Building Strong Organizational Culture with Ed Brzychcy

Welcome back to All About HR. I'm thrilled to be talking to our guest today, Ed Brixey. Ed has navigated a diverse career path, showcasing his versatility and expertise across multiple domains. With a background that spans the military, academia, and entrepreneurship, Ed has amassed a wealth of experience and insights that now he shares with organizations seeking to thrive in today's dynamic landscape.

He currently consults organizations on building effective teams, executing new strategies, and fostering innovative mindsets across their organizations. He speaks to the power of building an organizational culture as a unifying force and teaches organizational behavior, strategy, and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Massachusetts. Welcome, Ed. Hey, Laura.

Thanks. Great to be here. Just gets the ears turning better than anything else. Nice.

Do you play any musical instruments? I try to. too. Certainly not at that level, but no, I do play some guitar and it's a good way to chill out in the evening once I get home.

Love it. Love it. Well, I will say that you have a very interesting background and I want to know what was it that drew you to organizational culture? So it's been a weird rocky road.

I kicked off in the military. I joined not too long after high school. And after my time in the service, I actually bounced around for a while until I finally realized, okay, no, I should probably get that education. And then chose business simply because, okay, I could probably do something with this.

And then through that and working there, coming out after my MBA was, okay, I like consulting. I like strategy. I like leadership development in organizations. And just started doing some leadership development work independently.

I'm working with organizations on how to build leaders, how to build communications, how to built and just the size, the scope, the scale of the clients and products I've worked on. And now it's a lot more strategic where, hey, how do we build the organization that builds people? For those of us that don't know a whole lot about organizational culture, how would you define it? It's that shared norms between people.

It's the shared understanding, the unspoken rules that we have as we work together. And it's one of those, it's tangible, but intangible at the same time. I was at a conference a while back and there was an entrepreneurship conference going on and a tech vendor conference going on. The two sides couldn't be more different.

The tech, absolutely. These were a whole lot of technical engineers and they were doing their thing and a whole bunch of entrepreneurs on the other side of the conference center. And just the way they acted, the way they spoke, the way they held themselves. Just completely diverse populations.

But that's the culture. It's that unspoken, how people look, how they act, how they dress, and just all those little intangible rules that we start creating when we form groups of people. So, would you say that most of the organizations that you work with have intent behind their cultures, or is it more something that just happened? It's a mix.

I love working with the ones where there was intent and we have something to go off of, but it is. It's sometimes you come in because, oh, we just let things happen. Wow. Oh, what we need to get a handle on how people are in our organization.

And we see we're losing that glue that could bind us together. What would you say is the best practice for organizations? Is it to have intent or is it to let it just sort of free flow? It's top-down intent.

It's the leaders of the organization set the tone and they're the ones people are looking up to and mirroring behaviors on it. And so if they're not in the game, it becomes a free-for-all. What would you say are some of the biggest challenges that those organizations face in trying to build a culture? It depends on how late stage.

I was at an entrepreneurial group earlier this week and talking about this and the intent that you come in as the business leader, as the entrepreneur, and how do we want our organization to be? Do we want to remain innovative? Do we want to remain supportive? And how do we want to treat the people within our organization?

What kind of attitudes are we looking to bring in? And the more intent you bring there, the more well-defined you create those organizational values that you espouse as the founder and as the organizational leaders, the better. Through mature organizations, that's where things get to be tougher because you already have a certain set of unspoken rules. So how do we change and how do we create the iterative change to get to where we want to go.

Where can we start? What small habits can we start bringing in in order to lead to those larger changes down the line? Do you have a story that you'd like to share where you've worked with an organization, love to hear about, say, an established organization that had an established culture that maybe got off the rails and needed some help? How would you go about helping that kind of organization?

