[Podcast] Designing Company Culture with Josh Levine

How can you create an amazing company culture that ensures a brand strategy can be actualized?

That’s at the core of this discussion with the amazing Josh Levine, author of Great Mondays.

We sit down with Josh to examine how branding should be done from within by intentionally designing a company culture. Together we discuss the six components of company culture – Purpose, Values, Bahviours, Recognition, Rituals and Cues.

If you are a brand builder looking to operationalize, align and motivate a whole company around brand thinking, this one is for you.

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Show Notes

• Josh Levine’s website
• Great Mondays Book 

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Well, hello, and welcome everybody to the first episode of season three of JUST Branding. It’s awesome to be back. We’re ready to go, full of energy, and we have got for you today one of my heroes, a guy called Josh Levine who are introduced shortly.

Josh is incredible because he’s taken design into areas where frankly, design shouldn’t be or at least shouldn’t be perceived to be from a business perspective. He’s taken design into culture. Josh’s work, I came across your work, Josh, maybe I don’t know, 10 years ago, and I read your book, Great Mondays, and it blew my mind because as a designer myself, I just saw the value of taking something complex and trying to give it some structure and a framework for everyone to work from.

Today’s guest is Josh Levine. He’s going to be talking to us about some of the aspects of culture design. He’s the author, as I’ve said, of Great Mondays and an advocate for great cultures.

I’d like to say welcome, Josh, to the show.

All right. Thanks, you guys, for having me. We appreciate it.

It’s absolutely wonderful that you’ve carved out the time. Before we go into anything, I just also want to obviously say I’m not here on my own. I’m with the famous Jacob Cass co-host.

Say hello to everybody, Jacob.

Hello. It’s good to be back. I’m very, very excited.

It’s especially been a long, long time, as Matt said. Forgive us if we’re a little bit rusty, but we are excited to talk about culture today and get back into branding.

You guys sound like old pros to me.

Old might be the word there, Josh. I don’t know about the pros, but we’ll do what we can. Obviously, this podcast is very much orientated around helping people build great brands.

What we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be diving into this discipline of designing culture, and we’re going to tap into Josh’s amazing experience and thinking around that. But we’re going to be trying to bring it back all the time. Well, how does this help us build a great brand?

Maybe we’ll get onto that in a minute, but before we do, Josh, tell us a bit about you, what you do, and maybe how you came to create Great Mondays and the structure around this idea of designing culture.

Yeah, absolutely. So I consider myself an advocate for company culture. It is my mission in life to help organizations adopt and practice company culture as a way to not only improve bottom lines, but improve employee lives.

And so this is the driving force in all of the work that I do. I wrote a book that you mentioned called Great Mondays. I have an agency, a consulting agency.

We work with pre and post IPO technology firms, helping them define and scale their company culture. And I also teach culture program and an MBA program. And actually, I started in a brand.

I come from a brand place. A lot of folks in the kind of company culture space are HR or design oriented. I actually studied as a graphic designer and then became a brand strategist under tutelage of our mutual friend, Marty Neumeier, and really got a chance to practice that skill.

But I had an opportunity to think, reflect, and think about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to evolve as a practitioner, a professional. And what I realized is that the way that we can get organizations to actually deliver on all those brand promises, in fact, the only way, is by engaging the people on the inside in that story. And so, the approach that I take uses all the skills and tools from my brain strategy days.

But now, instead of trying to define and then articulate a message to the world, it is about defining and articulating that message to the people on the inside of the company so they can perpetuate that message into the world. And that is ultimately what I wanted to, why I wanted to get into company culture. It’s been almost 15 years.

I started in the late 2000s. And when I started, people kind of turned to me and said, culture? You mean like ballet or something?

So there was not a lot of acceptance or understanding about the importance of it. But luckily, I’m pretty tenacious and the market has seemed to have woken up to this important topic. And so I’m here to drive the point home and give the people the skills they need to actually start to use this practice in their business.

