March 2022
In the third episode of our ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast series for 2022, Partner Lucy Lewis speaks to Kit Krugman, Managing Director and Derek Newberry, Senior Director of co:collective’s Org + Culture Design practice.
In this episode, Kit and Derek discuss their approach to gender parity and what companies can do to create greater diversity, both inside and outside of their companies. Derek shares his view that the ‘Great Resignation’ is really the ‘Great Re-calibration’ meaning employers should be re-defining their relationship with their staff to architect their value proposition.
With offices re-opening again, Kit and Derek share practical insights into the drivers of culture and relationship building that can help businesses navigate this new transition. Derek leaves us with his thought-provoking hope that the office of the future will see a revival, not because staff feel they have to be there, but because they want to be there.
If you would like to find out more about co:collective you can visit their website here: www.cocollective.com.
In Conversation With…Kit Krugman and Derek Newberry
Season 2: Episode 3
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s In Conversation With… podcast. I am Lucy Lewis, a Partner in Lewis Silkin’s Employment team and in this podcast series I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspectives on what the Future of Work holds.
We know the pandemic has accelerated longer-term societal, economic and technological trends giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to rethink who, how, what and where we work, but although the pandemic has been the significant catalyst for immediate change, it’s only one of the drivers changing the world of work. So today I’m delighted to welcome Kit Krugman and Derek Newberry onto the podcast, both of the Co Collective based in New York. The Co Collective is a creative and strategic transformation consultancy which partners with purpose led businesses.
Kit is Managing Director, Organisation and Cultural Design. She is on the Board of Women in Innovation and she’s a frequent speaker and writer on topics of future facing, organisational design and transformation. She also talks, thinks, presents a lot on women in leadership and building cultures of innovation and diversity, equality and inclusion in the workplace.
Derek is Senior Director, Organisation and Cultural Design. He has a background in anthropology and he’s a thought leader specialising in driving cultural change. He’s also the author of a fascinating new book “The Culture Puzzle”.
So we know that organisations and workplaces and the people in them are going through this really dramatic change, we’re all struggling to adjust to the lasting effects of the pandemic; and one of the things I’m really looking forward to exploring with you both in our conversation today is how organisations can develop their business models and their strategies but particularly their relationships with their people to thrive in what’s becoming an increasingly complex world of work. So welcome to both of you.
Kit Krugman: Thank you so much, we’re thrilled to be here.
Derek Newberry: Thanks for having us.
Lucy Lewis: I was going to start by asking you both if you’d introduce yourself. Just tell us a little bit about your background and about the Co:Collective.
Kit Krugman: Great. Yeah I’m happy to start off thank you so much for having us here. My background is actually I came up in the creative management space. I was working in partnership with creative leaders to design creative organisations, thinking about building creative teams etc., and that took me through a pathway to become essentially a head of people, thinking about the internal organisational design and then from there I actually got a Degree in Organisational Psychology, and then created and founded the practice at Co-Collective around organisation and culture design. So that’s my kind of brief history. As you mentioned I also serve on the Board of Women in Innovation and that’s been an organisation that I’ve been engaged with for by now almost five years so. And I can tell a little bit about Co as well but maybe Derek why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself first and then I can dive into Co.
Derek Newberry: Absolutely yeah, so my deep background is in cultural anthropology which I was drawn to because I’ve always had this interest in understanding the power of culture. First of all to bond people together to achieve really truly and remarkable things but at the same time to tear people apart; and at the very beginning of Grad School when I was getting my PhD, I sort of assumed that I had to go very far to find and explore cultural differences and I ended up living in rural Brazil for a while but as I started teaching executives at the Wharton School, I realised that you don’t really have to go very far at all, that there are deep cultural divisions in organisations that are very close to home, and so I started to look at the power of cultural, of culture as a force in organisations and went from, really from teaching to doing and ever since I’ve been advising leaders on how to build great workplaces and many of those lessons are collected in the book you mentioned; and we put those things into practice at Co as well. Kit can talk a little bit more about that.
