Struggling to Identify Your Company’s Culture as a Virtual Employee? Look at Implicit and Explicit Cues (Part 1)
By Marina Mainescu, Wendy R. Weidenbaum, and Lois Hines
Identifying a company’s culture has never been an easy task; however, in today’s era of remote work, the task has become even more difficult. Employees forced to onboard virtually are struggling to understand their company cultures.
Company culture “refers to the shared values, attitudes, standards, and beliefs that characterize the members of an organization and define its nature.”[1] Culture can determine how a company’s management and employees interact with one another and with the outside world. As such, it can serve as a motivating force, uniting employees behind a common purpose.
On the other hand, when a company’s culture does not align with its employees’ personal values or expectations, it can cause discomfort or even distress, and discourage productive engagement with the company’s work. For these reasons, it’s important for employees to identify their company culture as early as possible and be thoughtful about whether it suits their needs.
Unfortunately, in the current environment, identifying company culture can be challenging. Working remotely, employees miss out on many important culture cues that would have been more noticeable in an in-person work environment. For example, in-person work environments offer more frequent and spontaneous interactions with coworkers, direct exposure to senior managers, and experience of the physical layout and function of the office (i.e. an open floor plan that encourages organic run-ins), all of which can help employees understand their company’s culture.
To make matters worse, when companies are overwhelmed by a black swan event, such as a global pandemic, and focused on navigating through a major transition, they are likely to focus less on employee onboarding, a process that would ordinarily help new employees understand and navigate the company culture.
Indeed, a few recently onboarded employees told us that they felt that it was entirely up to them to get to know their new coworkers and companies. Under these circumstances, new virtual employees need to be both proactive and creative in seeking information about their company’s culture, and they need to know where to look.
Where Culture Shows Up
A company’s true culture is hard to pin down. Some aspects of culture are explicit, like the company’s stated values, for example, while others are implicit, requiring employees to read between the lines of everything that goes on in the workplace. Problematically, implicit and explicit cues can sometimes contradict each other and send mixed messages – a company may say that it has a mission-driven culture, yet this may not be reflected in the actions of its management and employees. Given all of this, it can be hard to make sense of a company’s implicit and explicit culture cues, not to mention that it’s hard to even notice the implicit cues in the first place, especially in a virtual work environment.
In this article, we’ll offer virtual employees a few suggestions for identifying and reading their company’s implicit and explicit culture cues. Part 1 will focus on implicit cues, while Part 2 will review explicit cues.
Implicit Culture Cues
While explicit culture cues are relatively easy to identify, having to do with a company’s actual statements and actions, implicit culture cues are much more subtle. They often take the form of unwritten, largely invisible norms of language and behavior that can be hard to put a finger on. Noticing such cues requires that employees pay close attention to what goes on in the workplace, and even read between the lines. This is difficult in any workplace and is especially difficult in a virtual work environment.
Virtual employees are privy to fewer workplace interactions, and the interactions they do witness can sometimes take a more formal, abbreviated or sanitized form. Still, implicit culture cues are critical to understanding a company’s culture because they are often more telling than explicit cues. They reveal what a company’s culture actually is rather than what it aspires to be. In other words, they communicate information that a company may not want to acknowledge directly – or simply be unaware of. As such, they are important to identify and understand – and that’s why we start with them here. Below are a few places to look for implicit culture cues when you are a virtual employee.
Power Dynamics
An important implicit cue about culture is the way power is presented and used in an organization. A company’s power dynamics speak volumes about its functioning culture, though most companies are unlikely to acknowledge these dynamics outright if they are at odds with the cultures these companies aspire to: collegial, non-hierarchical, “flat” cultures, for example. As a result, employees need to look for implicit cues that speak to who actually holds power.
First, think about your personal experience with your team. Are you given a lot of autonomy or are you overseen fairly closely by your direct manager? A lack of autonomy may indicate that power is tightly held in your organization, which has a big impact on company culture. Furthermore, how much credit are you given for your work? Do you get to send e-mails to senior managers, or do you get left off e-mails between the more senior members of the team? This too speaks to whether power is hoarded or shared in your organization.
Second, try to observe your company more generally. Does it seem like there is a delegation of power and responsibilities, or is power concentrated in just a few individuals? One way to pick up on this dynamic is to pay attention to who makes decisions at your company. Are day-to-day decisions made throughout the ranks or does it seem like they are often escalated to senior people?
A related way to determine the distribution of power is to see whether senior managers are involved in multiple facets of the business, including those that should perhaps be led by others at this point. For example, if the CEO is heavily involved in internal initiatives like recruiting and marketing, he or she probably retains a lot of power.
Finally, simply observe who gets airtime at your company, in meetings and over e-mail, and, even more simply, how often senior managers’ names come up among employees. The more visible senior management is, the more power they likely hold.