Can I ask you a question, Josh? Like how would you define culture?

Yeah, great question. And it’s the first question I asked when I started to realize that this is what I wanted to work on. So of course I went and Googled around and sort of reread up on all this stuff.

And there was no unified message. There was no agreement about what that is. And that may probably intuitively make sense to you guys and to the people that are listening.

Because when you think of culture, you think it’s like this big fuzzy idea. I don’t know. It’s kind of about the soft skills or it’s about how we treat each other or it’s about the casual Fridays or whatever it is, allowing people to work from home so they can be happier.

And yeah, it’s all those things. And so I actually went and thought about what I was struggling with and how I was thinking about it. And essentially the definition that I came up with is that culture is the cause and effect of every decision that we make inside of a business.

And so the reason why I decided to focus and define it that way is because it’s a system. I couldn’t disentangle this idea of like, well, culture is what makes it great to work here. It’s why I do this thing versus what I do actually is gonna change what other, I have control over the culture.

And so I wanted to articulate that it’s a system, cause and effect. And that was great. That was a good moment for me to sort of go, oh, okay, great.

That’s what culture is. But then the next step was, well, okay, so what? Now what?

Like, what do I do with this? I want to apply it, right? I’m an applied artist, right?

Like as a designer, right? It’s like that’s, I got to use it in some way. So what do I do with that?

And that was the next big question for me around, how do I move from this? Like, okay, let’s create a mutual understanding around it. And then what do we do about that?

Yeah.

And I guess that’s where the book came from, right? So you applied that. I mean, the book, as I say, is how old is the book, Josh?

When did you write it?

About two years. It’s about two years old. It came out at the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020.

I actually launched my firm, like I said, in the late 2000s. And the name of the firm is Great Mondays. And I started cranking out all this content.

And as, you know, because I got further and further along, it became better, you know, less and more real things. But this was me thinking. And you can kind of, if you went through an archive of all the writing and all the videos I’ve ever recorded, you can kind of see the evolution of my understanding of culture.

But yes, Great Mondays as a concept and a business has been around for over a decade.

Now you’ve mentioned it. I think I did come across, did you have a canvas at some point or something like that? Or I think you did.

And yeah, I think maybe it was then, now I come to think of it. But one thing that I really connected with was, you know, exactly what you were saying, which was that, you know, brand strategy is linked to culture in the sense that if you are a brand first business and you’ve aligned your leadership team around purpose and vision, you’ve got all those juicy things, which should be, in my view, customer appealing, right? Customer centric.

Then what do you do next? You’ve got to kind of then turn around to your people inside your organization and say, come on guys, let’s all align around this thing. And culture, therefore, is crucial to anybody building a brand.

So I wonder if maybe you could touch on, you know, some, you know, well, first of all, do you agree with that statement? And if so, then why is it so crucial to brand building? What’s your view on that?

Yeah, well, like I said, in order to deliver on those brand promises, those big aspirations, the incredible logo that is imbued with meaning and the messaging that makes, you know, us want to pay attention, we need to make sure that all of our, all the people in our, at the business understand that as well. And that’s not, that doesn’t just happen by handing them new business cards. That was sort of the first step, but we need to take it a little bit further now because customers are more likely to be interested and get, be able to have access to what happens inside the company.

So if you have a bunch of unhappy employees, you can’t advertise your way out of that. And so what you need to do is really instill this inspirational message. And just like you said, we start with purpose.

Purpose is the center point and, you know, you start, you go out from that, that’s brand, go in, you know, you go inward, that’s culture. And so that’s the starting point. Purpose is the inspiration of that.

And that is ultimately what we, what we’re hoping for. And, and I was thinking culture is the, when you think of this concept of culture and this practice of culture, it’s really the vessel for, in which we start to add different ingredients that we can begin to see how we want that, like what, what is it that we want our people to do? And, and ultimately, when you think about like the one thing, why is culture important?