Kit Krugman: Great thanks Derek. In terms of Co, so as you mentioned, we think of ourselves as a creative and strategic transformation partner and our founding ethos is in this idea that you really, it’s much easier for organisations to say both to their audiences and both internally and externally what they believe in, but it’s much harder to make that real; and we call that difference the difference between story telling and story doing and in the context of organisational culture, we find that often organisations have higher purposes that are really important to them, or values or a mission, but then when it comes to laddering that into the organisation and actually making that reveal and lived in their behaviours, in their systems, in their structures, that’s much more difficult.
Lucy Lewis: Really great, it would be really good to pick up on some of those themes about how you can use those things to build your organisation, but before we do that, I just wanted to ask you a question about Co:Collective because you know that we’re celebrating International Women’s Day this month and the theme for that is break the bias. You’ve talked about being on the Board of Women in Innovation and I also know that you’re really, and rightly, proud of the Co:Collective’s track record on diversity. I know that you have a 50% ratio of men to women at every level I think.
gender diversity in the workplace
You know it’s that time of the year where people have an opportunity to focus and think about diversity, particularly gender diversity and I wonder if there’s any tips that you would give our listeners that are working towards gender parity, but perhaps more generally towards greater diversity and their organisations?
Kit Krugman: Yeah thank you for that question. So you know on the gender parity front that’s something I’ve been passionate about for a very long time. I think it’s absolutely critical and especially in the design and innovation stage, the consulting stage, often times the gender balance is definitely more male, especially in the leadership levels.
Now what we’re really proud of at Co, we’re a completely independent organisation, is that we’re the opposite. We have our CEO is a woman and a lot of our leadership team are women, however I would say we actually are not 50/50. We are now sort of struggling with our diversity in terms of we are over 50/50 and so gender parity, and Derek might laugh but gender parity at Co actually has shifted in the other way and so now we’re looking for some diversity in the form of men joining the organisation like the amazing Derek; but in terms of diversity I think it’s really important to talk also about the multi-dimensionality of diversity and one of the things that I think too often happens is only talking about gender diversity with… because it’s easier to talk about perhaps some things like racial diversity and like every organisation, we at Co, have our work to do as well and I want to be really clear about that and so that’s a constant conversation that we have about racial representation and racial diversity and inclusion within the Co:Collective ecosystem as well. So you know I think every organisation as you mentioned is really thinking about diversity and why diversity matters, and why it’s important and it is a systemic thing that we need to think about.
Derek Newberry: If I could just add to that briefly. We also believe that it’s really important to not just think of it as something you do inside of your company, but outside as well and this is a larger philosophy we have that there should be really no daylight between what you project out in the world in terms of your brand and how you engage with consumers, and what you are doing inside of your company, and we feel that that extends to DE&I.
And so just as one example we’ve been working with a learning company on its DE&I vision and at first they were very focused on the things you would imagine, like how are we recruiting, promoting, retaining diverse talent which is obviously super important, but you know we pushed them to think about well you know you’re able to make learning accessible to first-generation college students in how you design your products and services to make it accessible to people with disabilities; and that’s something that’s important for your employees as well to know what kind of impact you’re having in the world. So we also think about DE&I as something again that it’s not just about what you do inside of your company, but about the impact you have on the world.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you, that’s really, really a powerful thought and actually, it’s helpful for going back, I said I’d go back because you were telling us a lot about the Co:Collective and the impact of story doing as you said; and I talked at the beginning a little bit about the pandemic and the impact that we’re seeing from the pandemic, and one of the things that we’re seeing is what you sometimes see described as the great resignation. You know a lot of people, taking this moment to reflect on their career and that’s clearly having an impact on the talent pool available, and I wondered if you could share your thoughts on what you think is driving that.
the great resignation
What’s behind the great resignation and then I guess most importantly for our listeners, what companies can be doing to meet that challenge and to really attract, and particularly retain, staff.
