Cultural change starts with action

As a Gen Z working in the corporate world, generally, the cultural changes that are made within the company don’t affect me much (since these changes are mostly made for new generations of employees). So, started working remotely? I spent most of my teenage years inside my room in front of my computer discovering every corner of the internet. Changed from having a schedule to goals-oriented work dynamics? amazing, I never even worked much on a schedule to get used to it.

And it’s been like that with every minor change that we’ve gone through in the past months. I also think it hasn’t affected me much because we’re used to change, so we tend to adapt way faster. But here are some things I’ve noticed happen when our company starts implementing cultural changes like the ones I mentioned.

Minor changes don’t affect people as much, one time, we changed our internal messaging provider and no one could care less. On the other hand, most of the barriers I’ve seen happening are related to how the traditional structure of work was taught: schedule, workplace, or power relationships. This is natural because it has been proven that those kinds of structures, although toxic, create a dependency.

But what I’ve seen always works better for my co-workers to adapt to a new change, is seeing other people doing it too. For example, the change to asynchronous scheduling was really difficult because we already related working hours to productivity. Understanding we don’t have to sit in front of a computer for 7 hours to be productive was the biggest challenge.

So more than anything this is a call to anyone in charge of improving organizational culture or dynamics, changes are always better perceived when we can see others benefiting from them. Act upon those changes, otherwise, the adaptation process will be far more difficult.