Category: Culture

Let’s be honest – we’ve all experienced a touch of Zoom fatigue these last few months, and we might even have zoned out a little during the last virtual meeting of a long day. We crave the connective tissue of a physical work hub: the in-person idea storms, the water cooler catch-ups, the good-natured envy of the comfortable corner office, the nuanced emotional punctuation of the gesture and the smile and the raised eyebrow. 

We may have watched our teams slowly become disengaged. Perhaps we’ve noticed a worrying fragmentation in our company culture, seen an erosion in our organisation’s understanding of its common purpose, or felt that our leadership teams have drifted out of alignment.

As we turn the harrowing page of 2020 to the hope and dynamism of a new human story in 2021, we may forget that those countless laptop interactions have in fact been offering us a glimpse of something vibrant, positive, and packed with possibility. Something that is very much here to stay: a dynamically networked virtual world, an opportunity to create global organisations that span many different countries and regions.

Thinking globally

But how do we foster a truly global ‘virtual’ mindset in our organisations, and transform Zoom zone-outs into cross-cultural, planet-spanning success stories?

Matt Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic, the software company that runs the publishing platform giant WordPress.com, with more than 1,000 employees working remotely in 77 countries. In a July interview with The New York Times, Mullenweg talked about the resistance he encountered from investors to the idea of remote working before the company’s inception in 2005. 

“There’s a very intangible magic that people imagine happens in an office that’s necessary for innovation or design,” he says. “There were a lot of biases. And to be honest, it’s hardest to change when you’ve been successful doing something in the past.” Fifteen years later, Automattic is worth US$3 billion, with 30 per cent of global bloggers using WordPress as their platform of choice. 

Automattic’s success was born out of a company culture that embraced the potential of ‘virtuality’, creating the story of a shared understanding that the office of the future could be anything its employees wanted it to be. 

“I’ve been to the offices of billionaire CEO’s that have their own private bathroom, beautiful art and couches,” he says. “But these are all things that you can have in your house. What I love about distributed organisations is every single employee can have a corner office.”

While his 2005 detractors may have predicted a slump in productivity in his remote workforce, Mullenweg says that in reality, people take less “away from keyboard” time than they should, and that this phenomenon is tracked and flagged up when it’s clear that an employee is in need of a short refresher break, or even a longer vacation. 

A connected vision

This kind of compassionate, visionary leadership requires a ground-up transformation in “the way things are done” patterns of thinking. Leaders need to rally their teams into the brave new virtual worlds of the century’s third decade with a compelling and motivating cultural story, if they wish to thrive in international markets and avoid the cross-cultural mishaps of a disengaged workforce working virtually, and in isolation, across different time zones.

The Storytellers can provide the means to help inspire your team to make this journey, and the momentum to transform “the way things are done” into “the way things could be”. A thousand individual corner offices – but a singular, interconnected vision, one unified global aspiration.

Story-driven change

The Storytellers can help you revolutionise your company’s culture by setting out a story-driven goal – an emotionally compelling narrative that can act as a motivational catalyst to positive, lasting change. Small but significant stories of achievement are pooled from teams across your organisation, wherever they are based, from the corner office, to the staff canteen, to the laptop in a café. These stories then feed into your defining business narrative, further fuelling inspiration, camaraderie and connectivity across each and every one of your company’s different time zones, cultures and productivity styles.

Download our Culture Change ebook today and learn how The Storytellers can make going global central to your organisation’s shared story of future success. 

2020 was a year of rapid and continuous change. Such explosive change for organisations is truly unprecedented, and having an existing robust company culture has been necessary for businesses not just to stay rooted, but to grow in this challenging environment. 

With the transition to remote working at the outset of the pandemic, a major fear was that company culture would be difficult to sustain. How could businesses maintain something so dependent on day-to-day interactions such as in-person meetings, socialising and chance encounters in the office virtually? Culture is something so intangible and abstract that it is known for being ‘what takes place when managers leave the room’. How can leaders role model culture through Zoom? And amidst the continuing whirlwind of change taking place in the world around us, how can companies continue to transform, adapt and innovate?

Inevitably, the shift from the office to home-based working has transformed behaviours, as culture is made up of workplace relationships and interactions. Companies are now considering serious questions such as how they can foster a global mindset in a digitally-connected world. There is also a strong focus on retaining culture when the physical environment of the office, water cooler chats and casual conversations have been taken away. Technology alone cannot shape culture and it still needs to be defined and articulated. 

In fast-moving global markets, culture is the biggest determiner of sustainable advantage. It determines agility, collaboration, how fast you can innovate and how hard you can drive towards a collective goal. By communicating and showing how your culture still exists and is able to thrive in a socially distanced, remote working world, you can ensure it stays strong throughout the pandemic and beyond. 

Complete the form on this page to download our latest ebook, and find out how you can use storytelling to shift behaviours and deliver long-lasting, sustainable change in your organisation today. 

A healthy business starts with healthy employees. Increasingly in the UK – where over half of all work absences in the UK are now due to work-related stress, anxiety or depression (HSE, 2018) – leaders know that healthy minds equal healthy balance sheets. But as we hear often from our clients, it’s a complex and confounding issue that many organisations lack the resource to adequately tackle.

At The Storytellers, we believe there is a simpler way to healthy, happy teams.  

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves determine the luck we have in our life. That was the finding of Professor Richard Wiseman in the early millennium after a decade of study into the felicitous and less-felicitous trajectories of various individuals. In so doing, Wiseman pioneered the first application of science to the field of personal development – an approach which has since spawned a growing global industry of professional and personal neuroscience that boasts varying levels of complexity and effectiveness.