So I was working with an organization where we saw a lot of turnover within the early first year employees. It was just people not meshing well, people not coming in well, and they just. Weren't good fits overall for the organization and for it was for a non-profit organization and so we started looking at some of their hiring processes and the way they were evaluating people for the team and working with that moving away from strictly behavioral interviews towards a much more just engaged interview process to walking people through the centers walking people through the organization and seeing how engaged they were seeing what kind of questions they have seeing how they greeted people throughout it, and using that as a context to judge, okay, what's the attitude you're going to bring to work when you come to work with us?

And we went, after employing some of those practices, we went from over 100% turnover for early stage year one employees to about 60%, just under 60%. Just because we had better fit coming in, better attitudes, we could see how people were engaged and how they would act when that came in? How interested were they in being a part of the organization? And so just finding that better fit at that low level made for a tremendous change in the long term that helped out the organization overall.

I love that. So I know too, you speak a lot to just the employee experience in general. So how does the culture impact that full employee experience? That's the employee, as far as the culture is the experience, as almost repetitive as that sounds.

When we come and we build people into organizations, it's that the group feeling that we have and that group mentality is where people feel they belong. And it's that esprit de corps that we have from achieving something together as a group. Or it's that unspoken communication where there's that support and we're able to communicate back and forth. So if you want to go a little more technical, that psychological safety that exists for people in the workplace.

place. And that's the experience. And that's what we can create through having open communications where the boss's open door policy works both ways, where they're not just expecting people to come to them, but they're on the shop floor sharing the stories, trying to gain some deeper understanding of what's happening within their organization. How hard is it for managers and leaders to go the other way?

Because it is, it's pretty easy to do a passive. My door is always open. Much more difficult to take the active role. What's your experience in coaching or guiding that change mindset, maybe even for leaders?

There's a lot of discomfort there because you might get information that you weren't prepared for or things that... Those 10% of things I actually see versus the 90% of, wow, this is what's actually happening and the problems that could be occurring that don't get reported up formally. I think it's even more uncomfortable though. I was working early on in my career when I was doing a lot more leadership development work amongst supervisors and mid-level managers.

And the discomfort towards upwards communications was probably the number one issue. It was either discomfort around communicating upwards or providing negative feedback and coaching people. And I think when the senior leaders come in and engage in that top-down fashion and break that barrier and start establishing those relationships and trust, then all of a sudden the upward communication becomes a lot easier. They have the most ability to kickstart the cycle and getting past, oh, well, we're so busy or, oh, we're just concentrating on the outside piece.

We just expect things to be done here towards taking those few minutes and inquiring, hey, how are things going? Hey, why is that machine still broken? What's happening over here? Hey, are your supplies okay?

And it's amazing the amount of feedback that they can get when you appear interested and when you are interested. instead. Yeah, it's a crazy notion where actually asking somebody what's going on and how they're doing that you'll get the response. Take a walk around and just talk to people, observe, see what's going on and have an open inquisitive mind and be interested in them and they're going to be interested in you.

Absolutely. So I was thinking a little bit more about what can organizations do better? How can organizations be better for that employee experience? It definitely sounds Sounds like one of the things they can do better is top-down leadership can go out and engage instead of expecting passive information or expecting it.

If something is a problem, somebody will come to them being actively engaged, where a consequence of not being actively engaged or actively seeking out that information is maybe finding out that early first-year turnover could be a consequence of that. Oh, certainly. I mean, it's the consequence of not without the top-down engagement. That's where we see a lot of that stratification appearing in organizations.

So that horizontal barrier between the executives and the management or between the management and the employees, that's where all of a sudden, you know, the executives come up with a new five-year plan and, oh, we got this new idea. We're going to be charging forward. They present it to the employees. The employees are like, oh, what's a good idea for you to come up with this time?

And just sit this one out. It'll be three months. We've got to make some changes for a little bit, but we'll be right back to normal after that. And avoiding those sorts of mentalities means engaging with the people and incorporating some of their ideas into the decision-making process to get a lot more feedback from the people who are actually doing the jobs.

