About company culture

And the almost impossible

task to control it
Three stories from my life journey to explain
the new ways of influencing culture !
The CEO request
More than anything, CEOs want HR to
influence company culture
Earlier in my career, the CEO of
a company I worked for sat down
with me and said: Joris, we need
our culture to change! We need
more urgency! We need people to
take ownership and move things
forward faster.
“Joris - will you fix that for us?”
I was young and naive back then
so I said - “sure”.The day after, I
was thinking - how the hell am I
going to do that? There’s
absolutely no way!
If you are like most folks who run HR,
you don’t want to burn your hands on
being branded ‘responsible’ for
company culture. Cause - isn’t culture
everyone’s responsibility?
The reality is most CEOs and company
leaders care less about traditional HR
metrics - they’ll always worry most
about their company culture. Not
about things like performance reviews,
hiring, or salary benchmarks.
Because these company leaders watch
their culture morph over time,
sometimes into something they don’t
want, yet feel powerless to stop.
And their anxiety makes sense. There’s
many examples of culture failing
companies. Company culture may be
great now. But without work it doesn’t
last.
Lehman Brothers was famous for its culture
that put service to clients and value creation
first. Above profits and growth second. In the
late 60s and 70s behaviors changed.
Leadership was unable to stop a culture of
increasing risk taking. It ultimately brought
this mighty business on its knees.

Uber’s culture was always problematic, but

became out of control problematic after a few
years of hypergrowth.
Two important observations
1. Both these companies had company values.

2. Both were filled with smart, talented people

with good intentions and aspirations.
Cultural differences
In order to change culture you need
influence behaviors
In Holland, folks keep different
friendship groups quite
separated. You may have a group
of friends from school. From your
sports team. From your
neighbourhood. You don’t really
have a culture of mixing friends.
So when you throw, for example,
a dinner party, you’ll tend to see
the same faces a lot.
And I only noticed this when I
moved to Australia - where the
culture is quite different. Folks
tend to mingle friendship groups
all the time. It means you are
much more likely to meet with all
sorts of different people from
different backgrounds at a party
in Australia.
So are people in Holland wired
differently? I don’t think so - it has
more to do with expectations and
behaviors.
In Holland, when you invite someone
to a dinner party, the host generally
provides the food and drinks. The
invited guests just rock up. In
Australia, the guest often brings along
their own drinks and even a dish.
Especially to a more casual bbq.
Those behavioral expectations
have unintended consequences
though.
In Holland I would be a bit rude to
invite your mate to someone’s dinner
party. It would put more pressure on
my host. But I found it much easier in
Australia. Everyone brings along their
own stuff the host would generally say
- sure bring them along!
 A quantifiable way to
describe culture:

“Two thirds of the team doing something

Two thirds of the time”
In order to shape company culture,
you need to change behaviors.
Not in a manipulative way. Nor in a
control and command way.
We have to give people the tools and
motivation to behave in a way that
makes them the best versions of
themselves.
I believe 99.9% of people want to be
good - But even though we humans
are good - we do things poorly all the
time. We gossip. We forget. We
sometimes manage people poorly. We
complain too much. We’ve all been
guilty of some such behaviors.
In aggregate - those poor behaviors
can be the downfall of company
culture.
Company culture can be enforced through
rules from the top. Though effective and
perhaps scalable, it will likely stifle
innovation and piss people off.
So the question is, if there are certain
behaviors you value and want to see scale
with your company as you grow - how do
leaders and people teams do that without
enforcing rules?
And the job is endlessly harder at scale
Take Shopify, one of Pyn’s customers. Only
5 years ago, they counted 300 people. Now
they crossed 10 000 employees.
How will fast growth companies like
Shopify ensure that important behaviors we
How will you reach
see now will still be visible when our team each person, especially
grows to 1000 or 10000 people.
as you scale?
Especially with remote work that’s hard
because you will need to find different way
to communicate or model behaviors
Timely nudges
Now, new methods and technology allow
is to proactively steer company culture
When my son Jasper was born,
Facebook knew that something
important in my life journey has
occurred. They also knew that I lived in
NYC. They knew I was male. My age.
Probably a lot more… few weeks later,
boom, magic! I receive ads for these
really cute baby headphones - perfectly
targeted - and perfectly timed.
And they moved me to act!
I bought the headphones and we loved
them! - we brought Jasper to many
concerts!
And then I was thinking of the ways my
HR team had been communicating
with employees - it was so much less
targeted. Less timed.
So, it’s not surprising that it is hard to
motivate folks to do something a
certain way.
And I thought… why don’t we use the
data that we have on people when
communicating with them. Yet, we
have all that data sitting there
dormantly in systems,
And if you want to move someone to
do something - it’s all about context,
relevance and timing.
It’s just one example of how we can
apply techniques from outside HR to
ensure we influence folks behaving in
a way that positively impacts culture.
And, often for the first time, we can
actually start doing that.
So what are ways to influence
behaviours of employees, even in
large companies, without enforcing
rules
Three ways
1. Ease
By making it super easy to do something or act a
certain way. Easier to do it - than not to.

