Organizational Culture

It was 7am on a Sunday morning and I was walking to a nearly empty “Saint Marks Square” replica at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.  The stores were not open yet and the tourists were likely still fast asleep. I was there to meet my friend and colleague Pat so we could record a segment of a webcast from an iconic background. 

Now I’ve known Pat for about a dozen years. He’s a great guy and an awesome colleague, but this would only be about the second time we’d be together. The foundations of our relationship and ability to work well together were actually established over hundreds of video calls.

The same can be said about my current supervisor. When the firm I work for had a reorganization I was shifted to her team. She’s a sharp, wise, honest supervisor with a great sense of humor and an even better perspective on life. It’s possible we may have met once or twice in person before I transferred to her team, but we had never established a rapport or working relationship. You see, she lives in California, I live in New Jersey. That’s about three thousand-miles of distance between us. I don’t get to join her for a coffee in the morning or a drink after work or to chat at the fictitious and wayyyyy overblown ‘water cooler’ during the day. As my colleagues and I approach yet another, new reorganization she and I are planning to meet for breakfast at an industry conference where I am one of the presenters. It will be the first time we’ve ever had a meal together one on one – after three or so years of collaborating at full-speed.

I bring up the two examples above to point out something business publications and industry thought leaders seem to be missing lately. Yes, the pandemic forced people to see how awesome and productive remote and hybrid working is as a model for knowledge workers. But now that the pandemic is (hopefully) waning, there has been push-back from many sectors claiming that the loss of nine to five, in-person offices has taken away from organizations’ ability to establish and maintain company culture. They cry and bellyache that people need to ‘return to the office’ so this mystical and superior ‘culture’ can once again be re-established…and business pundits and publications buy this BS as quickly as it is shoveled.

In this article I won’t go into the reasons that the culture change led by hybrid working (despite all the bellyaching) is permanent. Feel free to read one of my old articles (like this one) for that explanation. For today, let’s ask Mr. Peabody to set the Wayback Machine to a time before the pandemic, before the ‘cloud’… heck, even before the old three-screen Telepresence monstrosities. 

About two decades ago (give or take a couple of years) a young(er) Mr. Danto came to an interesting realization (along with thousands of others I’m sure.) People tend to demonize what they can’t or don’t see. Big organizations had many offices around the country (and the world) and these dispersed employees were suddenly interacting with each other on a more regular basis. It was an easy downward-slide for people to get into an ‘us versus them’ mentality about it. It was actually kind of ugly. But then, this newfangled thingy – at the time ISDN based videoconferencing – had an amazing impact on the situation. Suddenly, these other offices weren’t filled with unseen idiots, they were instead filled with colleagues and friends that we spoke with and saw on an almost daily basis. That addition of video – including facial expressions, body language, humor and good nature – allowed organizations with offices around the world to collaborate as if the people were all in the same location. Sure, the technology was not all that great in terms of quality when it first came out, but it worked. 

As the years passed, the technology involved vastly improved – the images and sound got a lot better, and more firms in the collaboration space came up with more diverse offerings of tools and experiences. Savvy organizations realized that they weren’t working at the equivalent of a local hardware store or restaurant. The ‘camaraderie and culture’ that needed to be developed didn’t – and actually couldn’t – be established by cramming people into a single location when in-reality their people were located all around the country and the world. Establishing a culture of teamwork across the miles required collaboration technology. The organizations that embraced this concept moved ahead with a level of cooperation and togetherness that the ones that didn’t could never compete with.

Now, as we step out of the Wayback Machine, we land back into a post-pandemic society that seems to have forgotten all about this lesson. We somehow believe we need to revert to a past culture that was never successful (or, in most cases, even possible) of having all of an organization’s people crammed into one location to help ‘drive and establish company culture.’ Sadly, that idea is a fantasy that never actually existed in the past. The atmosphere that existed in these ‘densified’ campuses was one that simply supported a managerial hierarchy of power and control, not effective culture. Managers – many of whom were promoted into positions they were not prepared for – embraced superficial processes like ‘Management By Walking Around,’ meaning they had to see butts-in-seats to know people were on the job. 

The reality is that almost three years of a pandemic has resulted in far too many people longing for a past that was never really any good…seeing the fantasy of superb organizational culture through some sort of rose colored, rear-view glasses that look at everyone all-together singing Kumbaya.

So, let me use this opportunity to remind everyone what great organizational culture is. It’s one where I can work with a colleague in another city as well as the one next to me. It’s one where I can develop an awesome, productive, enjoyable relationship with a supervisor that I might see in-person maybe once a year (when we hug as if we’re relatives.) It’s one where I can meet a colleague at 7am at an empty, fake Saint Marks Square and immediately kick-into completing the tasks at hand – because we know each other…we have an excellent working relationship based on an excellent organizational culture – and we never had to be under the same roof to develop it.

By all means please email a link to this article to any colleagues or supervisors that have conveniently forgotten the past. Do it anonymously if you have to. I’m happy to be the one that tries to slap them back out of the fantasy.

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has over four decades of experience providing problem solving leadership and innovation in media and unified communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. He is also the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology. David can be reached at DDanto@imcca.org and his full bio and other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info.