Uptime: What’s the Big Deal About Work Culture?

When businesses make capital investments in new facilities, equipment, or technologies, they plan to achieve a return on their investment (ROI) in terms of reduced costs, improved margins, new products, or greater market response. They also plan for new business and work processes to bolster and sustain their ROI. But what about their plans to address changes in habits, behaviors, skill sets, and leadership in the workplace–the work culture–to assure the capital investment actually pays off in the short and long term?

Work culture is the entire people side of a business. It’s how people behave individually and collectively on the job. Quite often, our behaviors in the workplace differ greatly from how we behave in our homes, communities, and other organizations.

All too often, work culture is taken for granted. “It is what it is,” many people have told me. Yet, what happens when an influx of new, state-of-the-art equipment, facilities, and technologies, destined to revolutionize business competitiveness, meets a traditional “it-is-what-it-is” work culture head-on? Before you over- or under-think this one, let’s examine some typical work-culture enablers.

Leadership

Top-level leadership sets the tone of a work culture, be it functional, dysfunctional, or exceptional. And the faces of top-level leadership—upper management, union officials, governmental regulators, and/or investors and boards of directors—call the shots on how things will get done. Leadership kicks in when such entities develop plans and strategies, make policy-level decisions, and decide where to spend resources to make new ventures successful.

The bulk of the organization is expected to play follow-the-leader by developing tactics to achieve the top-down plans and strategies and making the policies (and work culture) come to life in the workplace. Consider, for example, the five basic business imperatives of environmental, health, safety, quality, and reliability. In almost every equipment-intensive business, none is more important than another. These imperatives are interdependent, i.e., they all depend on and affect each other.

The confusion begins when top-level leaders announce, “Safety is our top priority,” which, in turn, may compel some to ask, “What’s the number two priority?” and “Where does quality fit in?” and “Isn’t reliability important, too?” A work culture is being formed.

Scientifically addressing the people side of change in an operation is as important as engineering changes in other parts of the business or process.

Expectations, accountability, and trust

Top-level leaders are responsible for setting very clear expectations for capital-improvement projects: goals, performance/outcomes, cost, schedules, and a life-cycle plan. Then, once the expectations are set, the leaders must hold themselves and others accountable for achieving these expectations. During this accountability process, leaders watch, listen, learn, and take action. Sometimes their actions are positive and encouraging, which suggests that they feel a sense of shared responsibility. Other times, their actions can be negative and punitive, with no suggestion of shared responsibility—call it blame. A work culture is being formed.

Trust is gained and lost by the talk and the walk. Leaders set the tone for a work culture of trust. We’ve all learned that actions speak louder than words. Leaders who walk their talk are positioned to gain the trust of others in their organizations.

The degree of trust in leadership is very contagious throughout an organization. A leader earns it. Setting the clearest of expectations with honest accountability and a shared responsibility (as in “we win or lose together”) can help build trusting and enduring relationships. Likewise, the lack of clear expectations, followed by negative and punitive degrees of accountability, can fuel a serious loss of trust between those being led and the individuals hoping to lead them.

Leaders who say (or demand) one thing and take actions that are inconsistent with their words will have a difficult time gaining trust—and an even harder time regaining lost trust. Being true to your words, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant the message, is a sound foundation for building trust and regaining any that might have been lost. A work culture is being formed.

Capital improvements meet old culture

New facilities, new equipment, and/or new technologies are often highly planned, scheduled, financed, and engineered. That’s the nature of a capital project: design, procure, build, install, startup, commission, operate, and maintain. And there’s a project-management structure in place to see that everything happens as planned.

But, what about the plans to address changes in habits, behaviors, skill sets, and enduring organizational leadership? New capital-improvement projects often have an impact on people in the workplace, i.e., new jobs, fewer jobs, different job roles. These projects often lead to obsoleting some skill sets and instilling new ones, i.e., new tools, programs, technology, work processes. How well does an old work culture address these changes?

Old work-culture leaders, organizations, and work groups will almost always struggle assimilating the products of a capital-improvement project. That’s because the new work-culture enablers were not addressed with the same level of engineering (or re-engineering) as with the capital project. The importance of the people side of the workplace is, thus, essentially dismissed by leadership, as in, “It is what it is, and they’ll figure it out with the training we provide for them (we hope).” Alas, a work culture is being formed.

A business case for change

For decades, we have known that people generally resist being changed. Still, they will embrace it when they want to change.

When there’s a compelling business case to invest in a capital-improvement project, boards of directors and senior executives have the basic ingredients to proceed with the project. Likewise, when people in the workplace are educated about the same compelling business case for investing in a new capital-improvement project, they also have what’s needed to proceed with the necessary changes. I apologize if that seems like an over-simplification. It is.

Communicating and educating the organization’s leaders and work groups at all levels builds a foundation for work-culture change. This is the very change that will lead to a successful capital-improvement project over the course of its designed life cycle.

A very big deal

A sustainable work culture must be established when new equipment, technologies, facilities, or processes are introduced. An established work culture will almost always clash with major changes in the way the business intends to operate.

Success comes when the people side of change is addressed as scientifically as the engineered changes in equipment, technologies, facilities, and processes. Work-culture change is as big a deal as a capital-improvement project. That’s why they need to be planned and deployed in parallel.

To learn more, visit:

“Improved Culture Cuts Downtime”

“Focus on Results and Change the Culture Along the Way”

Kotter International’s “The 8-Step Process for Leading Change”