Culture Chillers and Performance

For the mature service organization, leaders strive to build their operations to succeed not only when they are present, but to function at consistently high levels when they are away. Within these high-functioning robust service operations, decisions are routinely, almost automatically being made much like a vehicle in autopilot-mode with capabilities that exceed human abilities.  Autopilot vehicles include a complex system of technology and networks, built from the most complicated and diverse scenarios in the world (Tesla, 2022).  These autonomous vehicles are making unseen decisions moment to moment, ready to process the next challenge with ease, grace and agility, much like a high-functioning and healthy business unit.  Striving for such a healthy business culture is of the highest priority and involves investments that will pay for themselves tenfold.

As with any system, inherent or situational conflicts must be identified and addressed.  When conflicts are not addressed, the desired outcome is compromised.  The importance of identifying and addressing conflicts promptly is essential to building the resilience of your workplace culture.  These conflicts can be referred to as culture chillers.  If unaddressed, culture chillers have a devastating effect on the service value chain equation that starts with hiring the right people and ends with performance.  In this brief article, we will discuss culture chillers, and their relationship to motivation, engagement, and performance.

While culture is often a discussed, efforts toward building a strong organizational structure are not always present.  If a heathy culture is desired, there must be strategic intent to accomplish this task.  Corporate culture embodies an organization’s values, ethics, vision, behaviors, and work environment. It is what makes each company unique, and it impacts everything from public image to employee engagement and retention.

Employees bring varying levels of motivation and engagement to the workplace.  If employees share a company’s ethics, vision and other cultural elements, they can positively affect a company’s bottom line.  With a healthy culture in place, a company will maneuver through challenges with a higher level of capability and agility. 

It is the leadership team’s responsibility to nurture a workplace culture. A healthy culture generates trust. Trust is a belief in the reliability of someone or something. Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, and extremely difficult to regain. Leaders are instrumental in creating an environment of trust, and it can be thought of as the bonding agent for a healthy culture.

Effective leaders manage successful businesses. They exhibit professional behaviors, and create a safe and ethical work environment. They hire the right people, provide equal opportunities, drive growth, equip employees with the tools and training to perform their roles, and build engaged and motivated teams.  While this list of leadership responsibilities is abbreviated, each of the items articulated is a characteristic of a healthy culture.   Leaders should be credited for high-functioning cultures as well as be accountable for low performing teams.

Culture chillers can come in the form of people, processes, tools or technology. This article will focus on the human variable, one of the most inconsistent and complex. Within a workplace, culture chillers are the behaviors or forces opposing a healthy culture. We refer to them as culture chillers, as initially they can interfere; yet sustained interruptions become culture killers. When culture chillers are addressed appropriately, they can provide insight and opportunities to enhance growth. Culture chillers present themselves in the form of actions and words: they can be intentional, unintentional, passive or aggressive. Often, they are associated with personal characteristics, emotions, biases, agendas, and past experiences.  The presence of culture chillers at high levels, can have a crushing effect on basic human needs, thus creating an unhealthy workplace culture.  Culture chillers are often present with low performing teams or those not reaching full potential.  One thing is clear: when teammates experience culture chillers, momentum, focus, morale, and objectives are compromised.

Below are some common examples of culture chillers (not in priority order):

• An environment lacking or inconsistent with trust, respect and integrity
• An environment lacking gratitude and empathy
• Blame game
• Big offices with posted titles
• Broken or non-existing feedback channels
• Disconnect between words and actions
• Inconsistent communication, including what is not said - yet clearly seen
• Manipulation of career paths
• Micro-management
• Poor performing employees not being coached
• Quiet quitters
• Emphasizing power differential by refencing of hierarchy and titles
• Requests and contacts after hours
• Separation from teammates or silo of management
• Speaking poorly about teammates, especially those not in the conversation
• Special treatment – favoritism
• Taking credit for another’s work
• Tasks being assigned that are above or below teammate capabilities
• Varying rules

The examples are countless.  If you ask your teammates what they want in a workplace, you will hear the common responses: a company with purpose they believe in, autonomy, opportunity to career growth and fair compensation.  While having a healthy culture is not always a top-five response, the underlying concepts represent foundational elements of a healthy culture. 

Avoiding or ignoring culture chillers can be tempting. Failure to address them will ultimately add rigidity into the corporate culture.  The results of these negative forces are crippling to a company and create demotivation, disengagement, quiet quitters, turnover, lost knowledge, performance decrease, etc.  Avoiding these undesirable outcomes starts with a focus on a healthy culture. Humans have basic physiological needs (water, food, shelter, and security) and psychological needs (ability to adapt to reality, autonomy, belonging, development of competencies, and recognition). Recognition of the relationships of these needs to employment is vital. 

Susan Fowler, an expert in the science of motivation, notes the ideas of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators is obsolete. She refers to optimal and suboptimal motivators.  Susan eloquently articulates the spectrum of motivation which is based on psychological needs and self-regulation. Optimal motivation includes components of choice, connection, competence and values (Fowler, S., 2019). 

• Choice: an innate need to perceive you have choices, recognize you have options within boundaries, and have a sense of control over what is happening at any time.
• Connection: an innate need to feel a sense of belonging and genuine connection to others without concerns about ulterior motives, pursuit of goals aligned to meaningful values, and a noble purpose and contribution to something greater than self. 
• Competence: an innate need to feel effective at managing everyday situations, to demonstrate skill over time, and to feel a sense of growth and learning every day.

