Jamie Notter

AUGUST 25, 2020

I’ve noticed that a lot of our clients are focused on decision making processes when they come up with action plans following their culture assessments. The action plans vary, but they usually involve an effort to clarify decision-making roles inside the organization. While everyone has a good general sense of who gets to decide on certain issues, it seems the devil is in the details, and everyone is not on the same page.

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Process Technology Organization 91

Jamie Notter

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Here’s a rundown of the content I put out there last month. I went a little big picture on the blog, addressing some of the tough societal issues we’re facing in the U.S. right now, and my Forbes post provides some advice on how management teams can integrate culture into their regular work and meetings. Human Workplaces Blog. Getting Ready for the New Wave of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Work.

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Jamie Notter

NOVEMBER 1, 2020

As you probably have already seen, Maddie and I announced that our company, Human Workplace, has now become part of the Association Success family of companies. This means big things for us, as we will be growing and expanding our offerings. Part of this will be a complete re-brand, however, so that has slowed down my blogging a bit this month–only two posts in October, but they are both giving you a hint of where we are headed.

Innovation 91

Innovation 91

Jamie Notter

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Here's a rundown of the content I put out there last month. I went a little big picture on the blog, addressing some of the tough societal issues we're facing in the U.S. right now, and my Forbes post provides some advice on how management teams can integrate culture into their regular work and meetings. Human Workplaces Blog. Getting Ready for the New Wave of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Work.

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Team Content How To 185

Jamie Notter

AUGUST 25, 2020

I’ve noticed that a lot of our clients are focused on decision making processes when they come up with action plans following their culture assessments. The action plans vary, but they usually involve an effort to clarify decision-making roles inside the organization. While everyone has a good general sense of who gets to decide on certain issues, it seems the devil is in the details, and everyone is not on the same page.

Process 149

Process Technology Organization 149

Jamie Notter

JUNE 4, 2020

When the pace of change goes through the roof, you will need new skills and new knowledge in order to adapt to the new reality. Providing those skills and knowledge, of course, is a big part of what I do, and since the in-person events are obviously being put off for who-knows-how-long, we just completely revamped our online training website, the Culture Campus , to help you keep up with the pace of change.

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Education Sample Course Class 140

Jamie Notter

MARCH 28, 2020

Normally, as a speaker, the spring is a very busy season for me, with lots of travel for conferences and events. But there is very little, as you all well know, that is “normal” right now. Not only is everyone postponing and cancelling events, employees are now shifting to remote working environments (with little to no prep), often at the same time that they are suddenly becoming home schoolers (with little to no prep).

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Jamie Notter

FEBRUARY 29, 2020

In our first two books, Maddie and I were fairly traditional on the dedication page—the first one went out to our respective parents, and the second one was dedicated to our respective kids. So when we put out The Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement last year, we took a different approach to the dedication: The reality in today’s workplace is that a large percentage of people simply expect work to suck.

Organization 91

Organization 91

Jamie Notter

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

I spoke last week at the American Cleaning Institute’s national conference, and the attendees were generally from large companies, many with a global footprint. I was presenting on the findings from our When Millennials Take Over book, and one participants asked me about the role of cross-cultural differences. Digital, clear, fluid, or fast are going to be interpreted differently in different cultures around the world, so how do you manage those differences?

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millennials System Conference Organization 132

Jamie Notter

DECEMBER 17, 2019

In case you missed it, Maddie and I released a new white paper earlier this month about our new maturity model for culture management. The title of the paper is the same as this blog post, The New Work of Culture, and we chose that title because we’re trying to wake people up a little bit here. There is NEW work to be done, folks. One of the reasons—maybe even the biggest reason—that most organizations plod along with fairly mediocre cultures is that leaders simply ignore the basic work that nee

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Class Leadership System Process 121

Jamie Notter

NOVEMBER 29, 2019

I was listening to a podcast the other day with Esther Duflo , a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, who was talking about the importance of empirical evidence when you’re trying to change things (in her context, reducing global poverty). A lot of economists base their interventions around some logical assumptions that turn out not to be true when you look at real behavior.

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Examples Survey Cost System 140

Jamie Notter

OCTOBER 1, 2019

When I do keynotes about employee engagement, I usually show this slide that documents the absolutely abysmal progress we’ve made on employee engagement over the last 20 years (the numbers are from Gallup). We’ve spent billions on engagement, by the way, yet we’ve only managed to increase the percentage of “highly engaged” employees from 30 to 34. I did the math: at that rate, we need another 297 years to get to 100%.

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Survey Strategy Leadership Team 133

Jamie Notter

JULY 31, 2019

I speak on many different topics—generations, Millennials, culture, employee engagement—but in both my recent keynotes and the ones I’m planning for later 2019 and early 2020, I am finding that the topic of culture patterns is what’s tying them all together. I’m working on a talk for October and the client wants a combination of the Millennial topic and the culture topic.

