Ordinary vs Legendary – What Good Culture Looks Like

17.10.24 10:09 AM - By Faryal

Ordinary vs Legendary – What Good Culture Looks Like

To better help everyone understand what we mean, let’s get into the three things we see most often that constitute “trash” or ordinary workplaces.

  1. Processes that don’t meet business needs
  2. Leaders don’t use data to help make processes better (more efficient)
  3. Equity and Inclusion efforts are a side project instead of a business imperative

Let’s put these into real-life examples. Imagine for a moment, that you get hired at a company and you take part in their onboarding process, part of which includes getting trained in how to do the job their way. You learn how to speak their language, do their paperwork, and participate in their processes. This is great. Integrating into a new environment as seamlessly as possible is important. As you’re participating in the onboarding process, you notice that what you’re learning how to do does not make much sense and, in fact, is wasting company time. This is an example of when a process isn’t meeting the needs of the business.


Next, let’s talk about all of the needless assessments our organizations have us take, and do nothing with. I’m sure we’ve all taken a survey asking us about our workplace pain-points and how management can best help us overcome them. Then what happens? Well, nothing. The organization now has the data  necessary to make real change, but they don’t always follow through.


And that brings us to what has become  the current side-project of too many companies: equity and inclusion. We could say the fact that just about every workplace today has mentioned these two topics at some point or another is already a win. However, the real win is when management creates and executes a measurable and sustainable plan for addressing their organization’s equity and inclusion needs.


If we truly want to be legendary, our job is to identify the flawed workplaces practices within our organization  and commit to doing things differently. For an employee, this means shedding light on the practices that don’t serve a purpose outside of busy work. As managers this means implementing change when a process no longer serves the enterprise. As leaders this means using the data collected to bring in processes that increase efficiency and productivity (and by the way, the data is telling us that putting equity and inclusion at the center of things IS what increases productivity).


Our next post will include tips on how to implement these ideas to create an awesome, LEGENDARY workplace.

Faryal