Presented at Rittmann, Torres, and Krajmalnik-Brown lab meetings on 7/1/20, by Carole Flores.
The team that leads the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology, above, has always been supportive of culture-building activities, such as off-campus outings, on-campus celebrations, t-shirt contests, brainstorming sessions and much more.
They have recently been searching for a way to regularly assess Center culture. They set Laboratory Coordinator Sarah Arrowsmith and Business Operations Manager Carole Flores on a mission to find validated instruments. We found two; one quantitative and one qualitative.
Laura Boyd, Assistant Director of Engagement and Professional Development in Knowledge Enterprise (KE), introduced us to the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, which was actually administered to KE employees in September 2019.
This seems to be just the validated, quantitative tool we’ve been looking for. It has been administered to over 35 million employees from around the world.
Laura told Dr. Rittmann and I that the Q12 survey is based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, an idea proposed by Abraham Maslow that describes human development and motivation through a hierarchy built upon foundations of successively dependent needs, pictured below.
This hierarchy can be superimposed on needs for employee engagement.
Over time, these ideas have evolved into a Spiral Dynamics Integral (Sdi, Clare Graves -> Don Beck & Chris Cowan -> Ken Wilber) that describes personal or cultural development in terms of memes. Each successive layer is, again, dependent on passage through previous layers. People or organizations may wind forward and backward along the spiral during times of stress or challenge. The stages or types of an organization are likened to the following metaphors: WOLF PACK < ARMY < MACHINE < FAMILY < LIVING ORGANISM.
During this presentation, our lab groups suggested that we were somewhere along the spectrum between family and living organism. I also suspect that we need to revert to the ARMY and MACHINE layers when devising, using, and enforcing strict protocols to maintain safety or experimental integrity. Maybe we must spend some time in each layer at different stages of our career development, to learn important skills, and revert back to them sometimes.
Several people wondered what happens to these paradigms when lower layers are compromised, such as health or security during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. Thanks to Slack, we quickly asked Christine Whitney-Sanchez (featured below) what she thinks and she provided the article, linked above, and speculated:
“From my perspective, that means if security is threatened we can return to behaviors that served at a lower developmental level but we maintain awareness of having made that choice.”
From the article she cited:
We took a moment to read through the survey questions, together, and noticed how they align with the paradigms, above. We read them aloud and tried to consider them from the perspectives of both mentor and protege, as we all serve as both in different aspects of our lives.
We then looked at our Center’s results, which are based on only six responses from the September 2019 survey. This is still a significant number in terms of total employees in our Center. However, not necessarily of how many affiliates that we have, at large, and those whose pay lines are housed in other departments outside of KE.
We had some interesting discussions about why there might be ambiguity around expectations. We wondered if it is related to the open-ended nature of research, or the ethos that we figure things out for ourselves rather than simply take instructions from others. We talked about the possibility of positing uncertainty as an expectation itself. We learned that the Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA) recently surveyed graduate students and found a similar result. They did a little digging and believe that the basic steps required for graduation may need to be clarified.
Our lab members were generally quite interested in these results and eager for the next survey, which is planned for September of 2020. With more participation, we should get some reliable quantitative feedback about the health of our Center.
But what should we do with that information? How can we put it to work for us?
Luckily, there is someone who is working on this problem. Her name is Christine Whitney-Sanchez. She is the Chief Culture Officer within the University Technology Office (UTO). This was an intentional placement, since the UTO is essential to every part of ASU, every department, every member of the student and employee community. UTO is at the center of data collection efforts as well. With such an expansive reach, this seems to be a perfect locus from which to disseminate culture change!
Christine started working with members across the UTO, in 2018, to define their culture objectives. Their core premise is that a healthy culture begets eruptive innovation.
After one year, they formed a Culture Ripples Design Team to prepare a Community of Practice that intends to disseminate mindful culture assessment and adaptation throughout ASU. I learned about them at an Organizational Performance Office Excellence CoP meeting and asked Christine if I could join the Design Team in December of 2019.
Since then, we have identified four areas of action and, with the assistance of an ASU-wide team of qualitative research experts, we are developing Appreciative Interview questions to address the Culture Mapping area. I think this will be the second valuable tool that can help the Swette Center to make meaning of the Q12 survey and decide how to handle our findings.
Appreciative Interviews (AI), Discovering and Building on the Root Causes of Success. “You can liberate spontaneous momentum and insights for positive change from within the organization as ‘hidden’ success stories are revealed. Positive movement is sparked by the search for what works now and by uncovering the root causes that make success possible. Groups are energized while sharing their success stories instead of the usual depressing talk about problems. Stories from the field offer social proof of local solutions, promising prototypes, and spread innovations while providing data for recognizing success patterns. You can overcome the tendency of organizations to underinvest in social supports that generate success while overemphasizing financial support, time, and technical assistance.”
The questions under development by the Culture Ripples CoP will soon be ready for deployment across ASU, and the Swette Team indicated that they are excited to participate during an upcoming Whole Center Meeting, next semester. I look forward to writing about our progress, then!
If you are interested in joining the Culture Ripples Community of Practice, please contact Sarah Arrowmith or Carole.Flores@asu.edu for an invitation.
