While we were writing the book The Secret of Culture Change, we often received skeptical looks. People would ask, “Is organizational culture really that important, given that more and more people are working from home, or from around the world?”

Our answer is: Yes. Indeed, if you have a geographically distributed workforce, creating and maintaining an organizational culture is actually more important, rather than less important, than if your employees are co-located. 

Here’s why: Organizational culture includes the norms, values, and beliefs that guide the actions of your employees when they confront challenges and opportunities that are not anticipated in employee manuals and training.  Since geographically dispersed employees don’t have the simple luxury of watching what their peers do in these situations, they will need to more frequently rely on their understanding of a firm’s norms and values compared to employees who are co-located.

Of course, building an organizational culture with a geographically dispersed workforce does present some unique challenges.  But, most of the principles discussed in The Secret of Culture Change apply in this setting.

A firm that has been successful at building a strong organizational culture, even though its 2,000 employees are spread around the world, is GitLab. As described in a recent Harvard Business Review article (Sijbrandij 2023, 30-33), GitLab was “born” with a dispersed workforce.  It tried building a more traditional work setting—once in Denmark and once in California—but ultimately decided that GitLab’s performance was enhanced by its distributed workforce.  And so, they officially became all distributed, have no headquarters office, and neither rent nor own any buildings.

So, how do you build an organizational culture with such a dispersed workforce?  The answer—not surprisingly to those who have read The Secret of Culture Change—is to engage in activities that build stories that communicate and reinforce the kind of culture you are trying to build.  As your employees share these stories—in this case, online—they begin building the kind of culture you want to see.  This is exactly what we saw business leaders do in our research for The Secret of Culture Change.

For example, GitLab is an open-source software development application.  Technical and cultural alignment are important in this collaborative space, and business leaders at GitLab have built stories that created, and reinforced, the importance of creating and maintaining this alignment.

So, for example, transparency in this context is vital. To create a culture that values transparency, the CEO of GitLab decided to exemplify transparency.  He does this by posting, online, not just his bio, but a list of his leadership flaws, advice from others about how to work with him, schedules of his routine meetings, and ways to schedule a time to meet with him one on one.  This CEO doesn’t just talk about the importance of transparency, he exemplifies transparency in a way that employees—no matter where they are located—understand. These transparent actions built stories that reinforce the importance of transparency throughout the firm. 

Another important cultural norm in this kind of distributed organization is collaboration. To facilitate collaboration, the company has an online policy document that tells employees how to do a wide variety of tasks. 

Having an online policy manual is not unusual. What makes GitLab’s manual unusual, however, is how it was written. Rather than being written only by senior managers or HR staff, this manual is crowdsourced. As employees apply the policies in the manual, they are invited to revise them, to make them more helpful in enabling the firm’s work to go forward. And when employees encounter situations that are not reflected in the manual, they are encouraged to share those experiences online, what they did in this context, and what they learned.

This online policy manual is, in a sense, a collection of the wisdom of GitLab’s employees. But, the process of creating and elaborating the manual also builds a story about the kind of collaboration expected at the firm. In short, GitLab uses collaboration to build a document that facilitates collaboration. 

GitLab also uses “theatrical” story building—one of the elements of effective culture-changing story building identified in The Secret of Culture Change—to reinforce and extend its culture.  For example, some employees at the firm changed the lyrics of the Chicago song “You’re My Inspiration” to “You’re the Iteration”—iteration is an important feature of their software.  Videos of senior managers singing this and other revised versions of popular songs at company Karaoke nights are widely shared throughout the company. 

Of course, having distributed employees does create challenges in building and maintaining a culture.  But, as GitLab has found, it is possible to build culture-changing stories that transcend time and space.

So, culture is still important, even in companies with widely dispersed employees.  In fact, it is usually more important in these settings than when employees are co-located.  And the tools for changing culture in these geographically dispersed firms are the same tools identified in the Secret to Culture Change—although their application may have to be modified for the online context.

References

Sijbrandij, Sid. “GitLab’S CEO on Building One of the World’s Largest All-Remote Companies.” Harvard Business Review, March 1, 2023. https://hbr.org/2023/03/gitlabs-ceo-on-building-one-of-the-worlds-largest-all-remote-companies.

Author: Jay Barney is one of the top three most cited scholars in the field of strategic management, who has published over 125 articles and book chapters, along with seven books. He is a full-time professor at Eccles School of Management at the University of Utah. Connect with Jay at JayBarney.org