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millennials Examples Process Organization 32

Jamie Notter

JUNE 24, 2019

Earlier this month I spoke to a small group of COOs as part of an event put on by CEO Update. The session included me and another speaker on culture, Michele Gelfand, who is a professor at the University of Maryland and released a book last year called Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. The concept is that all groups (families, organizations, nations, etc.) have cultures that can be identified along a continuum from very tight to very loose.

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Maryland Class Innovation Resources 140

Jamie Notter

MAY 17, 2019

I was in Dallas this week speaking at an internal meeting at a large corporation. The session was on “Employee Engagement in the Real World,” and during the session I was talking about how Maddie and I define “deep success.”. One of the core arguments in our latest book is that employee engagement is ultimately driven by people being successful in the workplace (not being happy or satisfied).

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Dallas Organization 145

Jamie Notter

APRIL 4, 2019

Take a minute and look at your organization from the 30,000-foot level. You’ll see that you have a number of key functions that need to be managed well if you’re going to thrive. Some of them are infrastructure functions, like financial management. Some of them will be product- or program-related, and will be somewhat unique to your organization. Then you’ve got some kind of sales/revenue function (for nonprofits that might be around membership or fundraising).

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Course Revenue Leadership Resources 166

Jamie Notter

MARCH 5, 2019

The biggest reason our efforts to improve employee engagement over the last 20 years have been a horrible failure might surprise you: it’s because we’ve been trying to make people happy. Our collective image of an engaged employee is someone who likes coming to work, someone who smiles a lot, someone who has a positive sentiment about their workplace.

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Jamie Notter

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

This post is part of a new series investigating workplace culture at a more advanced level (hence the “401” moniker, like you only get access to this course your senior year…), digging into what we see emerging as the “essentials” of culture in the 21 st. century. Beware, these posts are often a bit longer. --. Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline nearly 30 years ago, so systems thinking is by no means a new idea—though looking at most organizations, you might think it was.

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System Case Study millennials Process 167

Jamie Notter

JANUARY 23, 2019

I was talking with a colleague the other day who said that in her experience, management retreats usually ended up at one of two extremes: either they were stellar and everyone loved them, or they were a disaster and people ended up quitting at the end. That may be a bit of an exaggeration—I’m sure many management retreats are more middle of the road—but it reflects a general fear among senior managers that management retreats are inherently dangerous, because they could do more harm than good.

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Jamie Notter

JANUARY 14, 2019

One of my mantras is that workplace culture isn’t as complicated, difficult, vague, etc. as we make it out to be. I’m not saying it’s super simple and easy, but it’s definitely something we all can handle. And since we push it away as “too complex,” we lack a tangible vocabulary for it, which only serves to reinforce our (inaccurate) conclusion that culture is hard.

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Leadership 177

Jamie Notter

DECEMBER 31, 2018

Since today is the last day of the year, I’m going to boil everything down for you. If I had to give ONE piece of advice to leaders who want to: get the most out of their organizations. attract and retain the best talent. beat the competition, or even make them irrelevant…. …it would be this: find and fix the patterns inside your culture that get in the way of your people being successful.

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How To Organization 168

Jamie Notter

OCTOBER 30, 2018

Here’s a typical scenario. You want to create a stronger culture, so you ask your people to articulate some kind of ideal culture. They tell you all the aspects they wish were present in your culture, and probably complain about some of the problems they now face, and you end up developing a list of ideas that capture what you think would be an awesome culture: collaboration, quality, innovation, integrity, etc.

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Innovation Organization 161

Jamie Notter

OCTOBER 10, 2018

When we were creating the Workplace Genome culture assessment, I had an assumption that organizations with really small staff would tend not use it. I used to joke: Hey, if you’re only 19 employees, then instead of the culture survey, why don’t you just sit around the table and hash things out!? But lo and behold, we’ve had a regular flow of clients with 15-25 people on staff since the beginning.

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Survey Process Organization 164

Jamie Notter

SEPTEMBER 20, 2018

EOS ( Entrepreneurial Operating System ) is a concept put forward by Gino Wickman in his book, Traction , and it is popular with many leaders. It’s a framework for leadership that includes some very clear processes for assigning roles, holding people accountable throughout the organization, and tracking key metrics. It seems particularly popular in the startup world, though I know people in larger, more established organizations who use it as well.

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System Leadership Team Process 113

Jamie Notter

AUGUST 17, 2018

I have to be honest here—I’m usually annoyed by economists. From my perspective, they tend to go overboard with logic and the notion that people are primarily driven by self-interest, because I think it strays just a little from the reality of being human. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised when an economist (and a big-wig at the Federal Reserve, no less) suggested that banks might need to pay more attention to their culture.