Employee Participation
Closely related to a company’s power dynamics are its participation norms. These norms determine how frequently and easily employees participate in work-related discussions at all levels of the organization. Is there a limit to the participation a company tolerates from its employees?
To answer these questions, you may first want to consider the experience of junior people at your company, as junior people are the least likely to have a voice. Think about whether junior people participate actively in internal or external meetings. Are they introduced to clients or other stakeholders? Do they get to present their own work? When meetings take place, do senior people make space for junior participation, or do they tend to dominate the conversation? And how does the company encourage junior participation in a virtual setting, where there are additional hurdles to having voices heard? Does junior participation remain a priority or fall by the wayside?
Beyond that, does the company give junior people the opportunity to participate meaningfully in internal initiatives or committees, or have a say in the broader direction of the company?
Next, you can also think about whether your company gives employees the opportunity to offer feedback and suggestions (or even to voice complaints). Whether a company is willing to hear (sometimes negative) feedback from its employees speaks volumes to how it views these employees and the type of culture it promotes. Does your company circulate an anonymous feedback survey or appoint an ombudsman, for example? Do employees get to report on how they are feeling via employee engagement surveys or pulse checks?
Understanding whether a company encourages or discourages participation by its employees, what type of participation is deemed appropriate, and who, as a result, feels comfortable using their voice, can help you understand the company culture at a deeper level. Is it as flat, inclusive, and collaborative in practice as it aims to be in theory? Does it value the development and experience of its junior resources?
Team Interactions
Another place to look for implicit culture cues is at the interactions that take place among employees. Individual and team dynamics contain a lot of information about the behaviors that are promoted by a company’s culture and those that are not. While reading such dynamics becomes harder in a virtual environment – first because there are fewer to witness, second because they are less organic, and third because they are more difficult to assess through a screen – there are still a few easy things to look for.
Consider how your team works together, and how often you interact with people outside of your team. Are your interactions limited to those directly above and below you, or do you have the opportunity to work with people on other teams or across functions? The answer to this question can tell you something about how flexible, collaborative, and creative your company culture is; the more interactions among employees, the more likely it is that new ideas and ways of working will develop.
Also ask yourself how often you get to interact with senior people in your day-to-day work. Few interactions with senior people indicate a higher level of hierarchy and a lower value placed on team connectivity and, in particular, on junior assets.
Finally, think about whether you would characterize your interactions with your team as more formal or more informal. If the people you work with (including senior people) take the time to get to know you on a more personal level, your interactions are likely to be more informal. If you trade jokes with your coworkers, or talk about things unrelated to work, or spend time together outside of work, your interactions are more informal. An emphasis on informal, personal connections among employees is often the foundation for a caring and collegial company culture.
Language
A final clue into a company’s true culture is its language. In some cases, the language a company uses to describe itself is an explicit cue – if a company talks directly about its culture, for example. In other cases, a company may exhibit more subtle patterns of language – frequently used words or ideas, use of a specific pronoun, or repeated mention of a particular audience. These are clues into how the company, and its senior managers, view themselves and relate to the employees of the company, as well as to its stakeholders. These clues can hold a lot of information about a company’s true culture.
First, try to think about how you’ve heard senior people talk about your company and its work. What language or ideas do they use to do this? Are there groups of people on whom they focus a lot? Examples would be the company’s employees, its customers or clients, or shareholders. This can tell you how much the company values, and caters to, each of these groups. Are there any recurring patterns in the language senior people use – for example, leadership may constantly return to the words “family” or “community” to describe the company, or “results” and “client service” to describe the company’s mission. The words that senior managers use frequently speak to how they see the company and its culture – both consciously and unconsciously.
One additional thing to consider is transparency. How transparent are senior people in their language? This may seem hard to determine, particularly if you are new. However, ask yourself the following questions: Do senior people seem to take ownership over their actions? Do they easily admit challenges or points of development, for themselves and for the company as a whole? When do they use “we” and when do they use “I”? Since culture “flows from the top,” it is important to consider the example set by senior management. A culture of transparency and humility needs to be modeled by company leadership in order to take hold.
So far in this article, we have considered a few good examples of implicit culture cues. While the list is not exhaustive, we think it’s a good starting point for virtual employees trying to get their arms around a new company’s culture.
In Part 2, we’ll review explicit culture cues, which are more immediately identifiable yet perhaps less important than implicit cues, as explicit cues speak more to how a company aspires to be than to how it actually is, and as such, have less to do with the actual functioning culture experienced by employees. Still, explicit cues are important to notice and understand as a baseline for how the company sees itself – and in particular, can help explain why a company isn’t aware of (or does not want to be aware of) its implicit culture. Read on to Part 2 for more about explicit cues.
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