Companies aren’t democracies. A few people call the shots and the rest follows. When you are an employee with an opinion, studies show that you’re most likely to keep it to yourself. For those who don’t, you might even be risking your job, and that’s essentially a culture issue IMHO.
But before getting into company culture and how it can support healthy communication and mutual feedback, I wanted to understand why are employees (I mean across the board, whether the company has a good culture or no/toxic culture) afraid of openly sharing feedback (especially negative or questioning things around) with their employers? Companies understand that by the way, as many are now setting up anonymous surveys to make their employees feel safe and open up a bit more and speak up (sort of!). The answer is that they don’t know what to expect, and they imagine the worst-case scenario, i.e. getting marginalized or losing their job.
I find psychology fascinating and I’m always interested to read about psychological factors playing into what we do and how we view our environment. From a psychology standpoint, one of the common answers to the question above is apparently linked to negativity bias. Ah, those cognitive biases, they run deep! Even when you know about them, it’s impossible to eliminate their impact on you and your environment. For those interested in this topic, I can highly recommend “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.
Anyway, what it means is that we tend to feel negative feedback more intensely than positive one. So if you give a positive piece of feedback and a negative one, more focus will be on the negative one, and it would have a much more significant impact on the receiving party. This is why we’re all afraid of criticism to a certain degree, whether we’re giving it or receiving it, and when you are an employer, you basically get to decide who gets to criticize you. In the workplace, feedback is de-facto a one-way street unless the leadership is actively building a culture that promotes it.
My experience is anecdotal obviously but I also had the impression that the fear of feedback is symptomatic of the fear of conflict. For some reason, certain people think that conflict in a team is bad or counterproductive. That’s clearly false. Fear of conflict creates dysfunctional teams, where consensus is called for, with no level of opinions or feedback that are likely to lead to progress and successful collaboration.
It’s absolutely necessary to build a culture!
When a company doesn’t have a culture, it doesn’t have a set of behaviors that are consistently used and lived across the organization, including how to deal with feedback. So the company leaves it to individuals within the different levels of management to decide how to feel about something or what to do about it, which is certainly not the right environment for feedback (or anything else for that matter) to flourish.
Having a culture can be boiled down to having some guidelines on how you do things in the workplace. This means that behaviors and everyone’s actions would be bound by a set of values and sound practices. In a healthy culture, for instance, things are more predictable, communication is less likely to be a complete mess, how decisions are made is clear to everyone, and leadership openness and team support are promoted with an active engagement from everyone to make it a reality and part of the company’s set of values, etc. So when you do not have a culture, feedback (and potentially conflict) can be interpreted in different ways and is not seen as an opportunity, which it absolutely is. Why? Because it helps find areas of improvement, not only in processes and technologies but also in human interactions.
I have to say that I myself was skeptical about the importance of a strong organizational culture until I worked for a company that doesn’t have one. I realized early on that you absolutely don’t want to stay there unless you haven’t known anything else, then you might be ok with it. But even then, a cultureless environment is far from being ideal to engage employees and improve their motivation, performance, and productivity. It also affects the connection with peers within the organization. No values or attitudes to unify teammates and get them moving forward; only clans, politics, gossip, and drama.
The good news maybe is that the benefits of building a healthy company culture are more and more recognized. For instance, company culture is an important factor for almost half of job seekers according to this recent survey. I think it should be more than that, and I believe it will be. Obviously, every business is different, and there isn’t such a thing as ‘correct’ culture or values, but my advice would be to never work for a company that doesn’t have any.
