The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation

Is it better for an organization to have one unified culture or a collection of mini ones? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach?

Organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava are back with more research insights, real-world examples, and tips for company leaders, this time about the complex world of subcultures.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culturekit.

*Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
Jenny & Sameer’s 3 Main Takeaways:
Awareness – know what subcultures exist within the organization and anticipate the possibility that they conflict in dysfunctional ways.
Agility – be willing to try out different cultural priorities. Before deciding that the counterculture is necessarily problematic you should look at what it is solving for.
Alignment – prioritize one cultural norm that applies to all units and unifies the organization rather than trying to be perfectly aligned on everything.


Show Links:
The Role of Subcultures in Agile Organizations [Leading and Managing People in the Dynamic Organization]
Maersk: Driving Culture Change at a Century-Old Company to Achieve Measurable Results [Berkeley Haas Case Series]
Identifying Organizational Subcultures: An Empirical Approach [Journal of Management Studies]
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundaries [Sociological Methods & Research]
The Lasting Leadership Lessons From The Challenger Disaster [Forbes]
5 Ways to Create a Culture of Innovation in Your Organisation [Salesforce Blog]

In this world of hybrid work, how to build and maintain long-lasting and impactful relationships at your company can be a head-scratcher of a question.

The Culture Kit hosts, Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, are here to help. On today’s episode, they’re answering a question from HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan about how to keep employees connected whether they’re at home or in the office.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!” at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c6kSlpzNd_xvfyH_sg8hfBQC5ZGXML8gmJr7O3ThROI/edit.

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer, a podcast created by the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

In this inaugural episode, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava—two Berkeley Haas professors who have dedicated their careers to studying and advancing workplace culture—answer a question from WD-40 CEO Steve Brass about how to create and maintain a strong workplace culture.

What does it mean to have a strong culture? According to Jenny:

“A strong organizational culture is one where people both agree about what's important and care. And so if you think about in your head a two-by-two box here, which is what academics love to think in terms of, you have one with agreement, low-high, one with intensity, low-high. If you're high on both, you have a strong culture. If you're low on both, you have a weak culture. But if you're high on agreement but low on intensity, you have what we call a vacuous culture. Everybody agrees, but nobody cares. And you could be high on intensity but low on agreement, and there you'll probably have a lot of conflict, or what we call warring factions. So those are the possibilities for how strong culture can array.”

Jenny and Sameer also discuss the dark side of strong culture. According to Sameer:

“I think it's also important to keep in mind that strong cultures can also have a dark side, and an organization with a culture that is too strong can quickly become stifling and fail to recognize the value and importance of non-conformists who are often really central to efforts to innovate and change the culture over time. In fact, if an organization's culture becomes too strong, it can actually take on the qualities of a cult. And so there's a risk of having a culture that may be just too strong.”
The two also discuss Jenny's take on Netflix and Genentech's cultures and how leaders even know how strong their culture is.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!” at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c6kSlpzNd_xvfyH_sg8hfBQC5ZGXML8gmJr7O3ThROI/edit.

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

The world of work is truly a work in progress. There are so many unanswered questions.

What's the best approach to bringing workers back to the office? How can you keep remote and on-site workers from forming silos? How can you restore trust after layoffs? Is it possible, or even desirable, to get back to the culture you had before the pandemic? There’s lots to think about, and we’ll be thinking out loud in our new podcast: The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer.

I’m Jenny Chatman. And I’m Sameer Srivastava. We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School who have dedicated our careers to studying and advancing workplace culture.

We'll think through the questions you're struggling with today and share insights based on evidence from the latest research. You'll come away with concrete steps you can take to start fixing your company's culture right away.

Tune in to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Starting April 2 on your favorite podcast platform.