Today, as people work together in a range of configurations, the implications for culture are complicating. We’ve been thinking about this in terms of how these evolving arrangements affect brand culture. Increasingly, we believe organisations with devolved and distributed workforces are going to need to function less as a singular brand culture and more as a brand delivery community.
COVID may have been a catalyst for breaking up the office, but the combination of different ways of working, different timeframes within which people work (full and part-time), complex supply chains and the need for specialist skills to deal with specific issues and opportunities has been decentralising brand delivery into markets for some time. That in turn has the potential to affect brand culture performance.
Working together, working apart
People don’t work the way they did. And many of them don’t want to revert. Access to talent is now less problematic than configuration of talent. Managers are grappling to establish and oversee blended workforces at organisations of all sizes. And the “freelance” market itself is segmenting into a plethora of arrangements. From fractionals to independent contractors to gig workers.
How do you bring people together as a culture when so many factors now contribute to them working apart? Rather than just insist on uniformity and physical presence, is there a way to measure alignment in increasingly distributed organisational cultures?
One thing’s for sure. Traditional organisational structures, with their assumptions of everybody in set places and set employment structures, don’t align with the dynamics we are seeing play out above. Some organisations will choose to enforce visible and present cultures. That’s the way they wish to manage and deliver their brands. But we’re interested in what an organisational structure might look like for brand cultures that want to foster flexibility. Particularly when they need to place people, who may or may not work for them directly, within a cultural structure that feels relevant.
Scoping a new approach to culture
What shape might a cultural structure like that take?
One way to consider this may be to take a prompt from carbon emissions frameworks. Here, carbon outputs are measured against three scopes: scope 1 (direct), scope 2 (indirect, but connected), scope 3 (beyond that). After all, that model is about collective evaluation and effort to quantify and achieve shared goals. Companies use the carbon emissions framework to analyse their impact on climate change. Imagine applying the same idea to evaluate the “cultural inputs” that people have with and within a culture and what the impacts are for each group.
Scope 1: Directly aligned. This is the core “in-house” culture where people (full-time, part-time, onsite and WFH) identify themselves as working directly for the brand.
Scope 2: Indirectly aligned. These are the contractors and freelancers who work alongside and with those in scope 1 to deliver the work. They work within the culture but may or may not feel part of it.
Scope 3: Beyond that. Supply chain and distribution companies that connect the brand with the wider market. They may work completely outside the culture and within their own culture, yet interact with scope 1 to bring the brand to life.
The power of such an approach is that instead of treating different workforces as separate elements, a community framework would consider how they deliver together and the relationships within groups and between groups to generate commonality. The focus is on communal commitment and outputs rather than physical presence.
What would the metrics be?
In an article on linking culture to performance, Denise Yohn points to three categories of culture measures devised by the Josh Bersin Company that could help measure the collective effectiveness of such a community:
- Leading measures – to identify how people feel about themselves, their team and other groups at all three scopes;
- Descriptive measures – to describe what the culture should look like as a community and how it should function as a united body; and
- Outcome measures – to define expectations and benchmarks for ongoing cultural transformation and adjustment
These measures, Yohn says, should be combined with business objective and target setting advice so that the collective culture is working towards shared and articulated goals.
Our suggestion for evaluating how people engage with the culture at these three degrees (scopes) of separation is that it could prompt a whole range of questions around overall cultural contribution. Here are just four:
- Are the people closest to our culture (scope 1) actually committed to strengthening our culture?
- Do the people who come in to work with us (scope 2) believe in and enhance what we share as a culture?
- Are our partners and suppliers (scope 3) aligned with us culturally and what are we doing to support that?
- What happens to our purpose and values as work shifts out into the wider scopes? (Are people committed to the same things when they are partners and suppliers as they are when they are in the building?)
Integration rather than just rules
A key challenge of course will be convincing people in different scopes of commitment to each other to make a unified and effective commitment to the brand.
Supply chains do that anyway to an extent, and we see that in things like Supplier Codes of Conduct, but forging a brand delivery community requires more than contractual expectations.
It requires levels of integration that are probably closer to those seen when companies are well merged. Rob Sanchez, CEO of Anteriad, offers some great tips:
- Treat the inter-relationships like a partnership.
- Gather best practice from wherever it sits in the community and apply it so that everyone learns.
- Build a collective vision, with specific benefits for each party, so that everyone knows what to expect.
- Provide a roadmap and invite input, so that everyone feels heard.
- Find the common points across the cultures, and build out from those.
- Look for fault lines between groups and resolve them proactively and quickly.
Time for a rethink?
Once the assumptions of physical presence were challenged, it re-set how people thought about where, why and how they work – for themselves, with others, and for collective success. Inevitably, that has generated questions around what and who a culture is these days and how companies should look to align the many moving parts and the orbits within which they work.
Many companies will want to take things back to the way they were – and they may or may not succeed. But our view is that the “distributed culture” is here to stay and that the smartest brands will look to reconcile individualism, team effort and collective allegiance to best effect by building cultures that transcend presence and even ownership.
Thinking and working as a merging community will challenge many facets of traditional organisational structure, but as value chains become more complex and integrate more specialist skills to achieve competitiveness, a rethink of how a culture is defined and how it defines itself and holds itself accountable is overdue. The Scope 1 – 3 model provides one way of thinking about this.
You can read more about the ways we work to align and change brand culture here.
Acknowledgement
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash