Making it real, making it matter...how to apply a Growth Mindset

Cultural evolution is a change that takes time. At Microsoft we view this evolution as an intentional, continuous cycle of creating meaning, activating learning and iterating. This is the model we use for the evolution of our own internal culture, driven by behaviours, systems, symbols and storytelling as levers for lasting change. As a global organisation that is committed to finding new ways of empowering people achieve more, we are constantly evolving and creating change from within, so we can provide the best possible service to our customers.

Hacking cultural change:

In 2014 we embarked on a culture evolution: a quest to become a place where employees take risks to change their world for the better. To encourage the shift towards our new culture we launched the global Hackathon in July of that year. Typically known as a coding competition that happens over a few days and involves sleep-deprived engineers, ours is different; all employees, not just coders or makers, bring their unique skill sets to a project. For three days, thousands of people in approximately 75-80 countries companywide collaborate and innovate in new ways to tackle big challenges that can seem overwhelming or even impossible to solve - until they are not. 

Our hackathon has grown to become the largest private hackathon in the world with 23,539 employees participating this year to mark the fifth anniversary - up from 11,550 in 2014. 

In many ways, the Hackathon epitomises Microsoft’s culture, it brings people together from across teams and disciplines and challenges them to collaborate to solve a societal issue or problem. It asks employees to take on challenges they feel passionate about or to come up with “the next big thing” for our customers and create experiences that are accessible to all. Employees are encouraged to strive, fail, and learn - and, whether their ideas become products or not - to bring the experience of iterating and growing to their daily work.

As the Hackathon evolves, it has come to embody these attributes and mirror a broader cultural shift in the organisation. This shift is evident in a few key ways;

Growth mindset, as participation continues to grow, employees have increasingly brought a hacking model to their day-to-day work.

Customer obsessed, more broadly, it has challenged employees to work not just on their own projects in their own silos, but also to ask, “what can I make better?” 

Diverse & inclusive, we are passionate about driving accessibility technologies, such as Eye Gaze and Learning Tools, and have made technology more accessible for all people, regardless of ability. Three out of the last four grand prize winners were ability and inclusion hacks.

OneMicrosoft, the Hackathon brings together people from across teams, disciplines, and sometimes even countries. Hackers represent 76 countries and 96 disciplines; 27% are non-engineers. 

Making a difference, the Hack for Good challenge at the Hackathon encourages employees to solve real-world problems often overlooked by the tech sector.

Culture is DRIVEN from the bottom-up:

To engage employees successfully we encourage them to communicate with each other about the culture. As a means to drive awareness and understanding each quarter, we launched a campaign for all employees that focused on one of the culture attributes (Accountability, Quality and Innovation, Responsiveness to Customers, Growth Mindset and Diversity and Inclusion), allowing time to explore each concept and how it resonates. This included messaging that showed up on things like; cups, lending libraries with curated titles aligned to culture, encouraging employees to “Take, Learn, Share”.  During the campaign employees contributed to their own books for others to read and left messages about what they learned.

We leveraged Sway, a tool available on our intranet used to share content, to bring each attribute to life in an interactive experience that unpacked the what, why and how of each attribute. 

These things may seem small, but imagine coming to work one day and your face is on 3.5 million cups with a cool quote about OneMicrosoft, for example. 

Culture starts at the top, but it should not stay there, we started at the top with a leader driven effort, but that is not self-sustaining. While leadership matters culture cannot depend on a single person. If we do not have leaders who hold our values, we will not get very far. When we think about this – there are three things we see as making good leaders; create clarity, generate energy, and deliver success. We rolled out these principles to all employees with the belief that everyone has what it takes to be a great leader.

Measuring and understanding the state of culture:

We measure change with data using a “whole system” approach looking at the following parameters;

·      Do employees see the evidence of positive change in Microsoft organisational culture? 

·      What are employee culture experiences by each attribute?

As part of the approach, we consider four factors that are believed to be impactful to culture in organisational science; employee engagement, strategic direction of the company, leadership effectiveness and company agility. All this is used to provide insights for informed decision making on where and how to invest in a culture “drumbeat” on an ongoing basis to make it tangible.

We are intentional with ongoing engagement to drive conversation, increase reach of messages and leverage real-time sentiment. For this purpose, we remind our employees of the individual attribute definitions and ask them whether they experience these in practice within the organisation and to what degree.  These responses are collected through our Microsoft daily pulse and annual focus groups which are our two leading measurements. We use both quantitative and qualitative (textual) analytics to collect the feedback which makes it clear where the issues are. Based on the responses we provide monthly, quarterly, and annual data to our CEO, Chief People Officer, and senior leadership team. 

As a result, Microsoft is a more open and transparent company – from our technology to our internal dialogues. Each month, our CEO, Satya Nadella facilitates an employee meeting that drives the conversation around culture. Thanks to our listening systems, remote employees can ask questions, and everyone can see real time responses minute-by-minute.

Ultimately the change we are undergoing may be the most important legacy we are leaving. It will fuel everything we do in the future. 

Next in our series…Why Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Matters

You can read the first article here.