Episode #1: Creating Harmony in the Workplace Through Cultural Transformation

Discover the transformative power of a positive workplace culture with us, Sharon Wilson and Cindy LaCom, as we journey through the corridors of corporate environments to the heart of employee empowerment.  As we unravel the tightly knit issues of subcultures within companies, you'll learn why a valued employee isn't just a happier one but also a more productive and loyal member of the team.

Feel the pulse of today's workforce challenges as we tackle the pervasive issues of burnout and quiet quitting, phenomena that have surged in the wake of a global pandemic. Listen closely as we discuss the invisible yet impactful ripples of a disempowered organizational culture. Our conversation extends a hand to HR professionals, executive directors, managers and employees empowering you with strategies to conduct candid assessments and bridge the gap between HR policies and employee engagement. By the end of our exchange, you'll have ideas about how you might steer your workplace culture toward a thriving ecosystem that not only benefits your organization but also the community at large.

Copyright: https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/reflection/107904

Copyright: https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/reflection/107904

Transcript

Sharon Wilson: 0:33

Welcome everyone to Transformation Talks. The intention of our podcast is to provide tips, strategies and inspiration to transform workplaces, communities and lives. I'm Sharon Wilson and I'm the co-founder and chief mindset and growth officer at Transforming Culture Consultants, and I have with me today our other co-founder, Cindy LaCom, who is our chief impact officer. You'll be hearing from Cindy in a few moments.

Sharon Wilson: 0:58

When Cindy and I first met, you know it was really amazing because she was a professor at the college my daughter was attending and my daughter was in one of her classes and I was so intrigued about Cindy's ability to really engage students and her ideas about creating more empowered workplaces and organizations. So Cindy and I got to talking and we discussed places we had worked and what we saw over the years that were the foundation for having happier, more productive employees, and they really developed into our recently launching Transforming Culture Consultants. And soon Cindy was asked to do workshops for organizations that she had been involved with at a board level for years to support them to improve their workplace culture. And, Cindy, can you share more about your background and some of the things that you've been working with our clients on? It's just been really amazing.

Cindy LaCom: 1:55

Yeah, thanks, sharon, and hello. I would say that for me, I've really been very lucky. I've worked in a primarily very empowered and positive collegial workplace, but there was a bit of a bump and I had a few years where that workplace culture changed and was not empowered. I was actually quite demoralized and came home from a job that I'd loved for two decades, thinking about whether or not I should stay. Things came to a close in a way that was really beyond my doing, but it led me to thinking a lot and, sharon, this is really when you and I met about what I might have done differently, how I might have intervened sooner, what others might have done to change the workplace dynamic, especially at the beginning. And that reflection led me to really think a lot about okay, you're in the thick of it, that's the culture. It's really difficult to even see a way out a lot of the time, but when I started talking with you, sharon, I remember thinking a lot about how might someone from the outside had intervened, how might they have seen the cultural dynamic of my workplace and said, whoa, this is not working, but this might. And that, I think, was a huge impetus for me to work with you to create Transforming Culture Consultants.

Cindy LaCom: 3:18

I also think that my work and my experience teaching gender studies courses was very helpful, because I had a lot of opportunities to facilitate difficult, complex, nuanced and sometimes contentious discussions about topics that people had a very deeply vested interest in, and so I had 30 years of experience with those kinds of conversations. And in the end to that, when I began working with organizations, primarily nonprofit boards, I felt, frankly, uniquely poised to do the work that I was doing to change the culture in those organizations and agencies. So some of the things I've focused on is building a more inclusive culture, and to that end, we've talked about everything from how do you facilitate a difficult conversation. We've talked about the difference between calling in and calling out. We have talked about how implicit bias can impact the way that we interact with others, even if we're not conscious of it. So I think that I've had a lot of really great experiences.

Cindy LaCom: 4:27

I'm preparing to do a training on generational diversity and, as Sharon and I look at our workplace culture, what we understand is that a lot of that miscommunication actually has to do with generational differences, and so a key question, I think more and more organizations and businesses have stated. How do we bridge that divide? How might we more effectively empower all of our workers? So those are some of the things I'm doing, some of the things that I think a lot about, but I think the most important thing about transforming culture consultants that we're really focused on changing our culture, which often demands fairly consistent interaction with staff and employees in an agency or business.

Cindy LaCom: 5:17

So, take it away. I know you've got something to say about this.

Sharon Wilson: 5:20

Well, I mean, one of the things that we talk about is being proactive is really ideal.

Sharon Wilson: 5:26

It's great when you can be proactive in an organization, but it's not always possible and we know that in a single workplace there can be multiple workplace cultures, some really effective and some simply demoralizing, as you talked about, and in fact it may depend on the person you're sitting next to. So I know for me and organizations I've worked in in the past and had my own business before transforming culture consultants for almost 20 years. So I've been out of the place of actually being an employer, being in a workplace culture in that kind of respect. But the thing is is that oftentimes people don't really know what kind of culture that they do have, because you may be in a department where the culture feels very empowered, but there might be someone in another aspect or another department that is in a totally different situation. So it's really about the holistic aspect of the culture and you know, cindy, you can share a little bit about what we are going to be talking about in our podcast here. Ok, thanks.