We put a lot of focus on explaining why we want

people to do something that we forget about
making really easy.

Remove any friction and make it easier to do

something right then to do it any other way
If you want a culture of feedback, and
would like performance feedback to
improve, you may be well served with
this Mad libs style template for perf
review used by Medium and Pinterest.

By filling in the blanks people didn’t

only structure your feedback better
and have your template for delivering
the feedback handy.
Or, like in this example, if you want to
encourage a culture of great
reintegration in the workplace after
extended leave, you can make it really
easy to put together a return to work
plan.

And make it even easier for a manager

to take the first step - to, within the
flow of work, send a pre-populated
meeting invite to the returning parent
2. Context
Putting a message in the person’s own
contextual setting will make them
more likely to act.
The UK Behavioural Insights
Team wanted to draw the
attention of those who failed to
pay road tax.

When letters included both the

person’s name and a picture of
their vehicle, payment rose
from 40 to 49%.
We have a lot of data about our
employees.

So, instead of sending the same

message to all new managers, use that
data to send a more relevant and
personal message.
3. Timely
People are much more likely to do something
when someone I’m actually experiencing
something.
It’s much easier to instill certain manager
behaviors in the weeks following a promotion
to manager. It’s a lot easier to help a manager
show their people care if you send the
manager a nudge just before someone’s
anniversary.

It’s a lot easier to follow a script on how to

manage difficult conversation if it’s send just
before a difficult conversation is about to take
place.

Or, like this example - it;’s easier to encourage

people to adjust their management style if
they receive this message a day after they were
promoted to become a manager of managers.
Throughout the employee journey, there are
certain moments where behaviors can have an
outsized impact on the culture you want to
create or reinforce.
- Life moments: birth of child or a return from
long term illness
- Transitions moments : moving teams or
promotions
- Crisis moments: layoffs or a security break
- Cyclical moments: rituals around salary
reviews or goal setting
- Organizational moments : moving to remote
or a reorg
Guiding behaviors during those moments is
crucial
The problem was that in all my years, when
managing HR at Atlassian and Squarespace,
those powerful tools marketing has been using
for years is just not available when managing
communications to employees.
But that has started to shift. You see more
tools that apply these techniques in an
organisational setting.
Whether it’s large systems like ServiceNow or
new tools like Pyn, which I co-founded two
year ago.
These new tools help companies
automatically send contextual information to
target employees when they experience
important moments throughout their
employee journey. Hundreds of moments.
Sometimes it more than doubles the
likelihood of employees engaging and shifting
their behavior !
It helps employees act in a way that helps Check out Pyn’s Employee Journey Map to identify important employee moments
them shine and reinforces the culture you
aspire to build. And we avoid becoming the
next Lehman Brothers of Uber
For the first time, technology makes it possible to
shape culture by shaping behavior.