Design Your Culture, or It Will Design Itself
How Embedding Values in Everyday Practices Can Shape Your Team's Culture
When we talk about culture in an organization, it's easy to think of it as a set of written values or principles. However, real culture is deeper than occasional posters with values. After all, the values listed on posters often don’t reflect the genuine, everyday experience within a company.
Many successful teams stand out not just for their strong value systems, but for how deeply these values are ingrained in their day-to-day operations. They have a shared way of doing things, refined through experiences and challenges.
For many culture emerges from the behaviors and decisions of leaders and spreads through every aspect of the organization, influencing hiring, promotions, and even the hard calls like letting someone go. And while people management is the most direct way to influence culture, there are other ways we can embed our values into everyday work life.
Let's dive into three key strategies that I’ve found to be crucial in evolving a design team's culture.
Design your meetings
As I've highlighted before, the impact thoughtful meeting design can have, extends to larger team meetings as well. Design the structure and rituals within meetings to shape your culture. We made a decision some time ago that ‘Design meetings should be run in design tools’, reason being we wanted our design team meetings not to feel like meetings, but like collective design sessions.
This simple decision has turned our meetings into dynamic, inclusive spaces where collaboration thrives. It’s made our leadership more approachable by engaging them directly in the tools our designers use daily. Additionally we’ve noticed our designers have become carriers of our teams collaborative nature and reproduced the collaborative energy of our design meetings on their projects with product management and engineering. Their enthusiasm has sparked a contagious wave of collaboration across the organization.
Questions for reflection:
How do your meetings feel? Are they something the team feels like they have to attend vs want to attend?
How efficient are your meetings? Most meetings are single-threaded, consider running multi-threaded meetings.
How interactive and participatory is your meeting format? Consider running meetings in real-time collaboration tools
Takeaway: To truly foster a collaborative culture, start by defining and demonstrating the essence of effective collaboration.
Design for maximum inclusion
In Berlin, we have assembled a globally diverse design team, encompassing more than 22 designers from 16 different nations, and equal gender representation across all levels. We focus on attracting and retaining diverse talent through a carefully crafted process.
Attract: Rather than conventional hiring process with design challenges, we believe that if a design hiring process relies on challenges to assess a candidate's technical capabilities, the real issue lies at the beginning of the recruitment process. It's asking the right questions, creating alignment and having an effective evaluation strategy from the start and not addressing these aspects later in the process and passing your responsibility as an unfair burden onto the candidates. This approach broadens our candidate pool, including those who cannot undertake challenges outside regular working hours.
Retain: To promote inclusivity, we prefer team brunches or lunches over dinners, accommodating parents and caretakers. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging and high attendance, ensuring that everyone can attend without feeling disadvantaged. This approach isn't just about the immediate team experience; it's a strategic decision that impacts the composition of our team in the long run.
The decisions we make today significantly influence who joins and stays in our company and how it will look like in the next 5 to 10 years. Are we creating an environment where parents, caretakers, or any individual feels welcomed and valued? The answer to this question shapes the future of your team. You want to avoid becoming a company that caters only to a specific demographic. Instead, value building a team that's rich in diversity of ideas and experience, understand that these intentional choices today create a more inclusive and dynamic company culture for tomorrow.
Questions for reflection:
Is there a chance that your hiring process unintentionally excludes certain candidates?
Have you thoroughly analyzed your recruitment procedure by mapping out the entire candidate journey?
Could any aspect of your event planning inadvertently make it difficult or exclude certain individuals from participating?
Takeaway: Achieving inclusivity means actively reworking and eliminating processes that inadvertently exclude.
Design spaces to create uniqueness
Our team works in an environment where the commitment to service is as much part of the offering as our skill level. And it’s only the combination of both that creates long lasting business relationships and success. Our Designers are embedded within product teams with a serious business focus. For a team of creatives, we need to carve out both places and times where they can break out of the seriousness of it all and welcome serendipity. This creative space might manifest as a dedicated Slack channel, a monthly team event, or even a special ritual at the beginning of your meetings.
In our case, these moments occur when we gather to discuss our current projects and sentiment with the broader team, providing a bi-weekly snapshot of everyone's experiences and progress.
To an outsider, it might seem like our designers are having too much fun, but that's exactly the space we aimed to create. The freedom and desire to draw outside the lines has grown from the trust we've built within our team, fostering a behavior that's distinctively ours.
Developing these pockets of for people to express themselves creatively, has been crucial for us. They give the team the permission to evolve and to iterate our culture. It’s made our shared lived experience authentically and uniquely ours.
Questions for reflection:
Do you offer a space where team members feel comfortable sharing their true concerns or questions?
Do you have a enough space for your team to creatively express themselves?
Have you set aside regular intervals and places for your team to unwind from the usual business seriousness?
Takeaway: For your culture to evolve, intentionally create spaces that nurture its unique qualities
Be the curator
I think of our team culture as a unique blend of people, strategy, and shared values. It’s work I care deeply about. While it's difficult to quantify the benefits of certain investments, what truly matters to me is ensuring every team member feels they're part of a meaningful, shared experience.
Instead of static or empty value statements on posters, focusing on shaping the lived experiences through meetings, spaces, and team interactions can make all the difference. Your team's culture will reflect the sum of the decisions and actions you take or don’t take.
Design the things people experience daily and design them with intention.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment to let me know if you'd like templates for any of the meetings mentioned above!