How to fix the most common company culture?
Read Time: 8 min
I don't fit into the cultures of most companies.
I can't stand the demotivating, inefficient, and often toxic environment.
This is why I became an entrepreneur.
This is why I'm searching for ways to do it better.
I harmonize well in Clan-Adhocracy-heavy cultures.
But Market-hierarchy-driven cultures are poison for me.
Don't know what I'm talking about?
Don't worry; there is a test to determine which culture your company has.
The OCAI company culture test.
According to the OCAI test, every business culture has four dimensions: Market, Hierarchy, Clan, and Adhocracy.
There is no right or wrong culture.
There are just different people who fit better or worse into each culture.
This is why culture fit is so important.
I think culture is even more important than the skills a candidate brings.
Skills can be taught, but culture cannot.
Learning about company cultures was eye-opening for me.
No wonder I don't fit into most companies; they're all Market-Hierarchy cultures.
Market-hierarchy is the most prevalent type of culture in our modern capitalist world.
I was shocked when I saw abundant scientific research showing this culture's negative impact.
Both these cultures, at their extremes, drastically affect the well-being of their employees.
Why is the Market-Hierarchy culture then so omnipresent?
In our capitalist world, a successful business is not defined by employee well-being.
A successful business is defined as: "Making the most profit possible for its shareholders.”
This is what these toxic Market-Hierarchy cultured companies are good at.
I define a successful business differently.
A successful business is one that:
Has large enough reserves to get through bad times unscathed.
Where everyone is compensated enough to lead a good life.
Where everyone is doing what they're passionate about most of the time.
Where everyone feels appreciated and empowered by being part of the business.
Where the majority of customers are delighted with the value provided to them.
All these need to be true at the same time for a company to be truly successful.
I haven't seen any healthy or successful examples of a Market-Hierarchy culture yet.
This is why I believed for a long time that a culture that is strong in Market or Hierarchy is inherently toxic.
There are so many problems arising from these cultural dimensions:
Diminishing employee wellbeing.
High employee churn rates.
Low product quality and customer satisfaction.
Diminishing creativity and innovation.
I had to remind myself that this is only one way of creating a Market-Hierarchy company culture.
The definitions of these cultures don't say anything about:
Revenue orientation,
Egocentrism,
Power structures,
Or bureaucracy.
Market-driven means to work result-oriented and to celebrate individual successes.
Hierarchy-driven means focus on structure, stability, and efficient operations.
These are awesome and healthy characteristics for company cultures to have.
I thought about this question a lot:
What would a healthy and successful Market-hierarchy-driven company look like?
Let me share the vision I came up with after countless hours of deep work.
How to make Market-Hierarchy cultures less toxic?
First things first: All work happens digitally.
We have a central platform that handles everything.
Knowledge aggregation,
Task management,
Personal development,
Problem resolution,
And communication.
As an employee, an average day looks something like this:
Open the platform and pick a task from the task board.
Finish the task and send it to review.
Take a break of half an hour.
Pick another task from the board and work it off.
Take a break of an hour.
Pick a third task of the day and finish it.
Check on new communications for 20 minutes.
Your day is done.
Compensation
Everyone gets compensated a minimum wage that is enough to afford a good lifestyle.
They can cover their basic needs for food, shelter, security, etc.
You must complete a minimum amount of tasks each month to get this minimum wage.
For example, 240 story points worth of tasks, where one 2h-task is usually worth 2 story points.
On top of this salary, a bonus system rewards personal performance.
This bonus system rewards several things:
Completing more story points per month.
Quality of work that is graded by reviewers and necessary revisions.
Attitude, which is graded by the people you work with.
Value of the completed tasks for the company.
I want to clarify that salary and bonus need to be seen separately.
The bonus is on top of the salary.
The salary must be high enough to guarantee a good life.
And a bonus can't be negative.
This should be a good incentive to put in the work and do it well.
Task Management and Workload
Tasks are well described and connected to all the resources necessary to complete them.
Very importantly, each task is bite-sized.
This means the task can be finished in one session (~2h).
Lastly, tasks show which skill and skill level are required to do this task.
I can only see tasks on my board, which I'm skilled enough to complete independently.
So I can be sure I'm the right person to work on this task.
And the project lead can be sure that qualified people do their tasks.
Project leads create tasks as a result of their tasks, which they picked from the board.
You can see how this system propagates up to the C-level, where decision-makers decide which initiatives to work on next.
Each initiative gets subdivided into smaller tasks, trickling down to execution.
When I'm done with a task, it gets reviewed.
If something is missing or not working, it returns for revision.
If the task lacks something, it is pushed back to the creator for revision.
After revision, the task re-enters the marketplace to be worked off by someone.
With this fully digital system, employees can work whenever they want and however much they want.
And most of the overhead is eliminated.
We can quickly reduce the average work time to the 20 hours an employee is productive weekly.
