Organizational Culture: The Challenge of Inclusion by Caroline Simard

I have written a lot here about the representation of women in technical roles in industry and what companies need to do to increase the representation of women. However, any effort to recruit, retain, and advance technical women will ultimately be unsustainable if organizational cultures are not changed to be more inclusive for diversity.

Have you ever had “diversity fatigue”? Many employees have become weary  of diversity initiatives that they see as having little real effect on the actual organizational culture employees have to work in every day. The problem is that many organizations focus on activities rather than on the more difficult task of cultural change.

An organization’s culture can be roughly defined as the “rules of the game,” including the norms of behaviors, language, structure, and shared understandings of “the way things work.” (For a detailed overview of all the definitions, see Edgar Schein’s 2004 book, Culture and Leadership). Given what organizational culture is – a marker of the “rules of the game” and “shared meaning”, it is not surprising that it routinely runs up against the concepts of diversity and inclusion. The concept of culture itself implies that some behaviors are accepted and others are not; some styles are “in” and others are “out.” – some are players in the game and others are not. Culture is annoying in that it enables a group to function in a stable manner and move in the same direction; it has been touted as a great source of competitive advantage, and yet, it is also an impediment to innovation and change – it shuts out divergent voices, minimizes dissent, and acts as blinders on an organization. It seems to me that building an “inclusive culture” is the ultimate challenge, since the definition of culture is the establishment of norms for what is in and what is out.

However, at the very least, an organization’s culture should strive to reflect the diversity of its employees and its consumer base. The price to pay in having a monolithic culture is a loss of talent and innovation. One study found that organizational culture was the biggest predictor of employee retention and performance (Sheridan, 1994 – Organizational Culture and Employee Retention, Academy of Management Journal, 35(5)).  One of the ways organizations avoid having to deal with culture change is by hiring for “cultural fit” – while I understand that hiring is the most important decision of a company, hiring for “fit” also drives an organization to homogeneous behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, and fails to draw on a diverse population of employees.

Consider the following comment from a technical woman we interviewed in our survey of 1800 technical employees in Silicon Valley:

“In the tech industry, if you're not a total dick, if you don't walk in there and you're not loud and obnoxious and throw your weight around and stuff, [you can’t get taken seriously]. The warm, nurturing is seen as weak and the loud obnoxious is seen as powerful… And so going into a room with a bunch of guys who want to scream, yell and throw insults at each other was just not the kind of place I wanted to be. … I was constantly getting interrupted, even from people who I didn't consider to be jerks…. And then I would suggest something and people would be talking over me, and then a guy would suggest the same thing and of course people weren't talking over him.”

The woman above, who had more than 10 years of experience as a technical woman, voted with her feet and left that culture that she felt did not value her communication style. The message she was getting was that to fit in, she would have to learn to be loud and obnoxious and throw insults around, and act like a “jerk.” She was not alone in her view – several women and men discussed the perception that acting like a “jerk” was a pre-requisite to advancement in the technical culture of some companies. In our interviews, I also heard men and women talk about the use of swearing in meetings as a way to be taken seriously in some tech and engineering cultures, whereby one’s ability to holler the F-word is somehow a prerequisite to be taken seriously. I find it interesting that some of these organizational cultures are built upon behaviors that are not even considered acceptable in the mainstream Western culture, let alone in other countries’ culture; I doubt that the engineers who have to holler the F word to be heard are teaching their children to swear and interrupt others as a recipe for life success. This kind of culture not only weeds out those women who do not embrace this communication style, but many men from diverse backgrounds and anyone who has a personality type or personal values that go against these behaviors.

This is not to say that the ideal culture is one where everyone is overly “nice” and everyone speaks in turn without raising difficult questions. At the extreme, a “nice” culture would lead to the same loss of innovation potential by being too averse to conflict and debate.

So where is the magic formula for a culture to leverage inclusion for greater innovation? The goal is to design  an organizational culture that encourages the sharing of diverse points of view, with an emphasis on team members representing the best interest of the organization as opposed to their own self-interest. (See: Dwyer et al, 2003: Gender diversity in management and firm performance: the influence of growth orientation and organizational culture. Journal of Business Research, 56(12); Chatman, J.A. et al, 1998. Being different yet feeling similar: The influence of demographic composition and organizational culture on work processes and outcomes. Administrative Science Quarterly, 43).

For insights on breaking barriers to cultural change in technical cultures, see the following report.