In this episode of BBC Best Bits, host Scott McInnes revisits earlier conversations with organisational‑culture experts Chris Dyer and Jane Sparrow to explore how work is changing in the era of office, home, and hybrid models. Chris defines culture as the set of norms and behaviours that shape how work gets done, and outlines his seven‑pillar framework for great culture – transparency, positive leadership, listening, celebrating uniqueness, recognition, and learning from mistakes. He illustrates the importance of handling mistakes with the 3M/Post‑it story and discusses how open sharing of P&L data builds alignment and psychological safety. Jane expands on the "remote‑working trap", warning that organisations often focus only on tools while neglecting belief and behaviour, and shares insights from Asian clients who have progressed further on the hybrid journey. Both guests stress the critical role of leaders: first caring for their own well‑being, then intentionally fostering human connection, mixing communication styles, and translating high‑level messages into personal relevance. The conversation concludes with practical advice for leaders to mix up communication, translate corporate updates into actionable, emotionally resonant guidance, and maintain ongoing support for teams in the evolving world of work.
Chapters
Office, home, hybrid— are we any clearer on how it actually works? In this episode of BBC Best Bits, we'll go back to episodes 37 and 71 with Jane Sparrow and Chris Dyer. We'll hear about how organisational culture is evolving as we continue to explore how we'll probably end up working for the next century, and that's about finding a happy balance between what employers need and what employees want.
Um, what is culture? Culture is the norms. It is the, the way in which we work. It's how we meet. It's all these like little things that are seen and unseen. So if you are on— if you started a new job and it's like, well, everyone's very hierarchical here, right? I can't ask for a meeting with my boss's boss. I have to go to my boss first. I have to get 19 levels of approval. Like, that's culture, right? In my organization, that would never happen. You show up, you want a meeting with me, if I'm the right person to be on the call, we get a group of us together. There is no hierarchy in that regards, right? We, we're very cautious of each other's time, but we're also like very open and free. So that's culture, right? There's very different ways of working. Both are good, both are necessary in those examples based on what you're doing or you're creating or you're selling or how big your organization is. But it's how you get stuff done. I will tell you, my co-author on the recent book Remote Work, she argues with me and says, no, culture is how it makes you feel. For some people, that definition works well. I think that's more of an outcome, right? How you feel inside of the culture, I think, is more of an outcome. But, um, what makes a great culture? Well, my first book really focused on that. We studied a lot of organizations. I had hundreds of people on my radio show, and we kept asking them a lot of the same questions. And there were some very distinct, consistent answers back from the best organizations. Vocabulary changed, right? Not everyone described it the same way, but they were saying the same things. And there's these 7 pillars of great company culture that I've identified. And you can look at any organization, you can compare Amazon to Google and Facebook to, you know, General Motors. You can look at these different companies who we might say they have great cultures. They've been around a long time. What is it they do really well that's consistent, even though they do it differently? Right? So transparency is one, that's a pillar. Positive leadership, being good listeners, celebrating what makes us unique, not what makes us the same. So uniqueness is really important. And a lot of organizations do a good job of focusing on their uniqueness and their value prop, like to their customers, but celebrating that internally. is really the organizations who get diversity and inclusion right. They get, um, you know, they're looking at how being different is better. Great organizations have recognition programs that work really well. So look at my recognition programs, it's really simple. We give green flags to people. It's not measured, it's not monitored, it's not salaried. And then you can flip and look at Caesars Entertainment, which we studied and it's a case study in my book, and they literally pay people like in gifts. And like there's this entire gigantic program that works so well, totally different, just as equally good, right? But they have a, they have a program that works well for them. Um, and, and so if you look at all these different, um, pillars, um, and, uh, oh, I think I forgot one, which was mistakes. So the last one I think is mistakes. So how do you deal with mistakes inside the organization?
Are you—
Someone makes a mistake, do you kill them? Do you fire them? Do you punish them? Or do you celebrate the mistake, figure out how to make it better, talk about it, celebrate it, you know, um, learn, learn from it? I mean, 3M is famous from this, right? I mean, people— most people know the Post-it story that literally a really crappy glue was documented. No one fired the scientists for making the world's worst glue. Instead, they documented it, put it in a database, and later on someone else came along. He needed a way to keep his paper on his choir stand when he was singing in a choir. And he found— I wonder if anyone else has a really crappy glue— and found it and put it on the back piece of paper and put there, that's Post-its. Bingo, right? So, if he hadn't internalized that, if they hadn't thought about it, they wouldn't have ever had— they would have fired that scientist, that experiment would have gone away, and we would have never had this Post-it. So—
And of course, that idea of making mistakes and how you deal with mistakes ties in beautifully to the whole area of, of course, psychological safety.