You may have noticed that I made an example of 240 hours per month above.
This results in a 30-hour working week as the default measurement for a productive employee.
You get a 50% productivity increase when everyone works the bare minimum.
Those who want to put in more working hours can freely do so.
Additionally, if over-performing individuals finish a 2h task faster, they're done earlier.
To prevent diminishing quality by trying to be faster, we reward quality of work the same as speed.
Because everything is centralized and digital, we can track times automatically.
This data then helps project leads to size their tasks correctly.
We have created a self-regulating system.
Decision-Making
At every step of the process, the platform collects data.
And it doesn't create overhead because it is all automated.
Especially knowledge is aggregated in a centralized knowledge base.
Core decisions are made at the company's top and broken down into smaller pieces.
These then create tasks and hand them down further to be executed.
The higher up a task is, the bigger it can be regarding story points.
Single people make decisions with the necessary skills as project managers.
This starkly contrasts how it is done right now in reality.
Too often, decision-makers are in their positions without having the necessary skills.
And project leads don't need to be expert in everything.
They can easily find expert input by sending a task for input out into the task system.
The skill system is central to my vision of a Market-Hierarchy culture.
It prevents the wrong people from accumulating power.
It specifically prevents people from getting into decision-making positions through:
Social networking.
Happenstance.
Beneficial treatment.
It also removes mobbing, discrimination, glass ceilings and other effects of centralized decision-making.
If you're making decisions in this company culture, you have the skills to make the right decision.
Personal Development
Each employee has a private profile that shows their skill levels.
Each skill you have and can develop in your profile is valuable to the company.
Your skills will improve with completed tasks and time spent honing a skill.
Speaking about tasks, you will see only tasks that fit your skill level.
This means you will see tasks above and below your skill level.
If you're up for a challenge, you can pick a task above your skill, and it will reflect in your personal development.
On the other hand, if you need a chill day, you can pick something below your skill level.
This system leads to higher employee engagement as you do only tasks that fit your current mood.
There are no job titles in this company culture, only bundles of skills.
Arbitrarily given titles and career ladders in terms of positions are inherently flawed.
They lead by design to toxic environments and only feed unsatisfiable trauma responses.
But if you're into titles, don't worry; there still will be meaningful, healthy titles.
These titles will be won through achievements or by peers.
This will keep the sense of progression and accomplishment.
There are different ways of climbing in company hierarchies.
The one vital metric is the decision-making power you hold.
Because everything is based on the skills you progress, you automatically get to make the decisions that you're the right person for.
This means you will climb the hierarchy by doing your work, not by doing everything else than your work.
Removing job positions prevents the wrong people from deciding on topics they're not fit for.
Which is a big problem for most traditional companies.
A second way to improve your skills is to use a learning platform.
This learning platform contains hands-on courses on all valuable skills for the company.
Each employee has a monthly budget of story points to invest in this platform during their core work time.
With this personal development plan, we should have removed any glass ceilings effectively.
You can start in this company at the bottom and end up in any "position” you like by design.
But we still keep order and stability for the benefit of everyone involved.
Problem Resolution
Problems are sure to arise in any business.
So, every company's culture should have a way to deal with them.
Even though most companies think they're structured, they're unprepared for problems.
You can create a ticket if you encounter a problem during work in our new healthy culture.
Which is then resolved by people with the right problem-solving skills.
Others can vote up and down these problem tickets in the company to show urgency.
This simple feedback mechanism ensures peak efficiency.
And the problem solver is just again another skill that anyone can develop.
A type of project manager who plans and creates tasks to resolve problems.
This is how a healthy and successful Market-hierarchy company could look.
You might have noticed that I reduced social interactions drastically in this vision.
When a culture focuses on individual success, interactions inherently lead to toxic competition.
Yes, internal competition will hurt your company more than it will help it.
Stop believing these wannabe business gurus telling you competition is necessary for success.
It is factually wrong, and no data is supporting these claims.
To be successful, we need to work together toward the same goals.
I also limited the decision-making power by anonymizing task allocation and reviews.
Unchecked decision-making in Market and Hierarchy cultures leads to power accumulation.
And without evil intentions, everyone will use their power for personal gain.
I tried to remove "managers” from this culture as much as possible to reduce employee churn.
Because people leave managers, not companies.
We still hold to the fundamental traits of Market culture by:
Rewarding individual success without creating competition.
And we're working towards one goal through clear, transparent information flow.
We also hold to the Hierarchy culture by:
Providing clear and transparent structures to follow, with everyone knowing their responsibilities.
Creating stability through long-term planning.
Highly efficient operations through feedback mechanisms and automated tracking of key metrics. Without introducing bureaucracy.
I want to hear what you think about my vision.
Let me know on LinkedIn if you agree and where you see potential for improvement.
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Thanks for reading to the end!
You rock!
Cheers,
Marcel