Do operating rhythms drive company culture?

Transcript

Kelvin Yap:
So my hot take is culture does not exist without operating rhythms as your guardrails.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Well, I’ve got an even hotter take, Kelvin. I would say that culture doesn’t exist at the company level at all.

Kelvin Yap:
Wow.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Welcome to Work Check, an original podcast from Atlassian, makers of teamwork software like Jira, Confluence and Trello. I’m your host, Christine Dela Rosa. Each episode, we bring on two debaters to help us decide which workplace practices are helpful, and which are just hype.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Today, we’re talking about the rhythms of our workplaces and whether those habits and practices are what build company culture. Debating today is Kelvin Yap! Kelvin, we have you arguing that yes, they do. Have you ever seen this in action?

Kelvin Yap:
Absolutely. Right here at Atlassian in fact. And that’s why Marshall doesn’t stand a chance.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Speaking of…arguing the opposite, we have Marshall Walker Lee.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Let’s get started Christine. And Kelvin, bless your heart.

Kelvin Yap:
Wait, what?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Oh! That’s Texan for “You don’t stand a chance.”

Kelvin Yap:
I see what you did there.

Christine Dela Rosa:
All right. Can’t wait to get into it. But first, let’s get everyone on the same page on the topic of the debate – a little something we call “operating rhythms.” So operating rhythms are the processes a company uses across all of its departments to communicate or keep operations flowing. Put simply, they’re “the way we do things around here.” We use the word rhythm because it means it’s repeated, it’s consistent. We’re talking about things like your regular weekly, all-hands meetings, the cadence at which you give status updates, the retrospectives you run after a project ends. All the things that keep your business running on budget, on time.

Christine Dela Rosa:
The term comes from Six Sigma, a methodology developed in 1986 by Motorola. An engineer there came up with Six Sigma to cut down on defects in the manufacturing process and reduce variability. And it worked. In 2005, they reported $17 billion in savings, and it was quickly adopted by big players like Honeywell and GE. Ideas from the Six Sigma playbook – like operating rhythms – have caught on outside of manufacturing.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Yet, despite having a huge influence on operations, a lot of companies just see operating rhythms as productivity boosters, and don’t consider how they might impact company culture. So our question is: Do operating rhythms drive company culture? Let’s get into it. Marshall, you’re arguing: no. Start us off for round one.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right. Well, before we dive in Christine, I’d like to request a definition.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay.

Marshall Walker Lee:
What exactly do you mean by culture?

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay, good question. To save you all from an Anthropology 101 lecture, let’s say it’s a collection of attitudes, behaviors and beliefs shared by a group.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay, great. So I’ll start with the most obvious point. Motorola didn’t implement operating rhythms in the hopes of changing their employee attitudes or behaviors or beliefs; They did it to improve the bottom line. And they didn’t report a 17% increase in employee engagement or wellness or psychological safety – they reported $17 billion in additional profit.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Operating rhythms might have an incidental effect on culture – I’ll get to that in a minute – but let’s not pretend that that’s their purpose. It’s just faster if all the cogs, or (cough) creative unique individuals in your organization do things in the exact same way. The official council for Six Sigma certification describes it as, “A set of business tools, statistical theory and quality control knowledge that helps improve business procedures.” Now, no matter how many times I reread that definition, I promise you will not find the word culture in it.

Kelvin Yap:
That’s because you’re not trying hard enough.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Okay Kelvin. Well, let me bring out my first guest. I’m excited to introduce Tom Nolan, a principal consultant with LinkedIn’s People Science team. He spent the last 20 years researching how workplace practices drive employee engagement. And one of the most common mistakes that he sees is managers and other leaders trying to engineer culture from the top down.

Tom Nolan:
Many of those leaders, in my experience, feel that people-related issues should or could be treated very similarly to how operational and production opportunities are addressed. People, they’re a little messier than widgets or uptime for a machine. You can’t use the same template for that approach.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Tom has seen significantly better outcomes when leaders take a more human-centric approach to culture building. I mean, culture is about people. It’s a complex and emergent phenomenon. You can’t mandate it. That’s like trying to forge a friendship by giving two random strangers a script to read. You can’t replace teamwork and trust with stand-ups and retros.