Luck, he discovered, is a mindset. This mindset determines the ‘attentional spotlight’ we turn on the world. People who see themselves as unlucky live life in a state of high anxiety. When we feel anxious, we narrow our attentional spotlight, and we miss the wider opportunities, possibilities and connections available to us. Lucky people, armed with a larger attentional spotlight, as well as higher optimism, confidence and openness to the unknown, are quick to spot these opportunities, and confident enough to act on them. Luck, Wiseman stresses, is not the same as chance. No neuroscience will help you win big at the Casino. But luck – in terms of professional success and personal contentment – is largely up to us. By interpreting the world in a positive, ‘lucky’ light, we are creating a virtuous circle in our own lives.

Wiseman was one of the first to understand that by changing people’s mindset, you can give them the tools to change their outcomes. In today’s volatile context, his insights offer nothing less than the key to a resilience mindset – something we spend a great of time helping our clients cultivate in their teams. At its heart, this mindset comes down to story.  ‘It’s the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’, says Wiseman, ‘that really make the difference’. What’s more astonishing about the human mind, he continues, is that we have the power to tell ourselves different stories. ‘And by doing this, we can have a real impact on our happiness and success.’

At The Storytellers, these insights are core to our own approach. We know that humans are storytelling animals, hardwired to make sense of ourselves and the world through narrative. We know that mindset is the foundation of individual success, and that the narratives we form about ourselves are the most powerful determiner of how capable, open and optimistic we feel in the face of change and challenge – and therefore how resilient we are in today’s VUCA world. We know that resilient employees are the change makers and innovators of any organisation – which makes them the only true source of competitive advantage in today’s world.

We also know that these personal stories don’t occur through chance. They’re shaped by the cultural stories we experience throughout our lifetimes: the examples of success and failure from peers and role-models that help us form belief or negativity about our own outcomes.  That’s why, alongside the compelling business-wide narratives we work with our clients to craft, we help leaders build resilient cultures with positive storytelling at their heart – broadening everyone’s attentional spotlight by celebrating attainable stories of success, impact and innovation.

These little stories have big impact – from reversing resignations, inspiring some pretty extraordinary acts of customer care, and fuelling innovation with huge cost savings (defect parts per million in one factory fell 73% within three months following our programme). 

Looking forward, as mental health and wellbeing become ever more pressing issues in the workforce, Wiseman’s insights – and, we modestly believe, our own approach – continue to bear fruit for enlightened organisations looking for fresh ways to inspire, restore and fortify teams grappling with ever more uncertain and dynamic contexts.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will tell you that a sense of belonging is an important factor in any human’s life. Given that many of us spend most of our daily lives at work, this need for belonging can be played out in the corporate world too: a strong, positive culture of inclusion, empowerment and involvement, a sense of wellbeing and work/life balance, trust, active engagement in the strategy and vision of a business, strong leadership, aligning one’s own values with and living those of one’s employer, and having a clear organisational ethos or purpose all contribute to one’s happiness in the workplace.

But what happens when an employee finds themselves in a situation where they identify more with their customer’s purpose and values than that of their actual employer? Take support service organisations or large B2B consultancies, where employees are outsourced into their customer’s organisation, often for months or years. In many cases, their real employer’s presence in their lives may largely only be apparent by the logo found on their payslip, while they are immersed on a daily basis in the activities and environment of their customer, exposed to their culture, values and messaging on a constant basis – not that of their employer. Their social interactions, sense of identity and belonging will almost certainly lie with their customer’s organisation. Franchised organisations can also be challenged with this. For example, a large car dealer network might include a number of businesses which deal exclusively with a one or two OEMs. Whose values do they uphold? That of their parent company or those of the brand they are representing? The same can be said of some call centre operations, where employees are representing multiple customers/brands. How do they align their actions and behaviours with the demands of different customers, who need their customer-facing representatives to act and behave according to their own organisational values and culture?

This is a dilemma that thousands of people in the workplace are facing. In a B2B world, from an employer’s point-of-view, their tenure of contract with a customer will rely on their outsourced employees delivering excellent customer service to uphold their corporate reputation and secure ongoing business. They may well have spent thousands on the recruitment, training and development of those employees, and certainly won’t want the expense of them jumping ship. They need their employees to feel a sense of loyalty, belonging, pride and purpose in their parent organisation, aligned to their values and culture – a sense of belonging – even if their emotional investment in time, energy and engagement lies within their customers’ organisation on a daily basis.

These issues present serious challenges to organisations when it comes to creating a strong brand culture, and indeed to delivering a better customer experience. This requires a slightly different and more detailed approach:

• Firstly, the need for an overarching strategic narrative is greater than ever in this instance. It’s so important for employees to have that shorthand view of the organisation’s vision, mission and values, especially where there are competing ideas to deal with. It can also become an important vehicle to engender a sense of pride and purpose in the organisation, which will ultimately lead to a better quality of delivery.
• Secondly, it’s even more important to conduct research that reveals the prevailing mood in the organisation, the different personas that exist, and the experience that they live. Navigating this kind of complexity requires a more astute understanding of the different characters who are on the front line, in order to properly identify where the points of ambiguity are, and who they apply to.
• Finally, and where there are competing values to uphold, it’s so important to reduce that complexity to individual instances rather than a top-level approach. Franchise and outsourcing models entail a rich variety of interactions with many different stakeholders – understanding when to live which brand values has to be specific. Illustrative stories about colleagues are incredibly helpful in this instance too, to give genuine, applicable examples to employees.

Creating an atmosphere of understanding and trust is particularly crucial in such business models. A strategic narrative is always useful in setting a clear vision of the journey that a business on. But in this case, it is even more important to get specific: about the personas in your organisation, the times where they face ambiguity, and their positive experiences of approaching given situations correctly.