What to do? Hire an anthropologist.
HOW CAN A CORPORATE ANTHROPOLOGIST HELP MY BUSINESS?
Corporate anthropologists work with companies to help them understand and if needed, change their culture. These cultures, which differ from organization to organization, embody management and employees’ core values, beliefs and behaviors which become the habits everyone falls back on to get their jobs done.
What a corporate anthropologist wants to know is, what are these cultural attributes? Are they working or in dire need of an overhaul? This is particularly important today as companies change, their employees change and their customers change. Culture has suddenly become vital for businesses to sustain growth and capture new business opportunities.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL METHODS
Here are some of the tools and methods anthropologists use to uncover what’s really going on inside a company. Try them yourself!
Deep Hanging Out. By shadowing people going about their jobs, we can understand a company’s culture and how it influences the way people get things done.
Capturing daily interactions. We listen in on customer call center interactions between customers and switchboard staff and hear how questions get answered and problems get solved, or not.
Video work getting done. When show employees what they are actually doing at work, they’re shocked at how different their “actual” activities are from their perceptions of them.
Observe staff’s interactions, especially emails. Emails are rich sources of information. Who do people copy and why? Who don’t they share communication with?
Take teams out exploring and observing. People become far better observers if they get out of their offices and actually watch consumers using their product or services.
5 LESSONS FOR BUSINESS LEADERS
Here are several important lessons for how and why anthropology could help you run a better business:
1.Look at your business as if you were just joining it, before you’ve become part of the culture itself. Spend a day in the life of one of your staff members or departments. Stay open to your observations, without any theories or assumptions.
2.Evaluate your company as if you were a consumer searching for a solution to a problem. See what it is like to buy and use your product.
3.Watch clients buy and use your products or services. Listen for unmet needs, challenges and pain points.
4.Bridge the generational gap. Boomers are approaching retirement and Millennials are coming on strong, approaching 50% of the workforce soon. They work completely differently, so go hang out with them to see if you need to build bridges between them and your older employees.
5.Almost 40% of U.S. businesses are now owned by women. The cultures they are building are very different from men-controlled companies. Go learn how and why.
MAKE NO MISTAKE: CULTURE IS A BIG DEAL
Company culture is not the outfit you wear to the office. It is inextricably linked to who you are and how you interact with others in the workplace. Is your culture doing fine or in dire need of an overall? A corporate anthropologist can help you figure that out and fix it.
Andi Simon, award-winning author of On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, is a corporate anthropologist and trained practitioner in Blue Ocean Strategy® (www.simonassociates.net). She is the founder and CEO of Simon Associates Management Consultants, designed over a decade ago to help companies use the tools of anthropology to better adapt to changing times. Simon also is a public speaker and an Innovation Games® facilitator and trainer. She served as a tenured professor of anthropology and American studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and was a visiting professor teaching entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis. Simon has appeared on “Good Morning America” and has been featured in the Washington Post, Business Week, Inc., Entrepreneur, the Los Angeles Times and Forbes, and on Bloomberg Radio.