The one thing to understand is that culture is all about choices. So like I said, definition, cause and effect, every choice that we make, it’s all about behaviors. So here’s a system, here’s a vessel that’s going to allow you a way to understand, define and then help the people inside your organization choose to make better decisions.

It’s guidance and it’s inspiration and guidance and incentives for moving in a particular direction.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m so excited to get into this.

I think we need some more bones though.

Yeah, that’s a high level of prep.

Let’s get it. I think we’re on board. Me and Jacob are on board with this.

But what I’d love to understand is, I think in the book you talk about six components.

Six components.

Let’s dig into those. Would that be okay? Just to sort of outline them first of all, and maybe we’ll then go through in a bit more detail.

So first of all, what are the six components? And then let’s get into it.

Yeah. So it’s a system. It’s a cyclic system, right?

It’s a cycle, purpose, values, and behaviors, recognition, rituals, and cues. So let me break it down for you. The first three are about the design aspect.

So if you have a map on the wall and you say, we want to go here, that is the definition of where we’re headed. And that’s what you got to do first. You’ve got your purpose.

So I’m sure you’ve talked ad nauseum on this podcast about purpose. Purpose is that big aspiration. It’s an inspiring statement.

It’s so big that you will likely never achieve that goal, but it’s the thing that’s going to rally everybody to cause and motivate, give you that energy to get there. The values is the next thing in the system. Values are your guard rails for what is most important and how you’re going to reach that goal.

So the other metaphor that I’ll use, another sort of geographic journey metaphor, will be the mountain. So the peak of the mountain is purpose. That’s your inspiration.

That’s, hey everybody, we’re going to go there. That’s amazing. If we ever got there, I’m incredible.

That’s such a, so high, right? Like that’s the view must be incredible. Yes, absolutely.

Now, you got to keep your team safe and you got to say, look, here’s how we’re going to get there. I’m going to describe that path to you. And I’m not going to say it’s exactly here, here, here and here, I’m going to give you a wide berth, but I’m saying don’t go over here and don’t go over here because you might fall into the crevasse or you might cheat and take the gondola to the top.

We don’t want to do that. So values are the key and you have to have a limited number. It’s a, the whole point about values is that it’s a, it’s a exercise in prioritization.

So you’ve got to have five values, but I’m trying not to go too deep in that. So values are the garbage. And then the center point, we talked about behaviors.

We define values through behavior. So that’s the first part. What kind, where, why are we, why are we going?

How are we going? And what does that mean for me as an individual? Now, just because we define that doesn’t mean people are going to go, okay, I’ll do it or okay, I’m there.

I’ll just think real hard and I’ll, you know, teleport to the top. So the second three are brought the activation or operationalization of your culture. So that’s recognition, rituals and cues.

So recognition, everybody’s very familiar with rewards and recognition programs. Recognition is how we motivate and incentivize people. The problem with most recognition programs is that they’re done the wrong way.

They’re recognizing the wrong things and they’re using the wrong things to reward with. And so for me in this system, it’s all tying right back to values. I’ll get into that in a second.

Rituals are how we scale culture. Rituals build and strengthen relationships and relationships are the synapses of culture. If we don’t have strong relationships, you’re gonna get silos, the dreaded silos, and you’re gonna get these culture elements, the little groups of people that are gonna have different cultures.

Now, maybe that’s fine, but let’s be intentional about it. Maybe it’s okay that there’s gonna be the, the German office is gonna have a little different culture than the Memphis office. That’s great, that’s fine, but we need to make sure that we’re doing that on purpose, and we don’t do it on accident.

So there’s, there’s that piece. So rituals are repeated behaviors that an organization can support and provide, helps build those relationships. And guess what?

That’s really, really important now that we’re all distributed all the time. That’s gonna be one of the big ones that you’re gonna see emerge. And I don’t think leaders have really grasped that yet, so watch for that.

