Until the last decade or so, organisations almost universally talked about “Human Resources”.  Within the last decade, there has been an increased shift towards the language of People & Culture.  While some may cynically see this as the equivalent of changing the curtains, the truth is so much more.

Indeed, the change in language acknowledges the central role culture plays across all aspects of our organisations, and the opportunities it brings.

The significance of workplace culture to both employee experience and legal compliance cannot be overstated. A ‘good’ workplace culture can serve as the backbone of organisational success, influencing everything from employee satisfaction and productivity to legal compliance.

From anti-discrimination laws to wage compliance to workplace health and safety, our employment laws create a complex framework that governs the depths of the relationship between our organisation and our people. Seeking our people’s compliance with these laws through a system of rules that demand mere adherence to legal standards is unlikely to set our organisations up for the success we want them to have. Managing these things through the prism of culture is not only more likely to achieve compliance, but also to build a single-point framework in which all business goals can be aligned and pursued.

For example, at the heart of a compliant workplace culture lies core concepts such as respect and inclusion. While employment laws prohibit sexual harassment and discrimination on various prescribed grounds, a workplace culture that focuses on these broader guiding principles is more likely to achieve practical compliance by giving employees a clear standard of behaviour to align to, while also opening the opportunity to dove tail with other cultural objectives such as high performance.

Similarly, if we establish and maintain a culture of respectful but transparent communications around performance (and not just performance management), we in turn open the door to fostering thought and discussions around innovation. Through these discussions, we open the door to a more consultative workplace, where discussions around change and work health and safety become ‘normal’, rather than inducing a defensive emotional response in the participants.

The focus on culture also provides a framework for us to more broadly manage the obligations imposed through recent waves of legislative change. For example:

• A workplace culture where remuneration models and outcomes are transparently tied to the achievement of clear business goals will foster an environment where concerns around the abolition of pay secrecy is academic, and productivity and work behaviours are more closely aligned with a high-performance culture.
• A workplace culture that normalises respectful and proportionate discussions around performance at all levels (not just poor performance), is a culture where the psychosocial risks associated with performance management are significantly reduced.
• A workplace culture that is based on concepts or respect and inclusion, is a workplace culture that has a clear foundation for the discharge of its positive duties for the elimination of sexual harassment and discrimination.
• A workplace culture where employees are trained on how to have respectful and proportionate discussions around matters of interpersonal conflict, is a culture where the risk of a hostile working environment occurring is significantly reduced.

But of course, knowing the culture we want and establishing the culture we need can only be achieved if we understand the drivers for the culture we have.  Our culture is formed less by the values we publish for ourselves, and more by the everyday behaviours we permit. Getting visibility of those behaviours can be a significant part of the challenge, and this is where ‘good’ organisations go the extra step. By focusing on the data we need to collect, and genuinely engaging with the data we have, we can generally get a good flavour of where our attention might be needed, but not why it’s needed. More often, there can be little substitute for a well‑crafted culture audit, enabling good organisations to get a cross-sectional understanding of all facets of its workplace culture. Almost universally you’ll discover that the issue is less to do with stated values or the goals of the top-down systems, and more to do with how our people manage our people in practice. Culture is everything.

Chris Oliver, Director