Forgive me for stating the obvious but want good workplace culture? Start with cash. If your everyday job doesn’t require you to physically clock in, time your bathroom breaks, or use an app to catch gigs from your car, you would be forgiven for thinking that workplace culture is only about getting along with your colleagues. Or thinking that it’s all about opulent perks – like Bay Area tech companies circa 2011. Or that culture is just a nice-to-have. Culture can be all of these things, but for millions of American workers, the good workplace culture they’re fighting for, is getting paid a living wage and having time off to go to the doctor.
Organizational culture expert Josh Levine defines culture as “the cause and effect of every decision you make.” That is to say, it can be intentional or unintentional, good or bad – and it’s there whether your employer thinks about it or not. And it can be critical. Studies have shown that a good workplace culture not only boosts worker morale, it also improves a company’s bottom line.
But while the knowledge worker class debates the impacts of a hybrid workspace, or the effects of offering paid mental health days off, it is easy to forget the many workers – warehouse employees, service employees, train operators, gig workers, etc. – whose workplace culture is more fundamentally broken.
And this squares with the most recent thinking on organizational culture that puts fair pay as a baseline on which everything else is built. According to Levine, Package – also known as pay, time off, and benefits – sits at the foundation of the Five P’s of Organizational Culture. The Five P’s (the others being potential, people, purpose, and perception) are a framework that helps company decision-makers intentionally build better workplace culture. And they can be a useful tool to build common ground too.
In an increasingly divided country, it can be instructive to realize that we are all working for a better culture, just starting in different places.