And finally, cues. Cues is what’s gonna link us back to the beginning. Cues are reminders, digital, physical, behavioral reminders, what we’re trying to strive for.

So purpose and values, we get really busy. We forget about the culture, we forget why we’re here. So I’m gonna help you remember why we’re getting there.

And there’s, you can use cues to remind your team about shorter-term goals. So there’s a big opportunity in that. So those are the six components, purpose, values, behaviors, recognition, rituals, and cues.

And that’s the system that is how organizations can start to design and manage their culture.

Boom. So guys, you can see why me and my simple brain got hold of Josh’s work and was like, this is good stuff. This is great because it simplifies it down and it makes it digestible and understandable and helps leaders appreciate the work that needs to be put into this.

And I’ve actually, Josh, used some of your thinking. I’ve partnered with HR teams. I’ve done at least three projects over the last few years.

Oh, there we go. Look.

Just for people listening, because this is a video podcast and an audio. So Josh is holding up a poster right now.

It’s a system, but you know what? Put it in the show notes.

Okay, we will.

Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, there’s even a, I even have a PDF of it. You can put the PDF of it in the show notes.

Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you very much. We’ll put a link.

All good. So yeah, so guys check out the show notes. We’re going to put a link there to a little diagram, which explains the six components and makes it super simple.

Good point.

I’ve got absolutely shared loads of questions that have just kind of popped into my mind. So, but I think it’s probably best if we, if it’s okay with you, Josh, if we do a deep dive on each of these components, and maybe Jacob and I could ask you a kind of a couple of questions around each one. So, I mean, you’re right, we’ve talked about purpose loads, but I wanted to more ask you around how you help organizations come to that purpose.

What sort of techniques do you like to use? Do you work with leaders or do you interview from the ground up or do you ask customers? How do you kind of get people to a point where you’re comfortable they’ve reached a great inspirational purpose for their organization that you can help them with their culture through?

Yeah, so this is the way that we go about this is not just for defining the purpose, but for the entirety of these projects. Now, projects are usually defined in those two halves. We usually start with purpose and values definition and then move on to the other pieces to activate.

So here’s what I’ll say. And this is kind of the most important aspect of my process, the most impactful, which is not only do we work with leaders and build rapport and bring them on board with the reason we do this, but we ask them to nominate culture ambassadors. And those ambassadors, those 10 or 15 people now are imbued with the authority by the leadership team to make some decisions.

And the leadership team is shitted in any ways because they’re too far away from the culture. They don’t have that exposure. And so we want to work with these people.

The ambassadors are the people that are really on the front lines. They’re the high potential employees and they’re the ones that really, really get it. And those are the people that we work with to define purpose and define those values.

And then we use those people to come back and message that to the executive team. And so that’s the very specific answer to your question, which is every time that’s exactly what we have to do. We have to build out a critical piece of this project, any project.

But just one more question. I always like, well, our listeners, they love case studies, right? How are you applying these systems to a real world scenario?

Do you have some samples, some companies you’ve worked with where you’ve applied this system, you found the purpose, you found the values and how you’ve integrated that into the system and to the leaders and then the employees?

Yeah, I got a couple of examples. So for purpose, one of the best purpose statements, I think that’s come out for me is for a company called Credit Karma. They were just acquired for a gazillion loads of dollars high into it.

So Credit Karma is a credit monitoring app and they also have credit cards, they sell you, and then they’re like, what’s the value of your house and all this stuff. So this is, it’s really nice. It’s a really nice user interface.

But the purpose of Credit Karma is to help people be their best financial selves. And so if you think about what that means for an organization, it’s not just about trying to sell more credit cards. It’s not just about getting people numbers on their credit report.

It’s about supporting them. And they’ve done a really good job of providing the tools that help people do that. So that’s a really, really, I think that’s a strong one.