Christine Dela Rosa:
But just because the purpose isn’t culture building doesn’t mean operating rhythms don’t still have a huge impact. It’s like, let’s say that I realized my cholesterol is high, and so I improve my diet and exercise, which happens to also improve my mood. Just because improving my mood wasn’t the original goal doesn’t mean that that change didn’t also have a big impact.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Well, sure. But by that logic, you could argue you that anything drives culture. I mean, the art on the walls, the food in the fridge, the orientation of the desks. None of those are intended to drive culture, but they might have an impact on it, just like your diet impacted your mood. But to really take root and to scale across entire organizations, culture building has to be intentional. You can’t have accidental culture that’s a byproduct of operational tools.

Kelvin Yap:
See, I disagree, Marshall. The art, the food, the desks…those things do influence culture by driving the way people congregate in the lunch room or even how they work together. That’s how culture is impacted at a company level. So I think you can operationalize culture.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right Kelvin, I want to hear your full response. So I cede the floor. Your turn.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Excuse me! Who’s the moderator here? But really, what Marshall said.

Kelvin Yap:
So I see operating rhythms as the building blocks of culture. It’s not about top down enforcement. It’s really about teams embracing practices that align with their values. When those practices become infectious and spread to other teams, they become rituals. And that’s how you scale culture that’s both cohesive and sustainable. Meet my guest, Jonathan Nolen.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Another Nolan? Touché, Kelvin.

Kelvin Yap:
No relation to your guest, Tom Nolan. Jonathan Nolen is the VP of Engineering and Product at LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform. To Jonathan, operating rhythms are about helping the company live the values that are central to their culture.

Jonathan Nolen:
So one of our key operating principles is you do what you said you were going to do. Did you do what you said you were going to do last week? Did you do what you said you were going to do last month? And so everything from our squad level meetings, to our team meeting on every Monday, to our monthly check-ins, to our quarterly goal initiative reviews, all those things are sort of asking that fundamental question of, “Did I follow through on my commitments?”

Kelvin Yap:
So in that case, the macro value is accountability, and then the operating rhythms are how they enact that value at the micro level. Monthly check-ins, reviews, these things seem operational, right?

Christine Dela Rosa:
Right.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Yeah.

Kelvin Yap:
It’s not the squishy stuff we think about when we hear culture building, but all those little operational rhythms stack up to create the larger culture.

Jonathan Nolen:
Culture is far more than just the relationships. There is a difference between a group of nine friends and a group of nine people on a baseball team. We have a shared mission together and working towards that mission requires us to have this shared understanding of where we are and where we’re going, and how we want to get there.

Kelvin Yap:
So rhythms are the way your company walks the talk, living those high-level values in the day to day.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay. That ends round one. So I hear both sides, I hear both of you, but I think you can really change the way you think and feel through actions. So this round, I’m going with Kelvin on the pro side!

Marshall Walker Lee:
Another victory for the robots.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Marshall, I can feel that counterpoint coming, so let’s have you start off round two.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right. Shake it off. Here we go. So Christine, I know that you like to have a lot of freedom at work. Is that right?

Christine Dela Rosa:
Sure. I mean, don’t we all?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Precisely. We all have different ways of approaching our work, as individuals but also as teams. And when operating rhythms are standardized at the company level, high performing team members like yourself, Christine-

Christine Dela Rosa:
Thank you.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Are forced to conform to rigid structures, and that can stifle creativity and motivation. And even worse, it can create what I call…Dark Rhythms. Dark rhythms are patterns of behavior that are little more than empty performances meant to check the boxes of operating rhythms. Now, we’ve all experienced this. This is when you go to a one-on-one or a scrum or a stand-up where everybody is just going through the motions, waiting for the meeting to end. It’s demoralizing.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Wait! Are you taking it to the extreme and saying we shouldn’t adopt any practices at scale? Because personal autonomy is more important?

Marshall Walker Lee:
No, not at all. I’m saying there needs to be a balance between processes and real, on the ground culture. Let me bring in my next guess. This is Erik Gonzalez-Mulé. He’s an associate professor of organizational behavior and HR management at Indiana University. And he researches autonomy in the workplace. A recent study of his that relates to what we’re talking about today was called “Worked to Death: The Relationships of Job Demands and Job Control with Mortality.”

Kelvin Yap:
Wow!

