Culture Of Habits: Survival Guide Vol. 2
A company’s culture is more about what we DO, than what we SAY. In the end, our culture is just the sum of our best and worst habits.
First, a little story on the power of habit.
When I first joined uBreakiFix it was clear from day one that the company had strong culture. One of the first things that jumped out at me was how employees referred to the company and themselves. Internally the company was ubreak or UBIF. Products would have nicknames like “biffy” and we all referred to ourselves as “ubifers”. It was fun from day one and it created intense community.
One morning after scrum one of our DevOps team jokingly said he wanted to start ending each meeting with everyone putting their hands in the middle and then lifting them in unison as we all said “uuuuuu-break!” It sounded as silly as it looked. But he was committed and started the trend all by himself at the end of every morning scrum.
The reaction was exactly as what you would expect from a group of devs, cynicism with a touch of friendly teasing. But our guy kept with it and slowly but surely he started to convert people one by one. Each “conversion” was a hilarious mix of faux disgust or cult-like support from the rest of the group. Before we knew it, we were all doing it. A lot. Every time and at every meeting in fact.
It became such a team norm that it honestly felt strange to end a meeting without doing it. It had become so second nature and part of our routine that most of us did it absent-mindedly, just putting our hands in and lifting them up slightly to signal the official close of the meeting.
After a few months it was so ingrained in our daily behavior that other teams outside of dev started to notice and pick up on it. Some even playfully joining in. It was no longer just an insider joke or private team thing. It was a part of our team’s identity, both internally and externally.
🔥 Why It Matters
It wasn’t until later that I realized how powerful that silly little action really was. At it’s core it represented our culture, distilled down into a very simple yet powerful daily habit. Stepping back now, it’s easy to see why. Our team was fiercely loyal, proud, supportive, unified. That one simple habit was a daily affirmation of all of those core values of our team. Even if it was unintentional.
We discovered it by accident, but consider the power it had to communicate and reinforce one’s culture. It even served to introduce our cultural norms to outsiders and new team members. As new hires joined our team it was awesome to watch how they reacted and interpreted it. In the end, that little action did more culture assimilation than months worth of 1/1s could do. The impact of organic habit is just that strong.
🧱 Habits Are The Building Blocks Of Culture
Your culture is the sum of your best and worst habits as a company, regardless of intention. This may feel like an obvious statement, but it can be powerful if used proactively. Our daily actions dictate our experience as a team. The more ingrained the habit, the more impact it will have on that experience and ultimately our perception of our culture.
Affecting meaningful change simply boils down to taking a hard look at your habits and seeing if they reinforce or detract from your desired culture. Want a strong culture of communication? Make sure team habits include 1/1s, company all hands, project kickoffs, etc. Is employee wellness important to your culture? If so, make sure to eliminate habits around poorly planned projects, unrealistic deadlines and constant grinding.
🤐 Unpopular Opinion
It is common wisdom that Culture “starts at the top” but I believe this is a bit of a misnomer. I would say that cultural alignment and vision starts at the top, but strong cultures are actually built from the bottom up, through the everyday habits of the organization.
This is why “corporate driven” culture initiatives often fail even with the best intentions. When the vision and talk track from leadership does not match the reality on the ground then distrust and cynicism take hold. Employees feel that conflict between what is said and what is reality every day.
The great paradox of culture is that it is both top down and bottom up. Neither approach can exist without the other. Top down is required for alignment and support, without which any meaningful culture development will not take. But the real magic comes from the bottom up. Leadership can define all the culture initiatives they want, but the reality is the daily habits define the experience of employees. That is what represents your true culture.
👩💻 Remote Impact
Culture is hard enough in person and it can feel almost impossible when remote. There are no lunch rooms or water coolers in the remote world and naturally occurring interaction can become nonexistent. All of those social habits tend to dissolve and all you’re left with is getting work done. This imbalance can impact culture in a negative way.
