Is it time your org had a culture deck?
Organisational culture is a bit like obscenity: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
How things get done around here. How we treat each other. How we make decisions.
All are aspects of your culture that your people can feel and see around them — even if they’re rarely or only tacitly acknowledged.
But articulating those unspoken norms — making the invisible visible — can be a powerful thing.
It can allow you to exploit what’s great and special about your org. It can also set expectations about what’s not acceptable.
Cue the culture deck or organisational manifesto — a document where you get to define your culture for all to see.
Such a deck will typically cover your purpose and values, the behaviours you expect of your people, and anything else that’s unique to your culture.
The most famous example is probably the Netflix Culture Deck, first published in 2009 and updated last year.
Others include The Little Book of IDEO, Spotify's Band Manifesto and The Asana Culture Code and the Manifesto we, ourselves, created for Mi9.
Each of these credos lays bare — for old hands and new joiners alike — what it means to be part of this team.
If they’ve inspired you to create your own, here are 4 tips on how to produce a culture deck that has impact.
1. Co-create your culture deck with your employees
Like your values and behaviours, your culture deck is more likely to be effective if employees have had a hand in creating it.
Two reasons.
One, the final product will feel more authentic than if you were to impose the deck from top down.
Two, the creation process itself will build ownership and pride in the deck, even before it’s published.
So start by running an employee consultation that encourages input from everyone — or at least representatives from all job types, locations and levels of seniority.
You can use a mix of surveys, focus groups and questionnaires on social to dig into questions like:
What does this place mean to you?
What does it feel like to work here?
What’s special about this place?
What are some examples of our values in practice?
What does it look like when we’re not living our values?
It’s also a great idea to invite volunteers to act as culture champs who can advocate for the project.
This group will typically act as a go-between their teams and the working group for the deck — providing input from the wider org and keeping everyone updated on progress.
2. Don’t forget the sceptics
When you’re assembling your champs and working group, be careful not to appoint “the usual suspects” — i.e. those people you know already care about culture.
Instead, be sure to include the “cynics” along too. You know who they are — the ones who are sceptical of “culture stuff”, but are likely to have an influential voice. (Netflix calls this strategy “farming for dissent”).
It’s not just that they’ll offer a valuable perspective on the deck. Chances are they’ll end up being its biggest and most credible promoters.
3. Use employees’ language
When consulting employees, be sure to pay attention not just to what they say, but also how they say it.
And be sure to have their words ringing in your (or your copywriter’s) ears during the writing of the deck.
Employees are much less likely to use jargon than management, so, its tone of voice, as well as its content, is more likely to ring true.
Take the example of the manifesto we helped Mi9 create. When we asked senior executives what was special about Mi9, this is the sort of thing they told us:
We create personal and professional opportunities for people to develop in a values-based, purpose-led high-performance culture.
In contrast, this is the kind of thing we heard from employees.
The fact it's in Australia.
Australia has koalas.
I f***ing love koalas.
This kind of comment is pure gold — and it directly shaped the sweary, in-yer-face tone of the final product.
The result? Employees loved the manifesto because it literally spoke their language.
4. Make it easy to find
By involving your employees in the creation of your deck, you’re already getting it off to a strong start.
But if your culture deck is to fulfil its whole potential, it needs to continue to become a living, breathing document that people love — and refer to willingly and often.
So after launch, build on the momentum by making the deck part of everyone’s day-to-day work. Don’t let it moulder in an intranet backwater like so much internal content.
Here’s an idea… When we launched the Mi9 manifesto, we opted for old-school printed copies — a bold choice for a leading digital media company.
But one we knew had paid off when, during a time of change, we saw employees clutching the booklet to their breasts. And they loved it because it was theirs.
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