Dr. Erik Gonzalez-Mulé:
So through a couple of studies, we’ve shown that people in jobs that are highly demanding, but don’t have a lot of autonomy, that kind of combination, were much more likely to be depressed and were more likely to have poor physical health. And that then translates to a higher likelihood of death later on.

Christine Dela Rosa:
So higher stress plus low autonomy equals…

Marshall Walker Lee:
Higher mortality.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Whoa!

Marshall Walker Lee:
Yeah, I’ll admit it. It sounds a bit dramatic, but that’s because it is. There are very real consequences to hyper controlling people’s work environments.

Dr. Erik Gonzalez-Mulé:
At first, you’re just like, “Oh my gosh! You mean I can die because my work doesn’t have a lot of autonomy on it?” Having stressful work without the resources to deal with it essentially kicks off this process of wear and tear over time.

Marshall Walker Lee:
And one great way to avoid that wear and tear is by giving employees a bit of trust to get their work done however they see fit. Let them use their discretion to set up the systems that work for them and their teams, rather than implementing rhythms that take away their sense of control at work.

Marshall Walker Lee:
A culture is made up of individuals. And if we improve the health and the happiness of individuals by giving them more agency, that’s going to drive culture. When operating rhythms become too controlling, it gets toxic. We have an environment of micromanagement.

Kelvin Yap:
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying operating rhythms drive culture?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Definitely not, Kelvin. I am saying they can derail culture. They can only drive it off a cliff.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Okay. Gentlemen, let’s pause on the semantics and channel that energy into the next point. Kelvin, finish up round two for us.

Kelvin Yap:
Great. So Marshall, I’ll grant you overreaching operating rhythms can harm wellbeing and culture. But having no operating rhythms is not the answer. To make my case, I brought in an expert in wellbeing…a doctor.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Whoa!

Kelvin Yap:
Meet Dr. Tina Shah. She’s not only a practicing pulmonary and ICU physician, she’s also an operation scientist, meaning she studies the connection between operations and health. And in particular, she looks at burnout in healthcare workers.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Topical.

Kelvin Yap:
Oh, yeah. So Dr. Shah explained how having efficient rhythms set up is actually key to avoiding burnout. She shared an example of operating rhythms driving the culture in a doctor’s office.

Dr. Tina Shah:
If you don’t have set expectations of who does what for that entire process – from the patient walking into the office, to having the information, and then walking out of the office – you can imagine what kind of mayhem it brings, and what kind of discord it brings in the team, and that will contribute to burnout too.

Kelvin Yap:
Operating rhythms in that example is simple, setting expectations about who does what and when. Dr. Shah compared a team of healthcare workers to a team of elite track and field athletes. They know exactly how to do their job, but operating rhythms set who runs which leg of the relay and who hands the baton off and when. Without operating rhythms, things can go sideways.

Dr. Tina Shah:
And we then throw them into a healthcare environment that almost feels like we’ve put them on the track and they’re supposed to run the relay, but they have shackles on their legs. And so when you are burnt out and you don’t have this culture of wellness, this is where the baton gets dropped.

Kelvin Yap:
No one feels good about a workplace culture that is chaotic and unstable, causing you to drop batons. Setting a rhythm means employees don’t have to constantly think about operations, and the rhythm can become second nature, like your heartbeat. Then you can spend your conscious energy focused on actually doing your job. So Marshall, setting a rhythm doesn’t have to be constricting. It can actually be a stable structure that creates, as Dr. Shah says, a culture of wellness.

Christine Dela Rosa:
I really like the relay metaphor. It’s great because if batons get dropped in the healthcare system, yeah, that’s bad for the healthcare workers, which ripples out to their peers, and in turn, it’s actually really bad for the patients too.

Kelvin Yap:
I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Point for me. Okay. This round is really about that keyword wellness. So are operating rhythms taking agency away from employees and harming their health? Or are operating rhythms just setting expectations so everyone knows where they fit in the relay? For this round, I’m awarding the side that genuinely surprised me. That’s you, Marshall!

Marshall Walker Lee:
Oh, yay! Take that Six Sigma.

Kelvin Yap:
Oh Marshall, Marshall, Marshall.

Christine Dela Rosa:
All right. This is your final round, debaters. Marshall, why don’t you start us off?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Great. So I would like to return to my guest, Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, the autonomy researcher, who made a point that really resonated with me.