Cindy LaCom: 6:35

So the name of our business says a lot of what we do transforming culture consultants and our goal really is to work in workplaces work with staff, employers, hr managers to create a more empowered workplace. All of the data tells us that when an employee is happy, when they're respected, when they're listened to, the workplace is more productive. Turnover rates are lower and people tend to stay. We know it costs one and a half times as much to replace someone as it does to keep them. So there's all sorts of reasons. We want to build an empowered workplace culture, one that is filled with idea and power sharing. So we're going to talk a lot about that in our podcast, but today we want to focus on the opposite by asking this very basic question how many of you have worked somewhere where you didn't feel empowered, where you felt disrespected, where you felt excluded? At the end of the day, you packed up your stuff and walked out thinking that you really didn't want to come back to worrying.

Cindy LaCom: 7:40

There are all sorts of ways in which a workplace culture can be disempowered. We want to just talk about a couple of those. I have mentioned the idea of effective or ineffective communication, but I want to say I've worked with a lot of organizations and I actually think that one of the things that can be most damaging is ineffective communication, and I'm thinking of that moment where you and your colleagues say wait a second, what are we doing? What's the new deadline for this project? We're reshelving this project to make room for this other one. How come this wasn't communicated to us before?

Cindy LaCom: 8:18

And so I think even between members of a team say, ineffective communication is a huge problem. I also know I've worked with organizations and agencies where rumor mongering and the gossip mill have undermined a collective capacity to be productive and innovative. Finally, I'm really interested in the ways in which cultural norms evolve and are sustained, and so I'm equally interested in the ways in which certain people are often left out of a cultural norm, whether that's because of what they look like, what they might believe, pace at which they move or perhaps how they communicate. So a key question for me is how do we build a more inclusive culture? And remember that doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with each other. It means that everybody respects the right to have different perspectives, and this is something that we will talk about in future. Podcasts is the idea of burnout in a fairly new phenomenon which is quite quitting, sherry do you?

Cindy LaCom: 9:29

want to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, go for it.

Sharon Wilson: 9:31

Yeah, let's address that, because there's been some big shifts that were in part amped up from the pandemic and one is burnout and quiet quitting and that really has become more of a tag.

Sharon Wilson: 9:42

But quiet quitting can seem to go hand in hand with burnout, where, instead of quitting officially, employees can seem to have a sense of resignation about their abilities to make any real difference in their organizations.

Sharon Wilson: 9:55

They often feel a sense of disempowerment that can impact their work performance and morale, and this really is kind of a phenomenon that has really come out of the pandemic and really has been more highlighted. These challenges are not easily recognized from within the organization, so the key is how to find out what your current culture really is from the employee's perspective. Now, that can usually be best accomplished from an impartial third party. To do an assessment to determine key indicators for both an empowered and a disempowered organizational culture and it's one of the first things we do with a client is to conduct an assessment that can help them to really uncover what are the perceptions of employees, that can really help them to prioritize training resources that will positively impact the workplace culture and goals of the organization. You know, cindy, did you want to share any more about that before I tell people a little bit more about how they can get in touch with us and how we can support them.

Cindy LaCom: 11:02

I guess I would ask those who are listening have you ever been in a situation where you thought that a relationship or a workplace culture or a team that you're working with was one way, and then you discover that someone else has a very different perspective? I just want to concur with what you said, sharon. It's really hard to see the culture you're part of from within. I used ineffective communication as one, but I'm going to use a more extreme example, two actually. One has to do with data on workplace safety, and when employees were asked about whether or not they had workplace safety policies, their answers tended to be no. But when HR directors were asked the same question, overwhelmingly they said yes, we have those policies in place and our employees know about them. So maybe that they do have those policies in place, but they're not really communicating them effectively or continuously. So I think it can be incredibly difficult to see from the outside.

Cindy LaCom: 12:03

But the other, more extreme example I wanted to offer was one organization that I was involved in, and the dynamic that had evolved before I arrived was one of a lot of closed door conversations, a lot of anxiety and I would say even paranoia on the part of the staff in terms of their relationship with management, and it took years after there was a shift in their workplace called Jeffery, for them to understand that the ways in which they'd been silenced and the ways in which they'd really been siloed was part of a culture that had become invisible to them. So I think that we will talk a lot about these things in our podcast, but the thing I think we wanted to start with was what are some of the elements of the disempowered workplace and how can those elements come to be normalized?

Sharon Wilson: 12:57

Exactly. So you know, that just gives people a bit of an overview of kind of our intention for the podcast, and really our intention is to be a support and research for you to help navigate these really unprecedented challenges in our workplace cultures and to create thriving cultures that have a ripple effect, that impact us all in a positive way, because our workplaces, our organizations, also impact our communities. They impact our family structures, everything is impacted and so that is a place that real change can be affected. We'd love for you to join our community of HR professionals, executive directors and managers that are wanting to create and grow more empowered workplaces and organizations and you can get free tips and resources and an opportunity to attend free virtual gatherings where you can engage with industry leaders and innovators, you can exchange ideas and strategies and best practices. We're really starting that and growing that community.

Sharon Wilson: 13:58

So you can go to transformingcultureconsultantscomhr to get on that list and we can provide you with that information and tips and resources and the information about when those gatherings would be. We're also available to provide you with a free virtual consultation to explore any challenges or opportunities in your workplace culture, and you can apply for that at, again, our website, transformingcultureconsultantscom. Slash free application and you can connect with us on LinkedIn at transformingcultureconsultants. Our vision is a world where employees feel happy, respected, valued and safe, and we really thank you for being a part of this vision, cindy, anything you want to say in closing?

Cindy LaCom: 14:43

No, just it's great to have you here. I'm looking forward to moving into the future with you. See you next time everybody.