A Bad Workplace Culture Can Result in a Disaster, No Matter the Industry

A bad workplace culture is a hazard in itself. But even a mediocre one can contribute directly to a disaster. 

NASA won awards for being the “best place to work” among U.S government agencies. But the Space Shuttle Columbia failure, which resulted in the loss of seven astronauts and countless resources, was directly related to cultural factors. 

 Two cultural attributes, one big problem at NASA

Overall, NASA was a great place to work — smart people, lofty goals supporting the national interest, research-based projects with the best technology available, innovative, exciting, worthy. But ironically, two aspects of NASA’s culture paved the way for the disaster: organizational support, and upward communication. NASA scored low on these two cultural attributes, in contrast to high scores on others. If you knew the agency, this wasn’t a surprise. 

 “Organizational support” means the extent to which employees feel supported in their efforts to attain goals. In the high-performance atmosphere at NASA, the expectation was that the best performers got it done. “Your boss wants to hear about how you solved the problem, not how you’re hung up trying.” In itself, this is a good thing for an organization, but it can also be a hazard. 

 When engineers were unable to understand why foam was coming off the external fuel tanks on liftoff, and how damaging the foam could be, they needed to feel free to say, “I need help figuring this out.” But the culture didn’t support saying that. 

 Similarly, “upward communication” was needed to take the information to the people making “fly or no fly” decisions. But the cultural attribute was “tell them when you have it solved,” not when you’re stymied by it. 

 These two cultural attributes made it possible for NASA leadership to make the decision to fly with an unsolved problem capable of ending in disaster. 

Something similar took place with Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill and the Brumadinho dam collapse, as well as the mishaps presently going on with Boeing. It’s also seen every day in healthcare settings and airlines. The nurse who sees the neurosurgeon about to operate on the wrong side of the brain doesn’t feel it’s appropriate to say anything. The co-pilot sees the pilot headed for the wrong runway, but doesn’t think saying something is appropriate. 

 These are cultural attributes. Is there value in speaking up when necessary, even if it’s awkward? 

 The culture of the organization determines what we are or aren’t comfortable doing. Is speaking up likely to be appreciated or will the speaker be held in contempt?

 Again, these aren’t bad cultures, at least not in the extreme. This isn’t harassment or obnoxious leadership. 

 How to build a better culture

So what needs to happen in order to assure a culture that contributes to good performance? Start by understanding what organizational culture is. Then assess your strengths and weaknesses, and then develop a plan and strategy to close the gaps. 

 There’s what we do and how we do it. The latter is the cultural part. If restructuring requires lay-offs, people will remember how they were treated more than the fact that people were laid off. Were people talked to? Was the necessity explained? Were questions answered? Was appreciation and respect shown? Or, were people notified in the middle of the night by email, then shut out of contact? 

 Five cultural attributes, five questions to ask

Five cultural attributes have been identified and researched extensively: upward communication, organizational support, trust, leadership credibility, and teamwork. These attributes have been shown to predict performance outcomes across the board, including better quality, less absenteeism and turnover, better safety, and overall better performance. 

 To assess these attributes, conduct surveys (often done poorly, so this is a watch-out), interviews, and 360-degree assessments of senior leaders. Determine the gaps and then plan for how to close them. If you’re concerned about specific issues, dig in. Determine how much variation you have across leaders at different levels. 

 With the assessment data in hand, ask and then answer these 5 questions:

• What cultural attributes do we want to improve?
• How much variation exists in these attributes across our organization?
• Do our leaders understand how they’re creating the culture we want to change?
• Is there one area of performance we want to focus on — such as quality, safety, or productivity?
• What have we learned from previous experience about the barriers we’ll need to address in order to make this change?

Workplace culture survey guidelines to lean on

When developing a useful survey and implementation plan for improving your workplace culture, adhere to these guidelines:

• Avoid response bias. If 45 percent of your employees respond to the survey, it may be a better rate than last year, but that’s not necessarily representative. Instead, invite a sample of employees to attend a (mandatory) meeting, and give them the survey to complete on the spot. If you invite across the board and require attendance, you can have fewer than 45 percent of employees surveyed, but the validity of the sample will be much higher. Get your statistician to tell you how many people you need to get good representation. 

•  Don’t ask questions about things you aren’t prepared to deal with. The worst thing you can do for your culture is give another survey and let the results sit there and collect dust. 

•  Publish the results of the survey in plain language. Avoid just providing tables that put people to sleep. Opt for plain language statements not just of the findings, but what’s being done to address the issues.

•  Consider focus groups for survey findings you think are important but don’t yet fully understand. Have operations leaders run the focus groups after they’ve had training on active listening. 

•  Develop action plans to address areas you want to focus on to change. When you’re getting the word out about your action plans, make sure you’re communicating “here’s what we learned and here’s what we are doing about it.”

 When leaders actively create the conditions to ensure that upward communication and organizational support are valued and encouraged across the organization, they promote a safe and positive workplace culture — and help mitigate the potential for disaster.

This article was originally published in Talent Culture in October 2024. 

To explore organizational culture in greater depth, you can read Tom Krause’s book If Your Culture Could Talk:  A Story About Culture Change.