Derek Newberry: So I would actually start with a little bit of a reframing there. So we do hear a lot about the great resignation but in fact it’s different sector by sector, but in general what we’re not seeing is masses and masses of people just stopping work right. We actually think it’s better to think of this as kind of a great recalibration.
People are shuffling jobs more basically and one of the reasons they’re doing that, just to answer your question, is you know they’re thinking about the relationship they have to their work and to their employer, and they’re asking is there something out there that’s a better fit for me, that meets my needs; and so to address that what we would recommend is what my Undergrads used to call having a DTR moment, a define the relationship moment, with employees.
Employers need to really think about what is our value proposition for the people who show up for work here and for the talent we’re trying to attract, and they get really crisp about that. What is our purpose in the world that you’re going to have an impact on? How can we help you grow in your career, but a relationship is two ways right so it’s also important to be really clear on what’s in it for the organisation, for the employer and does that really clear expectations right?
So we know burnout is driven high on active ambiguity among other things so for example lack of clarity on expectation and you know when the work day starts and stops, or how many hours you’re supposed to work and when you don’t set those expectations, people feel this need to be always there and so we advocate that on the employer side as well. It’s important to kind of define in really clear terms what do we expect of you in terms of when you start and stop work, the kinds of hours you’re… when you’re in the office or not right. That’s something a lot of us would have.
Lucy Lewis: Thanks. Kit is there anything that you would want to add?
Things that businesses should be thinking about in terms of retaining staff.
Kit Krugman: Yeah I think I would love to go back to the question that you asked around gender parity and diversity in the workplace and one of the things that I didn’t answer in your question was the idea of what can organisations do, and I think that’s really tied to the question of how do you retain and how do you attract because creating an environment that is welcoming to different people, different contacts, different individuals is really critical; and so the way I think about that is there’s really three main things.
Like I said it’s always a systems approach but representation is a piece of it. It’s the thing that I think for organisations becomes the most clear but it’s only one piece of the puzzle, so representation at the leadership level, whether that’s in terms of gender, diversity or racial diversity or identity diversity and it has to be also across the org and different teams etc., right so if you have an engineering team that is 100% male or 100% white then you’re not going to see that same diversity or that same inclusion.
But it also is enforced by both the policies, which are the explicit systems and the norms being the implicit systems, so you know the one thing I would say, and I’m very passionate about this, I could probably talk about this for a long time, is parental leave. If organisations take one thing away from what I think is really important on the gender equity front, it’s equal caregiver leave, so I’ll just say equal caregiver leave. There’s a lot of, a lot of reasons and research behind that.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah and that’s interesting because it’s something that the UK Government, as well as UK businesses are really grappling with. We’ve introduced a concept of shared parental leave which has been very complicated and increasingly businesses are recognising the importance of shared parental leave. I think it’s a really good point.
I’m interested again, it’s coming back to the Co:Collective but I guess there’s value in talking to you about the things that you’ve done as well as the things that you help others to do; and I know that, I mean even before the pandemic you were trialling different ways of engaging with staff, an idea that you know that their contribution or compensation for their contribution can’t just be valued in the salary that they get. So I know you looked at things like unlimited leave.
employee retention strategies
It will be great to hear you share a little bit about the things that you’ve done, the things that you think have been successful and why you’ve done them. The journey that you’ve been on.
Kit Krugman: Yeah it’s a great question and it really goes back to what Derek said about articulating the value proposition. I’m a big believer in the mutual benefit that employees and employers can design between each other, and I think what’s really important to think about is the reason that I originally thought, one of my original thesis was about compensation being really thought of as holistically around experience. Where is the experience that you’re providing your employees and you know the way I feel very lucky in my job right now because I’m learning every single day and in that way I feel like I’m being compensated to learn; and as long as you’re being compensated to learn, then there’s a whole different value proposition in terms of the way that you think about your work right? So I think that it’s really critical to architect the value proposition and to build into that a sense of autonomy and freedom and trust.
