WTF are microcultures? (and why they are important in workplaces today)
Large corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees, multiple levels, departments and operations spanning across regions might be missing the point when trying to foster one single cohesive, company-wide culture.
They should instead embrace microcultures that pop up when a cohort of employees at a larger organization develop their own standards, values and way of doing things, according to Deloitte research published this week.
As hybrid work takes over as the most popular working arrangement, microcultures and granting more autonomy for certain groups based on functions and geographies are essential for effective transitions to new ways of working, experts say.
They’re not entirely new, but they’re now a bigger focus for organizations that have grown larger and have more dispersed workforces. Ultimately, organizations that have embraced microcultures rather than having their entire workforce follow a rigid, monolithic corporate structure are more likely to achieve positive human outcomes and business outcomes, according to the Deloitte report which surveyed over 19,000 global business and human resources leaders.
But what does a microculture actually look like?
What does a microculture look like?
Microcultures can develop based on some factors like job function and location. “Think of the finance shop, vs. the CIO shop, vs. the HR shop,” said John Forsythe, managing director at Deloitte. Subtle differences in how work happens there are often necessary because the work that they do is different,” he said.
And certain offices might have their own way of doing things depending on local norms in that city. “A New York City office vs. a Tokyo office – the culture is going to be different there,” he said.
Some questions that can help determine how a specific microculture’s values and norms shift from others in the organization include: “Are we collaborative, or do we work independently? Are we focused on customer needs? Are we focused on internal process consistency? Do we share information, or do we keep it to ourselves? Is the place that we work inclusive of diverse thinking, or is everyone toeing the same line?” he said.
One example from Deloitte’s report looks like this: Google Cloud is a business-to-business company, while the rest of Google works directly with consumers. Google Cloud’s people team saw a need for a unique microculture reinforcing customer empathy and embedded it into the performance review process. In performance reviews, everyone at Google is assessed on their teamwork contributions, but only those on Google Cloud are assessed on customer empathy tenets, according to the report.
Where does hybrid work come in?
One major thing employers have gotten wrong with return-to-office transitions is explaining their rationale for making such changes in a way that workers accept. CEOs and other executives have touted goals around collaboration and innovation they say can only happen in person, yet determining exactly what kind of work needs to be done together regularly is more often determined by individual teams. Many clients still ask what hybrid work really should look like, Forsythe said. Ideally there will be broad, company-wide parameters, but also more flexibility and autonomy given to teams to work in a way that suits their specific culture and needs best. “Any strategy that doesn’t consider its culture is probably doomed to fail,” he said.
Embracing microcultures and allowing autonomy within teams on hybrid work helps workers better accept justifications and makes reasoning more relatable as it more closely considers their duties and goals more specifically, rather than at an organization-wide level. Employees who contributed to their teams’ hybrid work arrangements said they felt their needs were considered and displayed higher engagement and work performance, according to recent research from Gartner.
“You can make sure that people feel inclusive at the team level, and not feel lost in a large conglomerate or corporation,” Forsythe said.
Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, says embracing microcultures can help drive “employee activation”, which happens when a group changes the employee experience by tailoring expectations to their specific ways of working.
“The benefit of a microculture is that a group can affect changes without getting approval from the whole company,” he said. And “most of the best ideas on how to serve customers, how to be more productive, how to improve product quality, happen where the work is taking place — not in some corporate headquarters by some HR department,” he said.
To be sure, employers should still ensure any shifts in values across specific microcultures don’t stray too far from a company’s overarching mission. “Danger happens when you’ve got misalignment between goals and objectives and the culture and behaviors that exist there,” Forsythe said.
But ultimately, “In today’s environment, being more agile and adaptable to a fast-changing customer business, technological workforce landscape, that agility is much more likely to be done at the micro-level than the organizational,” he said.
“It’s really hard to move large corporations, but it’s easier to move different functions, units, teams, within that to take advantage of a new business opportunity. I think that increased need for agility is one of the drivers of micro cultures.”