Dr. Erik Gonzalez-Mulé:
Operating rhythms are, to me, not really going to drive culture so much as just be kind of a reflection of it.

Marshall Walker Lee:
I think this point kind of blows up the whole debate question. Rhythms aren’t a driver; They’re a mirror. If a company has a ton of operating rhythms, a lot of structure, that might be a symptom of a lack of trust, and more importantly, a symptom of a lack of curiosity. If we want to continuously improve our work, we need to have the flexibility to rapidly experiment with new ways of working. As the agile manifesto says, we need to put people over processes, period.

Marshall Walker Lee:
In my opinion, culture is always, always, always upstream from operating rhythms. And here’s a thought experiment to prove it. If you believe that operating rhythms drive culture, then theoretically, you should be able to implement the same set of rules and ceremonies at any company, any team, and have a similar effect on the culture, regardless of factors like the hiring practices, diversity and inclusion, compensation, values, geography. Does anybody really believe that that’s true?

Kelvin Yap:
If it helps me win this debate, then yeah, I do.

Marshall Walker Lee:
All right. So then let’s ask, “what really does drive culture?” I mentioned before that Tom Nolan, my guest from LinkedIn’s people team, does research into employee engagement. How much does an employee emotionally buy into their company and its goals? And Tom’s research shows that there’s really just one factor that has an outsized impact on employee engagement.

Tom Nolan:
70% of the variance in a person’s engagement level can be attributed to their manager.

Christine Dela Rosa:
70%.

Marshall Walker Lee:
70%. And Tom said that often he’ll be working with a client, looking over their employee feedback from the previous months, and he’ll notice some huge spike in improvement at some specific time. And when he asks about it, here’s what he hears.

Tom Nolan:
Inevitably, the response is something along the lines of, “Oh! So and so took over responsibility for that area three months ago, and he or she is a great leader. So absolutely no one here is surprised by those results.” And I’ll dig a little bit to find out what kind of operational changes may have been put in place by that new leader. And almost always the response I receive back is, none.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Tom has seen this dozens of times. A new manager running the exact same operational playbook as the leader they replaced has an enormous positive impact on culture and employee experience. Same operating rhythms, entirely different culture.

Tom Nolan:
In recent research, we saw where employees who recommend their manager are two times more likely to feel their company has a great culture when compared to those who wouldn’t recommend their manager. People trump process. And so the best designed processes can either be enhanced by or potentially undone by people’s activities and behaviors on it.

Marshall Walker Lee:
And I’d like to take this one step further and propose something a little bit radical. You ready?

Christine Dela Rosa:
Ready.

Kelvin Yap:
I think so.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Company culture does not exist.

Kelvin Yap:
Wow!

Christine Dela Rosa:
What?

Marshall Walker Lee:
Yeah. It only exists at the team level. And I don’t mean team in some metaphorical sense. I mean the group of people you work with directly. Here’s Tom.

Tom Nolan:
One of the quotes that drove a lot of our research initially is “a company has as many cultures as they do managers or teams.”

Marshall Walker Lee:
I think we’ve all experienced how dramatically different the culture can be from one team to another within an organization. The bottom line is that operating rhythms don’t drive the culture, the people do.

Christine Dela Rosa:
As they say, one bad apple spoils the bunch.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Exactly.

Christine Dela Rosa:
I mean, I’ve never actually seen apples do that in real life, but I have seen how one personality, especially if they’re managing, can totally change a team culture. Moment of truth, Kelvin. What’s your final point?

Kelvin Yap:
Marshall, trust me, I totally hear you on the manager point. But staffing is complicated. You have to consider the chemistry between a manager and the people on a team. It’s not as simple as ditching a manager whose team culture is weak and slotting a new manager into their place. It’s much quicker to change up the way those people work together instead.

Kelvin Yap:
You mentioned engagement before. Sure, managers have a big impact. But think about it. Without an operating rhythm, like weekly meetings or quarterly retrospectives as a forcing function, that impact is severely diminished – especially now that we’re all working from home and it’s harder to maintain, let alone improve, culture.

Christine Dela Rosa:
For sure.

Kelvin Yap:
You all know I’m a bit of an extrovert. But even I sometimes feel uncomfortable calling up a group of colleagues to get their help with a problem, even if I really need it. During the pandemic, my guest, Dr. Shah, helped a healthcare company shift to telemedicine, and she set up a weekly, “all hands on deck” call to keep everyone on track.