It’s one I cite in the book. The other I would point to, we’ve been doing some work with the DC Public Library. So Washington DC Public Library, they asked us to come in and help them with their purpose and values.

Now, I don’t have those memorized, so I’m going to call them up.

You’re allowed to. You can’t memorize every single client’s thing. This is what I love as well.

You work with a few clients over it and you forget, don’t you? Because you’re on to the next one and the next one, and they have them and they use them. But yeah, the strategist’s brain often has to move on.

So have you got them there, Josh?

All right. So the purpose of the DC Public Library, to be a cornerstone of community progress by activating dreams with knowledge, access, and hope. And what was interesting about this process is that we’re, I think all libraries, but this one as well, is that they’re at a turning point.

What is the purpose of a library if we have access to the internet? So there’s the people that are in the, it’s all about the books camp, and then there’s the people about sort of the bigger next vision. And so we brought those two things together.

And one of the interesting things that we do with purpose statements is you can double click on each of the most important words. So in this statement, to be a cornerstone, if you double click on cornerstone, it’s an explanation, a definition of what we mean. And so the power of a purpose statement, as you guys well know, is that it’s condensed and concise.

Then you get to go, okay, now that we’ve read on that, let’s unpack it. So if we’re saying cornerstone, we’re saying cornerstone because the library is a constant and a world of change and connects our history and builds a foundation for our future. So that’s an example of that piece.

Now I’ll move on because we are talking about this particular case study. I’ll move on to the values. And what’s interesting about the values, and I will give sort of my pitch for why most all values suck, is because the way values have been written is to be consistent and agreeable.

And I believe that those values of ethical behavior or collaboration or whatever it might be… Authenticity, yeah, exactly. You’ve seen these.

Innovation, there’s another one.

The problem is that they’re under-leveraging their capacity. They don’t work as hard as they could. And so I believe that values should be something that can change.

And I encourage my clients to look every two to three years at their values. And the reason is because these are a tool that you can get organizations to, we can communicate to the organization and say, this is the three to five things that we are working hardest on. Now, if there’s something that we’ve already gotten down, that we’re really great at, then I say, great, let’s free up one of those spaces and allow for something else that we’re working on to come forward.

The fear often is, well, we’ll forget, we won’t be as good. But the truth is, with culture, when you get an organization to move and be good in a certain aspect, it’s going to continue. It would take a lot to stop that inertia.

So, for example, one of my client’s pager duty is incredibly diverse. It was built from the ground up with a strong DEI capacity. And when we started working together, they’re like, well, of course, this is really important to us.

It’s going to be one of our values. And I’m like, maybe not. And it’s part of one of their values.

The value is team up or work together. I can’t remember what the phrasing was. But the point is, it’s more than just about DEI.

It’s about working together and bringing together a collaboration. So what I encourage my clients, and they’re not always successful, I encourage my clients to define values that are much more, and I’m digging deep in my brand experience, unique, differentiated, compelling, tell a story. So instead of like you said, innovative or ethical.

So for the DC Library, the five that we’ve defined are give and get respect, be a we, invest in us, welcome everyone, and stay rooted. And what this allows you to do is to actually use them in many different ways. So we’re telling a better story.

Everybody here is nodding their head vigorously, right? We’re all brand folks. Tells a better story, makes it stickier in our minds and more compelling.

And think about all the different uses. Immediately, you can start to articulate an employer value proposition that’s highly differentiated. So this is a tool you can use to recruit and retain your top talent, which has been, but now is a burning platform in tech and a lot of companies.

So there is an under appreciation for the capacity of values. And that is ultimately what we’re talking about. Now, I don’t want to mislead and say that is the only piece of the value.

The value is we have it well defined and articulated. What does it mean? How do we make it active?

I can’t really articulate that just in an audio podcast, but you can find there’s a lot of examples that we have on our website at greatmondays.com that you can see. And I encourage everyone to understand and try to grok the sophistication with which you need to define value in order to make it really, really work.

