This is the fourth in a series of six posts about social cohesion, an emerging idea about organizational success that will shape the future of workplaces. You can read the introduction to social cohesion here, about evaluating social cohesion in your organization here, and about the first critical dimension of social cohesion here.
Jeff Leitner: Earlier in my career, I was vice president of a small consulting firm. For reasons I don’t recall, we were having cash flow problems. So the president suggested the executive team forgo our paychecks for a while to ensure that everyone else in the company got paid. We all agreed and I remember being proud to do it.
But about two months in, I returned from a long weekend to find that while everyone else on the executive team was forgoing our paychecks, the president wasn’t. He was paying himself just as often and just as much as he ever had. That was a heck of a job but I resigned that day.”
Whether you would have resigned yourself, you undoubtedly get why I did. There’s something about discovering that things are very different than they seem that rocks us and leads us to question everything around us. Can we trust the people we thought we could trust? Are we really in this together like we thought?
In a world of spin and overstatement, we’re sadly accustomed to reading and listening skeptically. But that inauthenticity is a big problem when trying to build social cohesion — which is a key to everything your organization cares about, including productivity, performance, motivation, engagement, learning, and dealing with stress.
The first critical dimension of social cohesion is fairness, which Jan and I talked about in our last post. The second is authenticity, which means that an organization believes that its leaders mean what they say.
The four key attributes of authenticity are:
- Clarity — Are you being clear about what you expect or do you leave expectations just fuzzy enough so that you can be impulsive later?
- Completeness — Are you telling employees everything they need to know or are you just giving them part of the picture?
- Straightforwardness — Are you saying what you mean or are you intentionally leaving employees with a misleading impression?
- Consciousness of power — Are you mindful that by being in charge, what you do and say carries a disproportionate amount of weight. No, you’re not just part of the gang.
If you say in formal policies, town hall meetings, or one-on-one conversations that you don’t care when employees get to work in the morning, that has to be true. You can’t then nick employees in performance reviews or deny them promotions and raises because they come in a half hour later than everyone else. If you say in the mission statement and on the company website that you prioritize quality work above everything else, you can’t penalize employees for taking the time to get everything right.
When leaders say one thing and hold employees accountable for another, it gives rise to unwritten rules. You’ve heard rules like this:
- Don't be honest about why you're calling off work.
- Never leave the office before the boss does.
- Optional events are not really optional.
- When the boss says "It's your call," it isn't.
These rules are red flags that an organization’s leadership is inauthentic and an giant obstacle to building social cohesion. And notice that inauthenticity has nothing to do with whether we’re in the office or working remotely — inauthenticity is a problem that permeates any and every working arrangement.
As for organizational management, there are a few critical steps to boosting authenticity.
- One, you have to replace the inauthentic with the real. If you’re doing or saying things that are intentionally fuzzy, incomplete, or misleading, stop. There may be good reasons not to share information with employees, but there’s never a good reason to share inauthentic information.
- Two, you have to align your formal policies with the unwritten rules. This doesn’t mean turning unwritten rules into formal policies, but you do have to account for the discrepancy between the two. Maybe it’s worth eliminating formal policies that nobody follows or believes in. That’s better than having official rules on the books that everybody knows are bunk.
- Three, you have to align your formal organizational structure with your informal organizational structure. Every organization has an unofficial, organic org chart. It’s populated not by people with the right titles, but by people employees trust to look out for them and give them the best information. Again, you don’t have to turn the informal structure into the formal structure, but you do have to account for the discrepancy between the two. If there are people in your organization who are really running the show — and trust us, there are — you would be wise to leverage them.
Jan Johnson: The workplace can also help organizations be authentic. Designers have two responsibilities: help clients use space to send authentic cues and stop them from using space to say things they don’t really mean.
It starts with digging into the unwritten rules, which tell us about workers’ authentic experiences. We need to respect what we learn and use it to balance out what we hear from leadership. If we don’t, we’ll design spaces that are inconsistent with how organizations work, which will ultimately decrease social cohesion.
We then need to pay attention to what artifacts mean. Do glass walls really represent transparency, like leadership says, or are they used to keep an eye on employees? Do ping pong tables build camaraderie or send a fake signal about playfulness? Do leaders really believe employees are their greatest asset or are they prioritizing real estate efficiency over worker experience?
In our next post, we’ll talk about partnership, the third of four critical dimensions of social cohesion, and what it could mean for workplace design.
Explore all six topics within the Social Cohesion and Unwritten Rules series in a consolidated .pdf.
To join Jeff and Jan for a presentation on social cohesion and the potential of workplace design, write Jan Johnson at JohnsonJan@allsteeloffice.com. If you want a head start, you can take the social cohesion assessment here. You can also learn more about the subjects they’re covering in this series here.
Jeff Leitner is a social innovator and theorist. He is founder and lead researcher at Unwritten Labs, a fellow at New America, and former innovator in residence at the University of Southern California. Jan Johnson is a workplace strategist and designer. She is vice president of workplace strategy at Allsteel, former chair of the Council for Interior Design Accreditation and teaches the three MCR.w classes for CoreNet Global.