And wow, you can see that process improvement turns much more iterative rather than just trying to force change. Yeah. Do you see that a lot as an issue? Because we have talked in previous version of our podcast about the decision-making process.

So do you see that in your consulting work that the way, how are decisions made? Is that problematic in organizations? It can be. I mean, it's sometimes without clearly defined criteria or with incomplete information, without at least asking for advice.

I mean, it's not so much coming up with pure consensus across the organization, but because business decisions do have to be made. But having better depth to those decisions can always be helpful. There's always room for improvement there. Let's say it that way.

And I mean, I think you just said it where you have involving the stakeholders or involving those that this decision is going to impact. So instead of blindly making it without their input, actually seeking out their input goes a long way to having buy-in ultimately, right? Exactly. And it's not all of a sudden once a year having them fill it out into the survey, but it's that continuous presence and that trust that can be built.

You're just going to passively absorb a lot more information that way than trying to do those one-time surveys or all of a sudden, hey, we're thinking strategic change. If you're having conversations and you have managers who are willing to speak and speak up and report, hey, here's some of the things we're seeing coming down the pipe, that just helps the executive decision-making process down the line. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I heard an example of an established company had culture.

Maybe having some issues with it, and then how you might navigate that. What about an organization, brand new, doesn't have any culture yet? How would you guide a startup or organization like that? Startups are fun because they're still young and agile enough and they can make the changes that they need to make without going through a million different layers.

But at the same time, there's no better time to start establishing, here's who we are as an organization. Here's what we believe in. Here's what we're passionate about. The owner, the entrepreneur being present within the organization and driving that through a lot of their early hires and looking for those good attitude and fit for the long term.

People who are just as excited about the idea want to grow with it as well. So there's a big challenge there, but there's also a lot more opportunity because if you set that solid foundation for the long term, you're going to see a lot better success later on as you start to grow. And as you start to scale, you already have a certain ethos across the company that you can build. Yeah, absolutely.

On that note, all right, Right. I think it's time for a quick break. So we're going to take a break for the HR hot sauce and we will be right back. All right, we are back.

That was the HR hot sauce. Getting back into the conversation with Ed, we're talking about organizational culture and ultimately the employee experience with that. Taking a pivot here on that particular conversation, what are some emerging trends you're seeing now around organizational culture or the employee experience or both? Certainly.

The biggest trend we're seeing is traditionally we have stratification and siloing as organizations mature. Those are the typical divides we almost always see being created. In the last couple of years since the pandemic, there's now a digital divide. And we're seeing a stark contrast between the digital, remote, or semi-hybrid employees and the ones that are coming back into the office.

And it's showcasing now we're starting to see the data around these digital employees are more likely to be laid off digital employees are more likely to miss out on promotions and raise opportunities and it's simply because the their presence on the screen doesn't equate with the presence in the office so how do you rate them oh they were good at their job check so we just don't really know who that is and it's just easier to say okay yeah sorry that you're not going to be able to continue with us as an organization with us because we have to tighten the belt a little bit.

And that gap is damaging. It's really difficult to incorporate somebody who is remote full-time. We can hire talent outside of our main geographical area. So bridging that has become very difficult.

It's become very challenging to find new ways to incorporate people into the the organization and the culture and make them really part of the team when they're a thousand miles away and they're only present on the screen. Oh, yeah. And this sounds specific to organizations that have a hybrid model. So you have some folks in the same job title, that some work remote, and then some go into an office.

And even in organizations that have the hybrid model, we've seen cases where there's a new employee that wants to work in the office and they show up on their first Tuesday and they're like, I have a whole office to myself. I'm brand new. What's going on here? And so finding ways to build that community has been a challenge.

Have you seen any best practices around that? So a best practice I've been using a lot since the pandemic was don't be the last one. If you're hosting the Zoom call, if you're hosting that remote meeting, don't be the first one to log off. Don't just close the meeting and allow everybody to go.