That’s amazing. I love that thinking there. And Josh, I was going to say, I’m really pleased you brought up that EVP, employer value proposition kind of buzz word, which we’re hearing a lot of.

I’ve also heard it stated as employer branding or internal branding, some people call it. And obviously, for me, I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but having the purpose defined, having the values defined is just a small part. Obviously, there’s a lot more to the value as an employee that I’m going to attach to this organization.

And I think a lot of what you’re talking about here, all would fold into a solid EVP, a really solid EVP. Even the recognition, the rituals and the cues, if you’re trying to hire top talent, when we get to those bits, when Josh explains them, as I’m sure he will in a minute, I’m sure everyone will be able to see, wow, you need these things in order to scale up an organization, in order to recruit and look after your people. But I was going to ask actually, do you get involved in other aspects of the EVP?

Or do you just use this as a framework by which to hang other things off? What other areas? Because I often think there’s a whole bucket of rewards.

I know you’ve got recognition, but this whole rewards thing and holiday systems and all that stuff. Do you ever get entangled in that HR world and how does that play out?

We help organizations define what they do offer. We don’t typically tell them because we’re not HR consultants, hey, you should offer a better employee stock option program or whatever it might be. But what we do say is, hey, you need to tell your employees or potential employees that you’re going to be able to offer a lot more than just cash and benefits.

We’re talking about who your colleagues are because remember, when they’re looking at these people, it’s like, oh, I’d like to be one of these people. I’m going to aspire to be those people. What kind of responsibility am I going to take?

What kind of impact will I have? What will this make me? Ultimately, how will this help me in my career path?

What do you offer in that capacity? Then all that gets wrapped up in just all the traditional branding elements, right? Developing messaging, headlines, and specific internal brand visuals that really help to articulate that compelling message.

We create a toolkit for those recruiters. Those are the ones that are like, always panicked and need more people and all this stuff. We have to give them a toolkit so they can learn it, we train them on that, or their team trains them on that, and then they are able to use that language and say, hey, let me tell you why X, Y, and Z.

What’s the headline? What’s the tagline? What’s the benefit?

So it’s the same as external branding. It’s the same funnel. It’s just a matter of digging up and identifying what it is that this company really, really offers.

Nice. Let’s move into behaviors, right? So you’ve defined the purpose, you’ve defined the values.

What’s a behavior?

So when we talk about behaviors, it’s everything from how you answer the phone to how you define your strategy. One story that I like to tell is about the very hipster, fancy blue bottle coffee that started in the Bay Area. And one of their values was deliciousness.

Now, when they started to scale, one of the ways that you make a ton of money as a coffee producer is you sell your beans bulk. But they could not get the other cafes to serve as delicious a coffee. And so what they had to do is make the hard decision and give up 50% of the revenue sales to actually say, hey, listen, we actually don’t want to grow.

And there was a rumor around the Bay Area was like, yeah, blue bottle is not as good as it used to be, right? Like you started to feel that. But they made a decision and they said, we’re not going to sell the bulk beans.

We’re only going to do it in our own places. And we’re going to essentially double down on our brains. So deliciousness has a value and a strategy of, hey, listen, if this is really important to us, this is the decision we need to make.

And so that’s an example of that. But it could be when you think about ownership of a project, what does that mean? What am I unable to do?

How do I come to my executive who might say, you went further than I was expecting or maybe that, you know, and you can say, look, that’s what this is what this value is about. This is what I’m trying to do. And you’re setting expectations for what you want people to behave like.

And then you can get into a conversation about it. Now, what Jacob is going to do at the companies and how he’s going to interpret it for himself, a particular value is going to be different from Matt. But we’re going to give everybody a baseline to start from.

So there’s a lot to it that we don’t have time to get into. But ultimately, that’s the nugget. And that’s what you really got to dial into and say, how do you engage your employees in a proactive way to get them to really understand, oh, how does this value affect my behaviors?

