In this world of hybrid work, how to build and maintain long-lasting and impactful relationships at your company can be a head-scratcher of a question.

The Culture Kit hosts, Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, are here to help. On today’s episode, they’re answering a question from HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan about how to keep employees connected whether they’re at home or in the office.

1. Engage – connect people to the broader culture through meaningful shared experiences.
2. Expand – make those shared activities opportunities to broaden their networks within the organization.
3. Experiment – be open to new ways of creating connection, while also being willing to drop bad ideas and adjust over time.

• Our Work-from-Anywhere Future [Harvard Business Review]
• Work-from-anywhere: The productivity effects of geographic flexibility [Strategic Management Journal]
• The Future of WFH [2024 Culture Connect Conference slides – Nick Bloom]
• Does Working From Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment [NBER]
• The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers [Nature Human Behavior]
• When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology]
• How to Build Your Network [Harvard Business Review]
• In the Changing Role of the Office, It’s All about Moments That Matter [Microsoft]
• How Working from Home Boosted Golf
• Case Study: How Visa taps into volunteering to keep its hybrid workforce engaged [TLNT]
• Is Commitment Getting Infected Too? How COVID-19 Stay-Home Orders Influence Workgroup Commitment
• The Ritual Effect
• Remote Work Revolution

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer, a podcast created by the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

In this inaugural episode, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava—two Berkeley Haas professors who have dedicated their careers to studying and advancing workplace culture—answer a question from WD-40 CEO Steve Brass about how to create and maintain a strong workplace culture.

What does it mean to have a strong culture? According to Jenny:

“A strong organizational culture is one where people both agree about what's important and care. And so if you think about in your head a two-by-two box here, which is what academics love to think in terms of, you have one with agreement, low-high, one with intensity, low-high. If you're high on both, you have a strong culture. If you're low on both, you have a weak culture. But if you're high on agreement but low on intensity, you have what we call a vacuous culture. Everybody agrees, but nobody cares. And you could be high on intensity but low on agreement, and there you'll probably have a lot of conflict, or what we call warring factions. So those are the possibilities for how strong culture can array.”

Jenny and Sameer also discuss the dark side of strong culture. According to Sameer:

“I think it's also important to keep in mind that strong cultures can also have a dark side, and an organization with a culture that is too strong can quickly become stifling and fail to recognize the value and importance of non-conformists who are often really central to efforts to innovate and change the culture over time. In fact, if an organization's culture becomes too strong, it can actually take on the qualities of a cult. And so there's a risk of having a culture that may be just too strong.”

The two also discuss Jenny's take on Netflix and Genentech's cultures and how leaders even know how strong their culture is.

1. Define – understand what a strong culture is and its purpose
2. Assess – understand how to assess and track it over time so you know if there are gaps between what your current culture emphasizes and what you need to be emphasizing strategically
3. Reinforce – recognize that culture needs to be consistent and comprehensive so that people believe it’s real and are willing to support it

• Leading by Leveraging Culture
• Genentech Case Study A and B
• Company Culture Soars at Southwest Airlines [Forbes]
• New Analytics of Culture [Harvard Business Review]
• Language as a Window into Culture [California Management Review]
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

The world of work is truly a work in progress. There are so many unanswered questions.

What's the best approach to bringing workers back to the office? How can you keep remote and on-site workers from forming silos? How can you restore trust after layoffs? Is it possible, or even desirable, to get back to the culture you had before the pandemic? There’s lots to think about, and we’ll be thinking out loud in our new podcast: The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer.

I’m Jenny Chatman. And I’m Sameer Srivastava. We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School who have dedicated our careers to studying and advancing workplace culture.

We'll think through the questions you're struggling with today and share insights based on evidence from the latest research. You'll come away with concrete steps you can take to start fixing your company's culture right away.

Tune in to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Starting April 2 on your favorite podcast platform.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*