Not where you work but how you work: offering a meaningful work experience

We live in times when traditional models have crumbled, and organizational paradigms are evolving profoundly and continuously. 2020-2021 has been a watershed in terms of working methods, people’s expectations and managerial practices. And it has had lasting effects.

To regain this meaning, of all the organizational levers available, there is one that, if well understood and activated, has the power to generate lasting value, attractiveness and satisfying performance: culture.

For a long time, culture has been seen as a soft topic, a nice-to-have at the bottom of the list of more pressing priorities. A topic considered almost exclusively for the HR function, suitable for inspirational presentations but of very little use in truly impacting on business results. The focus was on numbers, processes, KPIs.

Culture? Nice, but not measurable. Not strategic. Not urgent.

Let’s debunk a few myths.

Nowadays, even the numbers tell us so.

In a time of job-hopping and post-retention where people build fluid career paths, driven no longer by loyalty to an organization but by loyalty to themselves, personal interests and an individual search for meaning retaining talent is an outdated and anachronistic idea. Rather, organizations should focus on attracting and valuing it when it is most useful and generative for both.

In this context, culture is a concrete and measurable organizational lever and generates fertile ground for providing a meaningful and transformative work experience.

Research from this year shows that there is no significant discrepancy between the in-presence model and the hybrid or remote model with respect to employees’ evaluation of collaboration, connection, innovation mentorship and training.

As an organization, therefore, it no longer makes sense to question only where one works. The key questions are how and why one works.

It is no longer a question of spaces, but of places. In English, the distinction is clear: from space – physical, tangible, traversable – we have moved to place, a relational and symbolic space that generates meaning, motivation and a sense of belonging.

Culture thus becomes the real glue of the organization: it can hold people, teams, processes and goals together by transcending the physical boundaries of space and ensuring harmonious and sustainable organizational functioning.

By acting on three integrated dimensions:

• Individual: how I interpret my role, make decisions, relate to work
• Social: how we collaborate, communicate, identify ourselves as a group
• Environmental: how we inhabit and use spaces, physical and digital

Culture provides direction and acts as the organization’s autopilot, defining how it thinks, acts, and performs collectively. It nurtures the experience of meaning, generates cohesion, and makes strategies effectively actionable.

There is no magic formula or good, bad or perfect culture that applies to every organization.

Every cultural intervention is a work of precision, to be calibrated to the specific context, identity and goals of the organization. The levers to be activated to bring about change in people’s ways of thinking and operating and, therefore, of their overall work experience are multiple, as are the dimensions to be considered: individual, social, environmental.

Culture is not to be forced; it is to be empowered. And its change requires listening, consistency and intentional planning. To intervene in culture is, after all, to act on the invisible to make it tangible and generative.

To act on culture, we must first understand it. In fact, understand them.

Often multiple sub-cultures coexist in an organization: groups of people within it orchestrate their behaviors based on shared sets of values and beliefs, and the coexistence of multiple ways of thinking and working, while a source of richness and innovation, can have negative impacts on the organization’s ability to follow its strategy and achieve expected results.

First and foremost, it is therefore crucial to decode how people think, act, decide, and collaborate, analyzing individual, social, and environmental dynamics to identify levers, barriers, and areas of risk.

ORIENT – Giving intentional shape to cultural evolution

This happens spontaneously, chaotically, and sometimes in a dysfunctional way. Instead, to orient it means to knowledgeably guide the operation of the organization in a consistent way with the identity of the company and its goals.

This does not merely translate into a list of values on the manifesto, which is the concise and visual emanation of an articulated thought about them, but implies having to translate them into concrete daily behaviors, rituals and practices that can be observed and evaluated in their consistency with strategic intent.

Designing a cultural intervention means (re)designing a coherent system that guides organizational action at the systemic level and at the same time enhances the individual’s dimension of individual attitudes, peculiarities and potential.

ACTIVATE – Move from declaration to action

In order for a culture not to remain simply a statement, it must be put into action in behaviors, relational dynamics, and decision-making effectiveness with concrete initiatives that affect the way people work, collaborate, and decide.

Therefore, we accompany organizations through real cultural activation and change management plans: experiences, artifacts, rituals, symbols, training, internal communication, new processes, and tools that support the desired change.

Culture, therefore, becomes the key driver that also permeates the spatial dimension and around which to redesign an effective, meaningful and satisfying work experience for people.