So you know one of the things you talked about unlimited leave, that’s something that we’ve architected for a long time. More than anything that sends a message to our people that we trust you, you are adults, we trust you to make decisions that benefit your own ability to get the rest and rest that you need with the needs of the organisation.
Lucy Lewis: And actually talking about autonomy of freedom and trust, you know it feels very current because I think particularly in the UK, and I’m sure with you guys in the US, one of the difficult things that companies are grappling with is how we go back or how we move forward is probably better than saying how we go back. How we move forward with our culture now that we’re starting to re-open offices, how do we rebuild the things that were lost to the pandemic whilst retaining some of the things that have been great, and some of those have been autonomy, freedom, greater trust when we’re not so visible to each other?
company culture and values
Derek I know this is a lot about what you do. I know that you have done a lot of research, a lot of work, you’ve written a fascinating book about culture. How do you think companies move their company culture forward as we go into this world of post-pandemic workplaces?
Derek Newberry: Yeah so I think there are four main drivers of culture that are sort of timeless. They apply to all groups everywhere as long as we’ve been humans but are especially, I would say acute, right now and especially importance of focus on at a time when you know as you said many of us are sort of scattered across hybrid workplaces and finding it harder than ever to connect with each other, and to build a really strong shared culture so if I were to just take briefly each of those four things.
The first force is around interest and this is really about the importance of building relationships. Strong communities anywhere including in organisations are really characterised by dense networks. So from an individual standpoint in your own organisation what you can think about is how can I find new ways to connect with people even as we’re at a distance or working remotely? Especially the folks who are more influential in your organisation, whether or not they have the biggest title right, kind of the people who everyone else turns to for advice or for guidance right; and so find ways to set up, you know, virtual coffee chats one on ones with those folks and ask them you know what’s changed for you over the past couple of years of this pandemic? What do you, what’s your sense about what’s working or not with how we’re managing the organisation? With how we’re managing this hybrid work if that’s the stage you’re in?
The second force is really around vision and what you could think of as storytelling which is so important for Co. One of the big things we focus on is helping organisations understand what their shared story is. Why they exist. What they’re for in the world, what they’re against; and again, that ability to tell shared stories is more important than ever to creating a sense that we have a shared culture. So what that’s all about is basically as you’re talking to people, as you’re getting the pulse of your organisation, to start paying attention to the stories other people are telling about again why they’re still showing up for work for something other than a paycheque. What’s important for them right now? What impact they want to have in your clients, your customers, your consumers lives right? And to start telling you know shared stories around purpose, around why we exist and to share those broadly.
The third piece is around building new habits which is something that’s also important for us at Co. We have a philosophy of story doing which is all about turning that shared story into real day to day actions; and so what to think about here as a leader is you know what behaviours do I want to see show up in my organisation that will really define our culture? So how do we actually live our values on a day to day basis? And it’s important to get very specific so a lot of companies right now are talking about the need to be adaptable or innovative. That’s great but for people to actually change their culture, they need to know what behaviours are expected of me. So, does that mean that in meetings we make sure everyone is able to share their perspectives before we make a decision? Is it about who we bring to the table to make decisions? It’s really important to translate to the level of concrete behaviours.
And then the last piece I think is something Kit hit on that is a really important, you know, focus area for us right now. It’s around experimentation right. Culture is constantly going to change whether we like it or not. So the way to get ahead of that is to have a little bit of a dose of humility and to, in a very proactive and conscious way, to constantly be experimenting and tinkering with new ways of working, new ways of engaging with each other and our customers so that we’re very intentional about evolving our culture together in a really, in a way that’s really aligned with our purpose and values and not sort of having it happen haphazardly.
So what that looks like is some of the experiments that Kit described a moment ago and they don’t need to be huge things, they can be small ways of you know rethinking how we run meetings again, how we do consumer research, whatever the case may be, but it’s important to continue to experiment to keep ahead of the changes that are happening in all of our cultures.