Right. What our P&L actually looks like. We tell people what our goals are. We tell them what we're trying to do. We, we share interdepartment goals. We share our goals of individuals on the same team. Because what we find is that if we realize that Tom on my team has totally different goals than I do, and he may be incentivized by them, he may be on a career track by them, and here I am trying to do something totally different, I'm gonna understand why Tom's not that interested in helping me get my goals done, right? Or as, and when he's got totally different ones, or we realize we're not aligned, we have opposing goals and only one of us can actually be successful and the other one can't. And usually that's unintentional. The organization unintentionally negotiates goals with people and things, and you don't realize that you're competing with each other in a way you shouldn't be. So getting all that out, it's all open, it's all, you know, out there. Really being able to have conversations with people and sharing as much information as what's legally and practically possible. Again, we share our P&L every single month, whether it's good news or bad news, right? And so people know. When it was COVID, we told them exactly what was happening. We talked to them exactly about what we were doing with the government programs and how long we thought we could go until layoffs might happen.
You talked recently in your article about the whole idea of a remote working trap. What is that, and why is it important?
Yeah, it varies depending on you as an individual, you as a team, and you as an organization. But really, what we know is that for all the years we've worked with culture, one of the things that often comes up and we work on is how you create a culture that thrives when some people are remote. Now, of course, what we've got now is a huge number of people working together that are remote, whether that's colleagues, customers, suppliers, and so on. And so there is a real danger that you get into the trap that we see anyway with remote working, but we're going to see it even more given the context we're in. And what that really is, is that we focus on just one dimension of equipping people rather than 3. So let me just explain that, Scott, because it's probably easier if I bring it to life and say that when we look at culture, we look at what we call the 3 pillars. So what we believe, how we behave, and what we use. So the belief being what we all believe in as a team or as an organisation, behaviour of course being how do we behave so that we're aligned with that belief, and then finally what we use is the tools, the systems, the processes, and the tech. Now with remote working, what we have seen with a number of teams and organisations is that there's been a huge kind of scrabbling around to get the right tech in place for people to be able to work at home, but of course what we also need to pay huge attention to is making sure enough conversations happen around the belief that a team have in this third culture that you mentioned, and also the behaviors that we're all going to adopt, because it is complex. Everybody's situation is different, and so it is complex. And the trap is that you just go to tools and techniques and the wealth of tips that are out there. Of course, you and I have both written those ourselves too, but that's not enough. And so some of the conversations that we've been having with leaders about how they're going to lead through this and bringing in some of the work that we've done in Asia, supporting companies over the last 3 months, that of course are at a different point in the curve, is really important to avoid that trap.
And what are some of the things that you've been talking to— I mean, obviously, your Asian clients are further ahead than we are on this journey. And arguably, although China are starting to reintroduce some of the things they'd relaxed, you know, they've been on a journey that we are probably about to go on or in the midst of. What are some of the things that they're doing or have done to bring staff on that journey. What's the role of a leader? Because we've often talked, and you talk to your clients as much as I talk to mine, about the whole managing versus leading thing. What is the role of a leader when it comes to that whole issue of people's emotions and people starting to feel emotionally stressed and that impact on well-being? What are some of the things that leaders are going to be doing or should be doing?
Yeah, I mean, I think what we, again, what we know from our experience in Asia here is that This is a totally different ballgame for leaders, and understanding that the way you lead in this situation because of context as well as the remoteness is critical, and the support that leaders need because they're human too. And so it starts, I always say, with leaders around look after yourself first, make sure that you are doing what you need to do to be productive and healthy and motivated, and then start doing the same with your team, because if you're not in good shape and if if you're feeling anxious and frustrated and disconnected, that will immediately show, of course, with all of your team and your colleagues and your customers more widely. So it really does start with you as a leader. Get yourself in good shape. Get the support that you need, and not just once, but keep it going as a drumbeat. And then start to think about how you lead your team. And one of the big things— I mean, there's lots in this, but one of the big things that we know is that leaders are going to require a lot more intention around connection with people at a human level. And I'm sure, Scott, that you share the same view as I do, that very often when we work with organisations and they'll say, can you help us with our communication? And you start to dig beneath the surface, and we certainly do this when we do culture audits, and we find that actually people aren't after more communication, they're after more connection. And therefore, at a time like we are in now, Never before have people needed to feel connected, and so there's a real leadership role here in terms of both keeping people focused, particularly those that perhaps are less self-disciplined, but also to keep people connected in different ways and really mixing it up because one size is not going to fit all for the duration of this new way of working.
One of the things I was just— I was running a webinar this morning, the one that I alluded to earlier on, but I was running it here for IBEC, which is one of the business representative bodies here in Ireland, and one of the things I said to them was that mixing it up is so important because it's all well and good getting some information emails or some content from on high in an organization from the CEO or the COO or the head of HR. But actually it's only when that information is contextualized or translated by your leader into what does that mean for us? How does that make you feel? What are some of the things that we can do differently or start, stop, and continue doing based on that communication that just came out, that it really becomes real for people. Thanks for listening. If you want to hear these interviews in full, you'll find links to each one in the show notes. And for more on Inspiring Change and the work we do, just pop along to inspiringchange.ie.