Give people that opportunity to ask that last minute question. We always had that in the conference rooms. So give people that extra moment. If they have a last minute issue they want to raise, go for it.

Same thing. I've seen a lot of organizations that are putting in, especially some new entrepreneurial organizations that might be more disparate. They're putting that budget line item in to say, hey, no, we're going to fly you in once every two months. We want to get to know you.

You're our new employee. You're remote. You're over there, even halfway around the world in some cases. No, we want to see you at least every other month or so in our office so we can get to know you.

You're a part of the team. You're a valued employee. And even I was talking to a company that was doing that and they even said, oh yeah, we had a lot of pushback at first. Oh, I don't want to fly all the way over there.

No, we're flying online. And once they got involved and they became part of it and they realized, wow, it's great to get to know everybody I'm working with and all that little small talk and water cooler talk and just that relationship building time is something, it's something people look forward to. And it's something that they're excited to be able to do. Oh, yeah.

They brought people back. in just to cycle them through the office. Keep those relationships with the home office strong so that when you're out in the field, you know who you're talking to on the phone. You know the level of support you can get back here.

So incorporating and fighting the budget for it is tough, but it's worth it in the long run. Same thing if you are digital, give some best practices and spend some time getting to know people. Start the meetings a little bit later and allow for some of that small talk or just the same at the end of the meeting. Don't just Just hit that red close button, give people a couple minutes to say their last words or ask that final question and be engaged.

I can speak from personal experience. So our company, we are all entirely remote. And I mean, exactly what you're saying. There are unique challenges with a workforce that is entirely remote.

And we did something really fun in our company meeting. The owner sent out a question basically saying like, send us an interesting fact about yourself. And then they put it all together and sent out the list without anyone's names attached. And you had to kind of figure out which interesting fact went to which person.

And then we spent the meeting going through each of the facts and it was really fun. One, hearing people's guesses on each of the facts and then ultimately finding out the interesting fact and who it belonged to. It was the warmest I think I've ever felt on a company meeting. It was really, really nice.

That's great to hear. There's fun little ways to do it and it's just those little icebreakers. It's the human moments that you could bring into the meetings that matter most. Oh, yeah.

You shared a lot of that online. So finding the time and the means for it is important as we see, you know, it's a normal business model now to have a distributed workforce. So what can you do to maintain something personal about it? So, okay.

With that, what changes do you want to see in the workplace this year? I'd love to see better team building, for lack of a better word. I'd love to see better that human aspect and understanding businesses, we're here to execute on task and we have a mission to accomplish, but it is people doing the work that accomplishes that. So the more that we can recognize and we can build up the people in our organization, the more we can create that shared culture, that shared sense of well-being and shared sense of passion, the better.

Together and just finding the little ways within the workforce to take those little pauses, to take those moments and say, Hey, we're in this together and you're part of the team and you're a valued member of the team and your contribution matters. Do you have any best practices around building teams? Gratitude goes a long way. Yeah.

I love, sometimes I'll do workshops and I'll ask the executives, when was the last time you said thank you to your team members? It's funny seeing, you see some that are really excited because they see they've done it and they've gotten the feedback and they've created that. You see others that are just kind of sitting back in a chair a little bit. It goes a long way and it's simple acts of kindness.

It's simple acts of gratitude that set the stage for a lot bigger change, and they just provide that foundation for the human element within the organization. Oh, yeah. A simple thank you, a simple acknowledgement. It goes a long way.

I think you have a lot of small little positives that will always, always add up to that one big thing that you could do. I love the small things. The baby steps add up faster than you'd imagine. So you might say it's like for teams and team building, because I feel like I've read some things where you have to have certain personality types in a certain way.

So it's less about that and more about the actual interactions. It is. It's the active reactions. I mean, I love using some of the assessments and you see great mix.