Lucy Lewis: That’s really fascinating. Thank you and actually conscious experimentation is something that we’ve talked about in the Future of Work Hub before, not necessarily so much in relation to culture but in relation to practical ways of workings, how you make hybrid working work for employees that are used to either coming to the office or working from home and the notion of conscious experimentation has been you know very profound in that context too, so it’s really great to hear you talk about that in relation to culture, a willingness to experiment a little bit with culture, not be too bound up in the past in terms of looking forward.
Kit I don’t know if there’s anything you would want to add to that?
Kit Krugman: Derek summarised it so beautifully. I think the only thing I would add is you know I think one of the things I think about a lot is, regardless of the context, whether it’s digital, whether it’s from home, whether it’s in the office, relationships are still built the same way; and so I sometimes think that we think of this in too binary a way where we think about okay we’re either working from home or you’re in the office etc., and my provocation to our clients and to ourselves is how do we build relationships and how do we optimise for building relationships?
So even as I think about the future of work and what I believe is important, is I call this, Derek will laugh at me, but I call this like the summer camp methodology. Right like if you come together with a couple of people for even a week, even two weeks in person and then those relationships sustain for up to a year, so you can think about the way that you do intentional design around bringing people together that strengthens relationships, which is fundamentally the baseline fabric of how work gets done, how people communicate effectively, and how cultures and communities are built. So if we think about that differently, then we might design a different reality.
The other one provocation that I’ll throw out there is, I was really inspired by one of the Ezra client podcasts where he interviewed Annie Murphy Paul about her book “The Extended Mind”, and she talks about how we sort of over index on the brain and how the way that we work is completely built around using our brain as opposed to using our body, and that the modern workplace in fact is built around this idea that we need to remain, keep our bodies captive and just use our brain in that context, whereas actually our body is collecting tons of different information kinetically, which really led me to start thinking about if I were to design a completely different workplace, what it would look like in terms of the ability for people to move around, the ability for people to not be captured at their computer, for them to be leverage and sort of intake all of the amazing energy and thoughts and kinetic connections that you can make when you’re not sort of staying in one place. So that’s my provocation. Does this opportunity create the moment for us to completely rethink the way we work?
Lucy Lewis: I love the summer camp analogy and actually the second provocation is the perfect segway into the last question I was going to ask you both and that’s… I’ve been asking everybody that joins me as a guest in this 2022 podcast series, what they’d like to see change.
the future of the workplace
So we know that the world of work is going to look completely different in 10 years’ time. It’s probably going to look different in ways we can’t even begin to predict now, but if you both had the power to ensure that there’d be one change for the workplace of 2032, what would that be?
Kit Krugman: Yeah I can start off just building on what I just shared. I want us to take this opportunity and I feel like we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to completely rethink the context, the culture, the way that we work and I don’t want us to miss it.
You know obviously with resource constraints it’s sometimes difficult to think about redesigning the office footprint etc., but to me we should be creating things like nodes and networks and a hub that’s all about a large café with breakout rooms and spaces for people to move around and you know I would love for us to take this opportunity to rethink how we use physical space. How we use our home in order to feel like we are doing our best work, to be more creative, to be more inspired and to be more connected.
Lucy Lewis: Fantastic.
Derek Newberry: To build on what Kit said my contrary intake is in 10 years I would love many, many more people to be back in the office and in the workplace, but because they want to not because they have to be there right.
The workplace for many of us has been a “have to” for a long time and for a fortunate few of us the pandemic changed that right. We realised we couldn’t work fully or partially remote and now there’s this debate around you know do we… it almost feels like the terms of the debate are around how much do we force people to go back to the office, and what I’d love organisations to think about is how do we design workplaces in the way Kit described as being so attractive that you go in because you want to. You know that not only are you going to get some really great collaboration done, some really great work done, but you’re going to see your colleagues in ways that don’t feel like an energy sap but are actually reinvigorating that you look forward to. So how do we make the office an attractive place to be, not just a “want to” or a “have you” excuse me?
Lucy Lewis: Thank you both so much for joining me. It’s been really, really fascinating and actually there’s a lot of inspirational thoughts in answer to that last question.
Kit, Derek thank you both so much.