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Jamie Notter

MAY 11, 2018

I know that many leaders are losing sleep about low levels of employee engagement. So you think it would make sense to actively pursue engagement, right? I mean, who would want any disengaged employees? Okay, I agree: it would be great to have all your employees going home every day thinking to themselves, “Wow, this is an awesome job! It aligns with who I am and where I’m going professionally, and it allows me to be very successful personally, while still contributing to the success of the ente

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Process Technology Organization 96

Jamie Notter

APRIL 30, 2018

I led a great session in Wichita, Kansas this week with some really smart healthcare professionals. We had gathered some data prior to the meeting about the cultures inside their organizations, and then we got together to brainstorm some ideas about what they could do to encourage more innovation internally. The pattern in their data was similar to what I see in a lot of organizations when it comes to innovation.

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Innovation Wichita Kansas Strategy 98

Jamie Notter

APRIL 16, 2018

Awesome cultures seem to be the exception, not the rule. That means most of us are on the outside, looking in—wishing that we had an awesome culture like Zappos, Netflix, or the organization next door that keeps making the “best places to work” list. So when we can find the time, we work on our culture. We might try to be more agile, or boost innovation, or encourage more transparency.

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Innovation Process Course Communications 107

Jamie Notter

MARCH 28, 2018

I always enjoyed the film Parenthood , from the late 1980s. Steve Martin played a guy who struggled with being the perfect parent (which is, of course, impossible). But there was a scene where Jason Robards, who played Martin’s father in the movie, gave a great speech about how it never ends. Even though he was an empty-nest grandparent, he was still parenting.

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Leadership Course 123

Jamie Notter

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

The answer to the question about the CEO’s role in culture has a bit of a paradox in it, so let me ask two more detailed questions to get to the point. First question: Does the CEO drive the culture? No. The culture does not emanate from the CEO, with the exception of a startup with just one or two employees plus the CEO. In those cases, the CEO is in the process of creating a culture with the force of his or her behavior and personality, yes.

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Team Leadership Project Process 98

Jamie Notter

FEBRUARY 12, 2018

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in some of the Workplace Genome data of some of my consulting clients lately: Middle managers experience culture as less futurist than BOTH the people above them in the hierarchy, and the people below them. Think about that. Regardless of the organization (so far in our research, anyway), people who don’t manage at all experience the culture at least slightly more futurist than middle managers, and so do the senior people.

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Jamie Notter

FEBRUARY 5, 2018

I was talking the other day to a leader in an organization whose culture was fairly traditionally “hierarchical.” There was a clear hierarchy there, and people had it on their radar that you shouldn’t do things or say things unless someone above you in the chain either knew about it or had approved it. This also left the culture somewhat “guarded,” as people were often unsure what they could say, so they simply chose not to say much.

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Course Organization 114

Jamie Notter

JANUARY 26, 2018

I see a lot written these days about this mysterious new generation that follows the Millennials, often called Generation Z. Yes, just when you thought you had figured out the “kids these days,” now you have to start all over again with a whole new generation! Or do you? The whole reason I got into generational research (almost 15 years ago), is because when I started digging underneath the surface of what was being written about generations, I discovered a lot of really weak research and relati

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millennials eBook Analysis Survey 142

Jamie Notter

JANUARY 12, 2018

This week I released a new online training program in conflict resolution, and one of the lessons in the course talks about “valuing stories over truth.” People are sometimes surprised by that notion. After all, in this age of fake news, doesn’t the truth matter? Of course it does. But fake news isn’t just about lies. There’s a bigger problem: Oversimplification.

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Analysis Course Process 111

Jamie Notter

JANUARY 8, 2018

Happy new year everyone! 2018 is already shaping up to be a busy year, particularly in the speaking department. Here are some of the venues you can hear me speak in the near future, both online and in person: QuestionPro Webinar: Workplace Culture Benchmarking, Challenges and Opportunities. Tomorrow(!), Jan 8. This is free and it's the third part in a series, so sign up and you can get access to the previous two episodes as well.

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Miami Nashville Leadership Education 27

Jamie Notter

DECEMBER 21, 2017

People tell me all the time that culture change is hard. And while it may be hard work, I will tell you right now—it’s not as hard as you think. When we do our culture consulting , we help clients come up with a clear set of culture priorities for aligning their culture with what drives their success. The step after that is to develop a culture playbook that has a set of clear action steps for completing that alignment.

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Committee Recruiting Recruitment Examples 79

Jamie Notter

DECEMBER 5, 2017

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern among the organizations that have measured their cultures using our culture assessment to date. While every culture is unique, I’m noticing that when it comes to Markers like Agility, Collaboration, and Transparency, many organizations seem to be working hard on what I call the “human” side of those Markers, but they haven’t put quite as much work into developing the systems or processes to support them.

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