You should never have a homogenous team of all this set of people. Bring in the dynamicism, bring in the outside opinions, bring in some new thoughts and ways of thinking. And the more you can do that in your organization, the better. We're all still human.

We all still appreciate one another and those acts we can do. Foster those little times to communicate and build those solid relationships and to recognize what everybody brings to the table. We don't want a whole bunch of the same person trying to make a decision. We want a nice diversified workforce that's going to share new ideas.

What are some of the rewarding moments that you've experienced like that, either as a consultant or as a professor or anywhere in your work life? We do a class every semester within one of the courses I teach, and it's about covalent integration. Going around the classroom, I have students from all over the world in there, and it's, tell me how to say thank you in your language. And then just sharing that amongst everybody, and everybody leaves with that one word.

And it's such a powerful experience to see people opening up who you know they're in america they're having the course in english all of a sudden get a chance to speak their own language and share a little bit of knowledge i think it turns into one of the most positive experiences i've ever seen in the classroom just seeing the feeling of everyone elevate and we usually do it early in the semester to kind of build up the classroom and it's just such a great experience for everyone i'd love to see that level of just shared wealth and shared knowledge and all of a sudden people are just like, wow, that was a small thing, but it's so rewarding to give people that moment to share.

Do you teach in person or virtually? We all go in person. You had any experience in virtual teaching? Is there a difference?

Absolutely. 100%. I love being in the classroom, just like with clients and consulting, trying to do as much onsite visits and knowledge gathering as possible. I mean, we do quite a bit digitally because it's just convenient.

But every now and again, for getting to know and kicking off the projects or wrapping things up, making sure there's that personal touch goes a long way. I wish I could quantify the difference between doing something in person versus something virtually. Because it's one of those things that on paper you can check boxes and say, yes, all of these things happened. But then it's all of the little things that are in between, which I suppose maybe even takes away a little bit of the spirit and the element.

That's the hardest thing in the OB world is so much of our work is non-quantifiable. It is. It's emotional intelligence. It's feelings.

And how do we build that in organizations? And you can quantify sort of the positivity that you bring to it and the change you see and the way that people interact. And you can see the long-term results in people's just feeling part of the organization and the turnover rate can go down or productivity and the feeling can go up. Promotions, people see better opportunities, you see more job expansion and sharing.

So you can quantify some of those distant metrics, but overall, just having that esprit de corps in an organization is a measure. All right. Well, do you have any predictions for the future of organizational culture? It's always changing.

And it's really exciting to see what new generations are bringing to the table. I know there's this big divide on, oh, we don't know how to engage Gen Z as they enter the workforce. And oh my God, there's so much change. But at the same time, they're bringing new ideas.

They're bringing new wealth and they're bringing new spirit into it. And it's sometimes a matter of finding those good mentorship patterns where, hey, we're going to pair them up with the older employee to share. So the other employee can share their experience and the older employee can share, well, you know what? We've tried things similar in the past.

What's temper that? And maybe we can try this in the middle. And I think if we find more opportunities to do that, we can come up with some really cool new innovations and we can solve a lot of these problems that we see cropping up in the workforce where people don't feel that there's a digital divide. Or maybe we can help eliminate some of the barriers to communication that we might have created within our organizations.

Oh, I love that. I love that. All right, Ed, it has been a pleasure talking with you. Is there anything else that you would like to share with us before we sign out for the day?

Thank you, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to talk. You can always find me on my website, leadfromthefront.net.

I welcome any and all conversations. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of All About HR.

Stay tuned for more engaging conversations and expert insights. Until next time, this is Laura Hundley signing off. Take care, stay inspired, and keep innovating in the world of HR. char.

Understand, engage, inspire, and retain your people like never before. PeopleElement's employee experience and engagement solution delivers powerful intelligence, giving you the confidence to act. To learn how you can gain a better understanding of your employees, please visit us at peopleelement.com.