M'aider for corporate culture

Will the spring revival of "corporate culture" come after the widespread availability of COVID vaccines? 

Corporate culture provides an execution framework for employees. It determines the rapidity of response to executive direction, sharpness of focus on the competition, moderates the risk taking appetite and determines the approach to solve problems. For Qualcomm, while there is no definition of culture enshrined, my perspective would be that our culture is to pivot our work to topics raised in all-hands meetings, do what it takes to make the customer launch on time and escalate when needed regardless of title to resolve an issue.

Unlike project-specific top-down command and control, corporate culture is an emergent phenomenon. 

In Emergence, Steven Johnson paints a panoramic canvas on the topic, albeit somewhat haphazardly as compared to Drucker's books, with useful insights. He draws analogies from ant colonies, slime growth, how cities develop over time, etc. "A successful ant colony can live up to fifteen years, despite the individual worker ant living only up to one year." "... the global behavior that outlasts any of its components parts - is one of the defining characteristics of a complex system." A system in which "local behavior leads to global wisdom" is how I would summarize as the key definition of an emergent system.

Corporate culture depends on the collective knowledge of employees that is built up over time. It outlives an employee's career in the company. For executives that cherish their corporate culture and want to preserve and maintain it, questions that might arise are:

• How to ensure that the year-long work-from-home hasn't diminished the prevalent culture in the organization?
• How do new hires, who haven't even stepped into the office since they joined their jobs, participate in the collective knowledge?

To enable macrointelligence and adaptibility in emergent systems, here are a few points Steven Johnson makes, paraphrased by me:

1. Make information widely available within the organization - information on competition, new technology, performance of business units, etc. 
2. Keep organization structures simple: too many dotted lines and joint responsibilities detract the focus from execution. It forces employees to learn a non-simple vocabulary to talk the language of each leader. 
3. Encourage cross-team encounters: when a company is young, everyone knows everyone else and information flows rapidly. As a company grows, one group does know know the activities of other groups. This diminishes the adaptability of the collective. 

Here are my thoughts on implementing the above - starting now and continuing upon return to campus.

1. Have multiple touchpoints per week for the employee that require the employee's active participation: 1-1 manager / team-lead meeting, small team meeting, cross team code/design review meeting, etc. Large group meetings are good for broadcasting content but don't provide the opportunity to the employee to ask questions or influence the outcome of a decision, which could lead to disengagement.
2. Use video calls for 1-1 meetings: this baselines expectations for mutual attentiveness, environs, grooming and dress code.
3. The speakers and people with a question in a large meeting should turn on their videos: this establishes a question / answer protocol and enables non-verbal interactions.
4. Allow working-from-home for two different teams. Since chance encounters at work are not possible currently, encourage short-term cross team projects as a way to build up connections within the organization. Two is a good number - I think more would lead to a diffusion of effort. 
5. Let the participants ask questions that a leader would normally ask for the sake of speedy progress toward the conclusion in a presentation. In an in-person meeting, body movements, hand gestures, etc. signal to the speaker to pause and let the other person speak. In remote meetings, the leader should step back and steer the participants to do a bulk of the talking, while steering the group in the direction of productivity.
6. Leaders should explain why they are taking a decision a certain way and let the team correct them real-time. The "why" enables new joinees to understand the thought process and the motivation in achieving a decision. 
7. In-person high-level design review meetings, energized sprints in bring-up labs, cross-team debug efforts, chance meet-ups for lunch in the company cafeteria - were good opportunities to bring people together for cross-team encounters. Bring them back as soon as safety protocols permit.

If you have reached this far, I owe an explanation for the title. Vaccines will be widely available by April. The first of May could be considered as the first day back at work in the office. May Day, celebrated on the first of May is a celebration of the Spring season. Corporate culture needs to be celebrated AND saved. The word for asking for help is "Mayday" repeated thrice, which itself comes from the phonetic equivalent of the French "venez m'aider" - come and help me. Too much cryptic crosswording at an impressionable age leads to an overly convoluted precis. 

What are your thoughts?

Kuntal.