Culture change: what we owe the people we work with

After a presentation by Guy Nasmyth, an organizational development scholar and systems thinker, I had a short conversation with him that stayed with me. He said organizations are most effective when they are understood as communities.

In my engagement work, there is a promise we make to the public that few organizations make to their own staff: your input will influence the decision, and you will hear how it did.

I wrote about what happens without that promise long before I worked in communications. As an undergraduate in Kamloops, I wrote an essay on the chorus in Sophocles' Antigone, the advisers who watch their ruler head toward ruin and say nothing. They present themselves as detached, objective and wise observers. I argued they were not. "Perhaps if they had risked their position earlier they could have circumvented the destruction."

My master's research at Royal Roads University later gave that instinct a finding. Impacted groups question the purpose of their participation if it does not affect outcomes and they do not get to choose.

Donella Meadows argued that a system's structure is the main source of its behaviour. In an organization, structure means how information moves, who can influence a decision and what happens to the person who points out a problem. On that view, disengagement is an output of structure. People who feel like members raise problems. People who feel like position-holders often stop, because raising a problem requires believing it will matter.

The research record agrees. Amy Edmondson's studies of hospital teams in the 1990s found that teams where people felt safe to speak up surfaced and discussed more errors, which allowed them to learn from them. The teams that looked worse on paper were the ones willing to say what had gone wrong. Google's Project Aristotle, an internal study of 180 teams, ranked psychological safety first of the five dynamics it identified. Who was on a team mattered less than how the team worked together. When people stop reporting what they see, the organization loses a feedback loop, and it usually loses it quietly. Suggestion boxes tend to fill with silence long before they fill with suggestions.

Public engagement practice formalized this principle decades ago, for audiences outside the organization. The core values of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), which inform my own engagement work, state that public participation includes the promise that the public's contribution will influence the decision, and that it communicates to participants how their input affected it. The IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation attaches a stated promise to each level of engagement, from inform through to empower.

Engagement professionals treat these commitments as the baseline for credible practice, because experience has shown what happens without them. Communities that are consulted and then ignored stop taking part. The same mechanism operates inside organizations, where it has no equivalent standard. An organization's credibility with the public is built, in part, by people whose daily experience tells them whether their own organization keeps its promises.

None of this is quick. Edgar Schein described culture in three layers: visible artifacts, stated values and the assumptions people act on without stating them. Most change efforts work on the first two, where progress is easy to report. Assumptions shift only through consistent behaviour over time, as leaders accept hard feedback without penalty to the person who gave it and make decisions that follow stated values even when doing so has a cost.

Before your next internal change goes out, make your staff the two promises you would make the public: their input will influence the decision, and they will hear how. Say who decides and by when, and which parts are still open. Report back on the date you gave, including what you did not adopt and why. Then thank the first person who brings you bad news, where others can hear it.

Guy Nasmyth's point was that organizations work best as communities. Engagement practice has already written down what a community is owed.

Further reading

• Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, on why structure produces behaviour.

• Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization, on psychological safety in practice.

• IAP2 Core Values and Spectrum of Public Participation, iap2.org, on the promise engagement practitioners make to the public.

About the author

Alesha Hayes, MA, APR, is principal of A. M. Hayes & Associates, a communication and public relations practice based in Victoria, British Columbia. Her work brings together strategic communications, organizational development and public engagement, with attention to how decisions are made, how people become involved and what it takes to earn their trust.

Subscribe to Insights for new writing on communication, organizations and public life.