Melissa Daimler, Chief Learning Officer of Udemy, the online learning platform, and author of the new book 'ReCulturing', joins Cheddar to discuss lessons she learned from trying to change WeWork's company culture before it crashed and why it's vital for leaders to adapt their company cultures to attract, maintain, and maximize top talent in the workforce.

On the Job

'Re-Culturing' In The Workplace

Okay, well whether they're bringing people back to the office, going fully remote or figuring out what hybrid looks like every company should be thinking about how to revamp their culture right now and joining me is Melissa Daimler, chief learning officer at you Demi and author of the new book re culturing, design your company culture to connect to a strategy and purpose for lasting success Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show and there's a lot of buzz around the show. We crashed as well. That's about the rise and fall of. We work, you are a former we work executive and even try to fix this company's culture before it really imploded. What lessons do you take away from that on building a more connected workplace culture. I I took a number of lessons, mostly they were validated from, from what I already knew. Um one is just that our organizations, our systems, you know, we have our our purpose and our strategy and our culture and they need to constantly be reconnected secondly, culture is a verb, not a noun, it is something that we do not a place that we go and that also needs to continue to be looked at on an ongoing basis versus just this kind of one off HR initiative. And lastly, I think our own personal culture and how we develop ourselves is really important to building an organizational culture. I think that's a really good point. So I know you kind of talked about what goes into defining the term culture, why is it so important for companies to be successful Culture is something that everybody is talking about, as you said right now, I think the biggest question I'm getting right now is how do we get our culture back? And I think that is the wrong question, because that assumes that everybody's trying to get employees coming back to work and again, culture is not what at the, at the office, I think there's a lot of great things we had at the office, we had free food, we have ping pong tables um but culture is more about how we work with each other. It is going beyond those values that you see on the walls uh you know, we work had some really beautiful neon lit values um but it's more about the next layer of what are those behaviors that those values exemplified if I were to see you um having a great day, what would you be doing, what would be we be expecting from you? Um It's also about those processes, so we talk a lot about our hiring, our onboarding are promoting and recognizing and embedding those behaviors into how we work is key to a culture. So it's interesting because I know this idea that you lay out of re culturing, I want you to talk to me about what it is and why companies should take a good consideration of implementing it. Sure, yeah, I mean we have, I was researching this book and we've been talking about culture for over 70 years now as a concept and as a practitioner I got so frustrated with their weren't really good definitions out there. Um it was a very nebulous thing, like it's a personality of a of a company or it's what motivates people, it's what makes you happy. And I think there are real ways to design and operationalize the culture. Again, if you look at it within the context of something that you can control. So culture to me is three things. It is our our behaviors, so how we work with each other, so think of it as our playbook for how to work. Um second it's embedding those behaviors into those processes that I that I shared, so how we hire, how we promote feedback, all those things that you know when those leaders when when we say oh feedback is so hard or trying to figure out how to promote people. It's because we haven't really defined what those behaviors are that we expect from people. And then lastly our practices, this is what we do on a everyday basis, you know how we meet with each other, how we communicate, how we connect with each other, all of these complement and define our culture and you know, I think that culture is something that happens every day whether by design or default, so we might as well design it melissa for leaders looking to change their own workplace culture. What's the best way to start. I think the best way is to look beyond your values. Everybody has a nice most people have a nice list of values that they throw on the website, but you need to go one step further and think about if I were to exemplify that value of innovation or that value of teamwork, what would that look like? Would we be asking more questions? Would we be listening to each other differently? Really defining behaviorally what that looks like in our organization? How is your company you to meet providing opportunities for people to continue to learn and develop their own leadership abilities? I think, you know, me walks, its talk, I mean we're obviously a learning organization, one of our key values is always learning, we're looking at doing that with our own employees, we just had a leadership development experience last week and we're always looking at how to learn not just formally but informally on that everyday basis, so encouraging each other to identify what each of us are, are developing what skills are we trying to learn and then being able to work together to to help build those skills. So we do the same with with many companies really defining what it is they're trying to build in terms of their learning organizations as such. Good input. That's melissa daimler, Chief learning officer at, you know, me and author of the new book re culturing, design your company culture to connect with strategy and purpose for lasting success.