Crafting Successful Cultures: Leveraging Artefacts, Values & Assumptions
Using Edgar Schein's Framework to Understand the Building Blocks of Company Culture
Hey there,
This is the first post so let me share a short intro. I’m Uri. I worked for almost 5 years at TravelPerk, a hyper-growth startup that takes culture extremely seriously. I joined the company when it had 70 employees and left when it had grown to 1000. First as a Chief of Staff to the CEO and then as Head of Community, I have been able to see from the trenches how a great culture is built (and how hard it is to do it). I still have many questions and continue learning about company culture every day through books, podcasts, and essays. That's why I've decided to create this Substack - to reflect on my experiences and share my insights and questions with others.
This is the first of hopefully many posts on company culture. Here we go!
In my learning journey to understand company cultures, no framework has influenced me more than the one developed by Edgar Schein. He explains how organisational cultures are born and what their key elements are. This post covers the concepts I found the most useful out of his work.
How cultures emerge
In short, Schein believes that cultures emerge when a group of people gets together to work towards a goal. At the very beginning, the group might need to deal with several different challenges. When an issue arises, a founder/leader might propose a solution based on her beliefs. When the solution proposed by the founder is applied and a successful result comes out of it, then the founder's beliefs are validated by everyone else in the team. That social validation makes that founder’s belief part of the culture.
Here's an example of how this process works in practice:
A startup has grown its team from 2 to 30 people in a few months. While the team was very productive in the past, they have recently slowed down. The founder believes that the decline is because the amount of useless meetings taking place has grown exponentially and people don’t respect each other time enough. As a consequence, she believes people have less time to work on the most impactful things.
To solve it, she proposes a No-Meetings policy on Mondays. Many colleagues have meetings they believe to be important on Mondays and don’t find that policy adequate at first. But after 5 weeks of running the No-Meetings-Mondays policy, the productivity of the team objectively has increased. Not only do people not meet on Mondays so much, but in general, people are more careful about taking other colleagues’ time. Therefore, the No-Meetings-Mondays policy has been socially validated as a successful solution to productivity issues. It has now become part of the culture.
Let’s now take a simplified look at what happened in this story:
Problem: general lack of productivity among employees.
Founder beliefs:
People need a lot of time to work on individual tasks and deliver the most impactful things.
Too many meetings take time away from working on those impactful things.
Founder proposed solution: No-Meetings-Monday.
Social validation:
Employees don’t do meetings on Mondays for 5 weeks and general productivity rises.
Employees believe that the proposed solution worked.
The founder beliefs have been socially validated.
Impact on the culture:
Assumption: Productivity > Busy schedule.
Employees now value and respect each other’s time. Meetings are scheduled only when necessary.
If anyone is looking to be more productive, they know that they won’t be judged negatively if they decline non-important meetings.
Levels of an Organizational Culture
That example is useful to understand how a culture emerges. Schein then structures his framework around 3 levels in which one can appreciate a company's culture:
Artefacts: they encompass all the visible elements of a company's culture, even if their meaning is not immediately apparent. Examples of artefacts include messaging on office walls, company-wide rituals, the compensation philosophy, and an email from the CEO.
Values: they reflect the members shared opinion on ‘how things should be’. That doesn't mean that everyone behaves according to them. However, it allows individuals to classify situations and actions as either undesirable or desirable. Examples: “do the right thing”, “have a growth mindset”, “put the customer first", "fail fast”…
Underlying assumptions: the invisible set of beliefs that have been culturally validated and, therefore, constitute the “cultural DNA” of the company. These deeply-held mental models are the hardest to observe, understand and challenge. These include assumptions about how each individual should work with each other, what behaviours will lead to success or failure, etc. Examples: data-driven decision-making, the priority of speed over accuracy when making decisions, expecting employees to arrive on time, what “good” or “bad” quality look like…
Wrapping up
The combination of artefacts, values, and assumptions are the key ingredients of an organization's culture. This understanding allows us to recognise our own culture or to create a great one in a new organization.
During my time at TravelPerk, I found that out of all those elements presented by Schein, “Artefact” was the one that I could play more with to reveal and foster a culture within a company. And while artefacts alone are not enough to build a great culture, I found them to be an essential piece of the puzzle. This is why I am focused on this concept here on the Substack, and will continue to share my insights into it in the posts to come.
Thanks for reading this first post. I'll be back soon with more.
Take care!
Uri