Organizational Culture: Align and Connect Your Employees

Culturally connected employees feel they identify with, care about and belong within the organization — and these connections don’t always require physical proximity.

The extent to which employees are connected to organizational culture can increase by up to 27% when they experience emotional proximity.

Focusing on the moments that matter for organizational culture in a hybrid environment, you can improve the employee experience.

The top 5 moments that matter for cultural connectedness include: 

Peer recognition. About three in five culturally connected employees say moments of peer recognition create a strong sense of company culture. By creating an intentional space for peer community-building and acknowledgment, employees feel significance as individuals and team members, and know they are valued contributors. You can promote peer recognition in a hybrid and remote setting by:

• Making time for moments of gratitude in team meetings

• Encouraging employees to write notes of appreciation

• Making more personal moments feel important, such as through a virtual birthday celebration or e-gift contribution to an employee’s wedding registry

Performance review feedback. Fifty-eight percent of culturally connected employees feel a strong sense of company culture in their performance reviews. Best practices for leaders delivering performance reviews include the following:

• Recognize and acknowledge individual employee contributions. 

• When improvement is needed, be supportive and offer solutions to help employees reach their goals. 

• Account for the impact of personal factors in performance feedback — a powerful way to signal that your organization cares about their employees as people, not just workers, and prioritizes their wellness over work outcomes.

Building team cohesion — defined by effective team collaboration, skills transfer and a sense of being important to the team — is a critical part of achieving talent goals. High team cohesion doubles the percentage of employees reporting high intent to stay and the percentage of those giving and sustaining their best performance. 

But cohesion among various generations can be elusive. Only 22% of Gen Z, 29% of millennials, 19% of Gen X and 14% of baby boomer employees currently report high levels of team cohesion. You can improve multigenerational cohesion by taking the following actions: 

Define team norms. Eighty percent of HR leaders say that hybrid work decreases employees’ visibility into each other’s work patterns. As generations with limited shared experience work together in this low-visibility environment, conflicts in working styles can make collaboration harder. For example: 

• Gen Z employees are more likely than other generations to want more time in the office to build relationships and learn by observing their colleagues at work. 

• More tenured employees often prefer the flexibility of working remotely to fulfill caretaking responsibilities or complete more focused heads-down work. They already have built strong networks and may not recognize the needs of early-career team members. 

• Younger employees may feel neglected without opportunities for in-person coaching or socialization, while older colleagues may resent having to spend more time on site.

Facilitating quick ways for employees to learn from their age-diverse teams helps bridge generational siloes. The following initiatives can double the likelihood of achieving high employee performance.

Traditional views hold that organizational culture only forms when a critical mass of people are gathered in one place. As a result, the hybrid work environment is often perceived as a threat to culture. 

The concern is that hybrid work will cause workers’ weak ties — work relationships with people outside of their direct teams — to become even weaker. But weak ties aren’t responsible for all, or even the majority, of an employee’s cultural experiences. 

Strong ties — relationships with team members and direct managers — have always been the dominant vehicles for connecting employees to corporate culture, and they are even more important in the hybrid world. People bound by strong ties form microcultures — a shared identity, purpose and community created by smaller groups of people within an organization. In a hybrid environment, organizations that help microcultures flourish will sustain and strengthen cultural connectedness.

Rather than cultivating a single macroculture and relying on weak ties to spread it throughout the organization, embrace the development of multiple microcultures and set them up for success. To help microcultures thrive, take these three actions:

• Minimize macroculture to make room for microcultures. Make your organizational culture framework simple and directional, not prescriptive, to allow space for microcultures. This provides a starting point for microcultures to define what culture means to them, and a set of guardrails to prevent unhealthy divergence from the overall company culture.

• Localize cultural meaning-making. Rather than rely on senior leaders to communicate what culture should mean to employees, localize cultural meaning-making, which allows employees to define what culture means to them in their context. This process can be as simple as encouraging employees to talk about culture with members of their teams. Localizing cultural meaning-making sends a clear message: The culture you create matters to the organization, and you have the power to influence it for better or for worse.

• Prioritize team effectiveness through team-driven norms. When employees rely on fewer interactions with a smaller group of people to connect them to organizational culture, the risk that toxic or dysfunctional team cultures will drive them away increases. Encouraging team-driven norms helps reduce work friction that might contribute to unhealthy team cultures.