From my experience, the best place to start is to be intentional about creating new space for culture enforcing habits. It doesn’t have to be anything big, just little actions that reinforce the interpersonal values of your team culture.
Some ideas from teams I’ve worked with:
Start an optional pre-scrum meeting where the team can join just to chat and interact prior to the formal meeting. Nothing special, just a routine opportunity for the team to socialize at the start of the day if they choose.
Setup a Discord channel to create a virtual office space for just chatting during the workday. The ability to organically enter and leave at will builds natural communication habits across the team and removes the rigidity of formal meetings.
Host virtual happy hours or other meeting events purely for socializing in whatever way fits your team. We used to have game nights once a month with our dev team and it was a ton of fun.
If you are a people leader, don’t forget regular team meetings and 1-on-1s. They are even more critical than normal when remote and trying to maintain communication habits!
😬 Mistakes I’ve Made
As a leader, culture building should be one of your top priorities.
My biggest mistake has been losing sight of this and the impact that negative habits have on culture. It’s too easy to look at small bad habits and say “you’ll get to them someday” or that “it’s not that big of a deal.” The reality is that negative habits do more to tear down culture than positive habits do to build it up. Be responsive about habits that detract from your culture and make it your mission to change them into ones that reinforce instead.
📚 Recommended Reading
Although habits are a powerful way to simplify working with culture they can sometimes be tricky themselves. It wasn’t until I read James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, that I really started to understand how to create lasting and impactful habits.
Atomic Habits - By James Clear
📣 As A Leader
As a leader be hyper aware of the fact that your actions and individual habits impact culture at a disproportionate rate than others. This continues to scale as you move up the organization. The broader your span of influence as a leader, the greater the impact your habits will have on culture.
This is critical to understand as a leader because habits are now amplified. When an employee has a habit of being late to meetings they have a time management problem. When a leader has the same habit then a culture of not valuing meetings starts to emerge. The same is true on the positive side. A leader who has the habit of always being available when needed will likely create a culture of support on the team. It swings both ways and can be impactful if leveraged properly.
🚀 Take Action Today
Just like in our personal lives good habit building is all about intent. Take a self reflection of your company’s culture and your team’s. What habits enforce the good. Which ones perpetuate the bad. Take accountability in pushing the good and minimizing the negative.
A simple yet effective exercise is to list out our desired core values (or cultural norms) with two columns underneath each: Reinforces & Detracts. Now run through all of your team’s habits and routines, both good and bad, and place them under the cultural values they either reinforce or detract from. Once complete, you have a playbook for which of your team habits you need to grow (the reinforcers) and which ones you need to adapt (the detractors).
The key is to be brutally honest about reality and act with intent when making changes. This is how team norms are built.
🎙Culture Habits Scrum Update
Accountability is everything and the heart of a good scrum update is about peer accountability and information sharing across the team. This section is about sharing what I’m working on in the hopes that others can relate.
What I’ve done:
Since going full remote two years ago I have focused more on creating space for social interaction on the team. Sometimes it’s dedicated time and other times it’s just making a point of creating conversation with and around the team to encourage socialization. I have found it an important part of creating culture with team members that are new to remote.
What I’m doing:
Letting the team drive the bus on introducing new culture initiatives to the group. Recently our team started doing themed sprint planning sessions where each meeting would have a topic like dream vacation or favorite music. Everyone would pick a unique background image related to it and share a little bit at the end of their update. It took no time at all and we learned more about each other in those few months than some had in years working together!
Blockers:
Still working to be mindful of my own habits and the impact they have. A great example is a habit of having too full of a meeting calendar. That directly competes with wanting to create an “open door” culture and is something I need to work to find better balance with.
What is the Motley Bool Survival Guide?
Well, I’m glad you asked. 😁
The “Survival Guide” is my humble attempt to tackle topics in product and engineering through a lens of shared experience and a smidge of humor.
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