It’s not just like a thing that the executives put up on the wall.

Just a very quick question on that one. Do you ever find that different parts of an organization need different types of interpretation of behaviors? Like, for example, I work with a business, they’re a manufacturing business, and we were going through this exercise, and we were saying, look, the values are the same, but the way that they show up in behaviors in the factory are going to be different to the way they show up in the back office.

What are your thoughts on that?

100%. I have nothing to add. That’s exactly right.

That is what we need to do. We need to make sure that we interpret it that way. So are you defining it in a way that I don’t want people to be doing something totally different?

You got to have an intention about that. What does that mean? But collaboration in the back office versus in the studio or the manufacturer, that’s going to be different.

That’s going to be a different thing and mean a different thing. So you have correctly interpreted that concept.

Awesome. I probably read it in your book, to be fair, Josh. So it was probably something you taught me.

Yes, view it back to be, that’s fine.

I want to add an example as well, because I recently did this exercise for an aesthetic clinic and one of their values was compassion. So there’s a lot of Botox bars and spas around, they’re popping up all the time. And what made this particular brand different was they cared, they had compassion, it wasn’t just another number.

So that value was very important to them. So when they went through the training process, it was always about making sure that you’re compassionate and caring whenever you’re with someone listening to them. And that was part of their brand value.

So that’s one example of how it would be integrated.

Let’s move on into the operational elements. I don’t know how you want to walk, maybe do you want to walk through all three a little bit? Or I’m just dead interested in how you get to a point where everybody agrees in what the recognition elements are, the ritual elements are, and the cues are.

What are your thoughts on that, Josh?

So in the book for these three elements, I break it down into four different, each one has a two by two quad, two by two quadrant of the different kinds of recognition, the different kinds of rituals and the different types of cues. These elements are not as controversial or as not as white-knuckled by the executive team as the first are. And I think your audience will certainly know the difference between trying to advise on a brand name versus messaging points for a product.

So a brand name is like everybody’s baby. So in this case, purpose and values, it’s like everybody’s super paying attention. But then as we get further along, it becomes a little more distributed.

The ownership becomes more distributed. Now, with recognition, for example, you have this common like once a year award ceremony. That’s a kind of recognition.

But you also can have and should have team, small team recognition. And so those are things that people can own on themselves. And what I suggest, and again, I don’t have time to get into all the four kinds here, but what I suggest is that every client, when you’re cataloging to assess where you are with your recognition, look at which quadrants have a lot and which ones don’t have any, for example.

And that to me is where you start the conversation. You’re like, well, look, we don’t have any peer-to-peer informal recognition. How might we support that?

We don’t have any system. We don’t have any formal peer-to-peer recognition. That’s something that is a big gap.

And so that’s really important. Now, the other aspect I want to make sure that we don’t forget is the most important thing to understand about a properly designed recognition program is that it is incentivizing values aligned behaviors. We want to incentivize the behaviors and not the outcomes.

If you incentivize the outcomes, you’re going to get bad choices. And that’s a really important element. I’ve written quite a bit about this.

So that’s when we talk about recognition, that’s the big change to think about. That is the paradigm shift is recognizing the way that we get to the outcomes we want, not the outcomes themselves.

Absolutely. Wonderful. And I would encourage everybody, grab the book, because those two by two quadrant boxes that you were talking about, every strategist loves a good two by two box, right?

Because it makes life easy. But absolutely fascinating to kind of run those through. And by the way, I should add in the book, if you run workshops with your clients and you’re a strategist, there’s literally workshop exercises packed through the book and tools that Josh teaches on all the way through, which is great.