The list of culture chiller examples easily fits into the three areas Susan speaks about.  The healthier our teammates, the more likely to have an engaged and productive workplace.  Culture chillers are likely to have a negative effect on teammates’ emotions which will ultimately lead to a drop in level of performance.  Susan refers to associated emotions such as fear, shame, anger, resentment and regret: each is associated with lost opportunities (Fowler, S., 2019). 

According to psychologists, humans have varying degrees of self-regulation with the previously mentioned emotions and being emotionally overwhelmed often leads to less-than-optimal decision-making, creativity, and production. These emotions are more likely to be counterproductive to motivation and engagement. Culture chillers are opposing forces to engagement, motivation, and performance (much like a technology glitch in an autopilot car causing an accident). The ability to identify and address these abnormalities promptly will improve business (and ensure safety in vehicles). Bottom line is that motivation is connected to employee engagement, satisfaction, commitment and company performance.

The good news is that one can identify culture chillers and address them to enhance overall success and performance.  It has been said many times that knowledge is essential to the cure.  It is vital for leaders to be present and self-aware; they are then much more able to create trust, overcome adversity to retain balance, and understand the difference between compliance and commitment. Taking the steps of addressing culture chillers while proactively improving motivation and engagement will enhance success.  The success will refuel you and your team, like sun to a solar panel.

Employee engagement and motivation are common behaviors discussed in the workplace culture.  Engagement is the employee’s sense of belonging to a purpose and commitment to the company and desired outcomes.  Motivation is the employee’s personal drive to be successful and perform at a high level.   While both are important aspects of high functioning teams, each behavior can operate independently of the other and vary in levels during an employee’s tenure.  Items that cause a change in employee engagement and motivation are often related to autonomy, job mismatch, lack of a sense of belonging, and those scenarios known as culture chillers. 

A healthy workplace ensures the establishment of a culture-strategy and effective communication to teams with clear expectations. Leaders must take active steps to build and maintain a desired culture.  All teammates need to be bold; when alerted to a culture chiller, they must take some basic steps including respectful listening, understanding the "why” associated with the action, and being open to learning how an adapted behavior will improve long-term outcomes for all involved.  Culture chillers can be associated with all teammates, including those in formal and informal management roles.  Addressing leaders is a more complex issue and requires additional sensitivity.

It is important for leaders to be aware of their staff’s needs, check egos, share what the desired culture looks like, define what engagement looks like in the workplace, effectively communicate, celebrate positive behaviors, utilize engagement surveys, and model core beliefs and expectations.  The experience of unfairness erodes connection and feeling part of something.

In an October 2022 interview with Dr. Mickey Suozzo Phys. D., we discussed the behaviors associated with culture chillers. Dr. Suozzo stated that the drive behind behaviors is infinite.  He went on to share that we have conscious / intentional behavior, but most of our automatic behavior is driven by the unconscious.  The power is in awareness, so we can then choose not to be stuck in automatic mode.  All of that is true in the workplace as well.  Dr. Suozzo expanded on his sense that supervision and reviews are intended, in an optimal situation, to help people see areas where they can improve and provide a path forward.  He included a caveat, as he did not think it is realistic to expect all managers to have a strong grounding in psychology ideas that would enable them to offer that depth of help.  Sharing this perspective and educating managers will benefit the entire organization (Dr. Suozzo, M., October 2022).  

In any system, output is aligned with the structural integrity or design of the product or structure. When stress is applied, results will waiver depending on the capability of the system. It is the same for an organizational structure. Organizations that are run for short-term success are less likely to effectively handle business pressure or stress. As mentioned in a Washington Post article, Professor Diego Comin states the productivity of the U.S. knowledge worker is down in 2022 (The Washington Post, October 2022). What business pressure or stress has the economy recently experienced? COVID. Leaders are under heightened pressure to boost productivity and address distractions such as “quiet quitters”. The Comin article describes technology to track employee performance as deleterious and calls for empowering employees, connecting employees to the company’s mission, doing meaningful work, and facilitating motivation. Engagement is directly related to productivity and culture chillers cause avoidance or disengagement. Recognition of culture chillers opens a portal to the goal of improved motivation and engagement. Don’t be discouraged, culture chillers will always be present to some degree; typically, they are not malicious in nature and present the opportunity to learn and grow.

Written by ADAPT Service Consulting Staff

Link: ADAPT Service Consulting

References:

ADAPT, "An Elite Service Culture, a Strategic Approach to Sustained Success”, January 2023.

Comin, D., "U.S. workers have gotten way less productive. No one is sure why”. The Washington Post, October 31, 2022.  U.S. workers have gotten way less productive. No one is sure why. - The Washington Post.

Fowler, Susan. (2019) "Master your Motivation”. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Suozzo, M. Interview October 24, 2022.

Tesla, 2022: Artificial Intelligence & Autopilot | Tesla UK.

Who is ADAPT:

ADAPT Service Consulting is a firm that provides expertise and professional advice to "Service Organizations”. The ADAPT staff are industry recognized professionals embedded in the service community. They have successfully developed award winning service organizations to be best-in-class, exceeded corporate objectives and function as a competitive advantage. With decades of experience in the service business, ADAPT takes an exclusive approach leveraging their experience, knowledge of service fundamentals and creativity to enable service organizations to succeed in today’s dynamic business environment and reach the pinnacle, The Elite Service Culture™.