What it’s like to work around here: That’s ‘climate’

Before I try to interpret the idea and uses of climate in the culture I work in, I need to give credit to the thinkers and practitioners who uncovered and developed the idea.

First, my colleague and a mentor, Michael Maginn.  When I told Mike a story about how challenging it is to face change constructively, we sound found ourselves discussing motivation and leadership.  Those themes pointed him toward my new favorite thinker and synthesizer of big ideas, Robert Stringer.

With George Litwin, Stringer measured types and characteristics of motivation.  They identified what would become six “dimensions,” the social science term for what you and I would call buckets.  In each bucket is a set of perceptions about the organization that describe subjective experience.  They then developed a survey that uncovers those perceptions.  It gets what people feel out in the open.  With enough data, it’s possible to express how strongly people feel about “what it’s like to work here” on a relative scale.

But the purpose of uncovering people’s feelings is not to help them feel better about working here.  The subjective experience of work is predictive of a number of important features that are effective:  ability to recruit strong candidates, ability to retain the best people, the extent to which people will engage with the work and make a commitment to the organization.

If you’ve been following the popular literature on employee engagement, you’ll know that the biggest difference between engaged and disengaged employees are:

• Whether motivation is triggered by the objectives set out for them and by the experience of trying to acheive them.
• Whether they are committed to the organization, which ripples far beyond work in what they say about the organization, whether others should join, whether people should do business with the organization, and whether it is on the right track.

What’s thrilling about Stringer (and his precursors and colleagues – more on them later) is that they have researched issues of motivation and identified many of the causal influences on it for more than forty years.  Engagement is just the current word for it.  (“Motivating employees” still sounds like thank you luncheons with the boss, attaboys, and at worst, a sophisticated psychic cattle prod.)

Undoubtedly there’s value in recognition and much has been learned since the first studies were carried out.  In fact, Stringers Leadership and Organizational Climate is only a few years old.  But the ideas have been tested and have stood up.  I hope they never become as catchy and popular as “engagement,” which will suffer under the weight of expectations placed on it.  I can easily see how climate is the thing you forget about once you’re factored its dimensions into the way you measure, manage, and lead the organization.