins an prize for that? its was too subjective.

Use incentives to make up for a poor working environment and you end up needing bigger and better ones just to maintain that level. It’s a bit like competing on being the cheapest instead of having the product everyone actually wants.

That’s the pattern. The initiative sits on top of the work, while the everyday conditions that created the problem stay exactly where they were. A culture survey. New values on the wall. An offsite. A transformation program with a name and a logo. None of it is bad on its own. None of it changes much if Monday morning looks the same as it did before.

Many of the conditions that shape culture also overlap directly with recognised psychosocial hazards: high job demands, poor support, lack of role clarity, inadequate reward and recognition, and poor organisational change management. So any culture effort that skips the conditions isn’t just likely to miss the mark. It can leave the psychosocial risk sitting there too. (If you’re unsure how this differs from psychological safety, I’ve explained it here.)

Incentives are a good example of how easily this goes sideways. Rewards shape behaviour, for better or worse. I’ve written about why the same reward doesn’t work for everyone, and about how KPIs can quietly drive the wrong behaviour.

A better question than “how do we change our culture?”

I’ve worked in places that already had a good culture, places that got better, and places that tried and missed the mark. So I don’t think culture change is impossible. I think it rarely works the way it’s usually attempted.

Culture isn’t really the thing you change. It’s the result of what people repeatedly experience, tolerate, reward and do.

We often try to change people’s behaviour so we can change the culture. I think we’ve usually got that backwards. Change the conditions people are working in, and different behaviour becomes possible. Repeat that behaviour for long enough, and what we call culture starts to shift.

So instead of asking “how do we change our culture?”, try asking:

“What are we doing, every day, that keeps producing this culture?”

That question is harder. It points back at all of us, leaders first. It’s also the one that actually leads somewhere.

So, is culture change a cop-out?

The way it’s often done, yes, it can be. When culture change is something leadership rolls out to everybody else, without anyone looking at their own part in it, Block’s line still holds up.

Done properly, it’s some of the most valuable work a business can do. When the culture is genuinely good, people hear about it, and plenty will choose it over a higher-paid job. In Glassdoor’s 2019 survey of 5,000 adults across the US, UK, France and Germany, more than half said culture mattered more than salary to their job satisfaction. (Glassdoor)

It just starts closer to home than most people expect.

Frequently asked questions

What is culture change?

Culture change is the process of shifting how people in an organisation behave, work together and treat each other. Because culture is the result of what people repeatedly experience, tolerate, reward and do, lasting change usually comes from changing everyday conditions, systems and leadership behaviour rather than announcing new values.

Why do culture change programs fail?

Many culture change programs sit on top of the work rather than changing it. Surveys, new values and offsites can leave workload, incentives, support and fairness exactly as they were. People also tend to treat culture as something others need to fix, without looking at their own part in it.

Who is responsible for workplace culture?

Everyone who works in a business is part of its culture. Leaders carry more of the responsibility because they set the conditions, incentives and systems others work within, and every employee contributes through what they do, tolerate and reward.

How do you improve workplace culture?

Start by asking what the business is doing every day that keeps producing the current culture. Listen to staff, observe how work actually happens, look at what incentives reward, and examine conditions such as workload, support and fairness. Then change those conditions and test whether things improve.

How we approach it at Base State

We don’t start with a values workshop. We start by looking at what’s actually producing the culture you’ve got.

Listen: what are people actually saying, when they feel safe to say it?
Observe: how does the work really happen, compared with how it’s meant to?
Follow the incentives: what does the business reward, on paper and in practice?
Examine the conditions: what are workload, support, clarity and fairness actually like?
Follow the outcomes: what behaviours and results are those conditions producing?
Test: change something specific and see whether the outcome changes.