I just want to kind of sort of start winding us down. But before we get to that, just the cues. Obviously, workplaces have sort of, at the moment, at least here in the UK, we’re sort of in this hybrid kind of mode where we’re not quite fully back, but we’re kind of…

Some want to go back, others hate it, they want to stay nomadic. We’ve got this kind of weird digital world, but also a desire to be connected. So I guess my kind of question for you around cues was, have you got any tangible or practical ideas, mainly in the digital world of cues, which maybe some of your clients have used or you’ve seen it, you think actually that’s pretty smart or unusual, ways of reminding people of what binds them together as a team?

Yeah, I mean, the easy one is just creating desktops for everybody. Loading up desktops that have… Maybe they’re rotating desktops that have a different value every day, I think is a nice option.

There’s also… You can use Slack in a lot of amazing ways. I have a client that has a different little custom emoji for each value, and so you just hashtag that value, a little emoji shows up, and that’s a really powerful way to do that.

And in addition, so the magic of technology and integration, if you recognize… So this goes back to recognition. If you recognize somebody else on Slack and you get the hashtag and do the right coding there, it’ll show up on the monitors around the office.

So that’s easy enough to do where it shows up on Slack or in another way to everybody distributed and say, hey, great, Matt is being recognized for step up and owning, whatever that might be.

Definitely wouldn’t have been me, Josh, just saying on that one.

You made a mistake there. What’s the emoji for nice beard?

I must say the emoji for the beard needs work. If Apple’s listening, can somebody do a bigger beard? That’s what I’d look for.

Anyway, move on. Well, look, we’re coming to a close of our time with you, Josh. I just want to thank you so much for coming out.

Is there anything that you want to leave our listeners with in terms of your thinking around culture and in terms of the future of culture, I think would be great. What are your tips and thoughts of where culture needs to go in the next few years going forwards?

Well, I mentioned it a little bit previously, a few minutes earlier, which is we’re distributed now and will likely be for the foreseeable future and relationships are very difficult to maintain. There’s data out there that shows our immediate teams we’re closer with and we know them better. Awesome.

But then any weaker links are getting weaker. So anybody outside of that. And when you are thinking about collaboration, you’re thinking about flow, you’re thinking about innovation, we need better tools to help facilitate building those relationships and working with people across space.

So when we’re thinking about rituals, we’re thinking about culture, we’re thinking about how to facilitate the building of those relationships. That’s what I think the big need is going to be. And where I see an opportunity for work and software and whatever it might be is really, really in that space.

How do you continue to develop that? So that’s one of my predictions for the future. And the other sort of perennial call out for culture is it is not a destination, it’s a journey.

It is not something that just one person owns off the side of their desk. It’s not HR’s role. It should be an executive’s role.

It should be a chief culture officer. It needs to be a department. No one from finance would ever walk into the board meeting and say, hey, everybody, we’ve solved finance this year.

We’re going to move on next year. That was last year’s focus. So culture is the same thing.

We need to really focus on building that because it’s a lot of pieces and it’s a very big practice, but it has a potential huge upside. It’s an evolution. You’ll never get it perfect, but you’ve got to always continue working on it.

And that’s what we need everybody from executives to middle managers to individual contributors to realize that it is for everyone to own and everybody to evolve.

Absolutely brilliant. We’ll take this away as brand builders and definitely be mulling this over, no doubt. I just love the whole system, the whole employee experience system that you sort of laid out for us there.

And the operationalization of culture. Activation is a lot better. Let’s do that.

Let’s leave it there. Josh, honestly, thanks for carving out the time. We’re so grateful, folks.

Pick up the book, Great Mondays. If you’re involved in brand building, it’s an essential part of your thinking. And the thing I love about it, Josh, is it’s so accessible.

So you can flex this system. You can build other components into it. But as a framework, trust me, I’ve done, I think, I think about three projects where I’ve used components of it at least.

And yeah, super valuable. So thanks, Josh, for all your hard work. Keep up what you’re doing.

And hopefully we’ll keep in touch. And no doubt when the next new thing comes along, Josh, definitely come on JUST Branding and tell us all about it.

All right. Thanks, boys. Appreciate it.

Cheers, Josh.