Dr. Tina Shah:
And we started to notice that people were showing up in the hundreds. And that only happens when you’re engaged and you see high value. We saw doctors asking, throwing out questions to the field about, “How did you guys do this? Did you find FaceTime better or did you find Zoom better to get in touch with your patients when you were doing video chats?” And other doctors would answer the question before I could even get to it.

Kelvin Yap:
It gave the doctors a chance to connect, to give input and problem solve together. In this case, people weren’t mandated to dial in, but they still chose to. It was a formalized signal that leadership is there to support and to listen for that hour.

Dr. Tina Shah:
Now let’s take the opposite. Let’s say you didn’t have weekly huddles. So therefore, you may have had less opportunity where the employee gets to give input or gets to raise a concern about something they see as a roadblock to them being able to achieve their deliverable.

Dr. Tina Shah:
You can see how this goes. When you don’t have spaces and places for that, you start turning into a toxic workplace environment where the employees will write on their exit survey, “My boss doesn’t listen to me. I don’t feel heard. I don’t feel safe.” So having a routine where you actually give people a voice is mission critical and directly related, in my opinion, to workplace culture.

Christine Dela Rosa:
That tracks for me. Without rhythms, it might be hard to follow through on the culture a company says it has, but might not actually put into practice. For example, even when I’ve had leaders who say they have an open door policy, I don’t usually think I can just waltz in whenever anything’s on my mind. It helps me to know I have explicit permission to do something at a certain time, like a green arrow at a stoplight, you know?

Kelvin Yap:
Yes. And if something as simple as an AMA with leaders or office hours with a team lead can increase engagement as Dr. Shah has seen – during a global pandemic – I’d call that a win…for me…in this debate.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Kelvin, Kelvin, Kelvin. I want to jump in here to point out that this cuts both ways. As you know Kelvin, here at Atlassian, we’ve had to reduce the frequency of some of our own operational ceremonies like our Global Town Hall, because all these events and processes were actually having a negative impact on engagement.

Kelvin Yap:
I agree. But operating rhythms aren’t set in stone. In that context, it made sense for us to change the rhythm and move from sync to async. So I actually see it as a positive.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Oh, that fair. There’s definitely a balance to strike. But let’s wrap this up. This final round came down to the question: are operating rhythms the silver bullet for employee engagement? Or are there other forces playing a larger role here? Marshall, you brought up points that I think a lot of companies forget. Like a manager can actually make or break a team dynamic. And Kelvin, your counterpoints really spoke to me. Repeated, consistent behaviors, they can have a huge impact. And if they open up space for communication, all the better. So I’m awarding this round and the whole debate…to Kelvin!

Marshall Walker Lee:
Air horns?

Kelvin Yap:
Oh, only the best of you, Marshall!

Christine Dela Rosa:
So culture building is admittedly a gray area with a ton of factors at play. But if you’re looking to develop a healthy, engaged and efficient culture, operating rhythms are one of the best levers you can pull on. But remember, you can’t just apply the logic of productivity to culture. Humans are not cogs in a machine. Don’t apply operating rhythms that are too controlling. Sacrificing your employees’ autonomy is only going to have negative effects on your culture. And finally, remember that culture is made up of people. Invest in managers who can lead and coach. Or if you’re a manager, constantly evaluate and evolve your team’s operating rhythms.

Christine Dela Rosa:
That’s all for our episode on operating rhythms. Thank you Kelvin and Marshall for joining us today.

Kelvin Yap:
Thanks Christine.

Marshall Walker Lee:
Hasta la vista.

Christine Dela Rosa:
For the transcript and recap, visit Work Life at atlassian.com/blog. If you’re enjoying the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you’re listening. Since this is the last episode of season one, just wanted to give a big thank you to the entire Work Check team: debaters Marshall Walker Lee, Dominique Ward, Shannon Winter and Kelvin Yap. Artwork by Joey Sabio. Story support from Melanie Duong.

Christine Dela Rosa:
Work Check is produced by the team at Pacific Content, including Pippa Johnstone, Annie Rueter and Karen Burgess, with sound design by Robyn Edgar. Until we’re back next season, I’m Christine Dela Rosa, and this is Work Check, an original podcast from Atlassian.