Are culture change programs really destined to fail?

ALSO: Great employee experience in action and a Big Ange video on culture

“70 per cent of culture change initiatives fail” - so goes the disheartening business maxim that took hold after it was first published in the Harvard Business Review in 2000. It’s so often quoted and repeated that the original source has vanished into irrelevance.

Except it’s not true - a paper that tried to verify it concluded there is no valid evidence to support it. So get started on your cultural change program - you’ve still got hope.

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Deutsche Bank, bankers to Donald Trump, have stepped into an interesting cul-de-sac of the RTO debate by prohibiting Fridays at home to be followed by Mondays. Only 6% of structured hybrid firms choose Fridays as a fixed day and Deutsche Bank cited the inefficiency of not using their offices for the bookends of the week.

The Friday/Monday thing sounds like a very specific use case where employees are maybe using the long weekend to travel away? As I mentioned last week someone in a big corporation told me they struggle to get hold of colleagues on Mondays and Fridays. Deutsche Bank has also mandated that managers spend four days a week in the office.

• I’m doing a podcast on employee experience in a few weeks but here’s a lovely example of it in practice:

• A man who made $1.8m insider trading by listening to his wife’s Zoom calls got convicted when his wife turned snitch on him. The article includes no details on the state of his marriage but the holiday fund has been severely depleted. (EDIT: They’re getting divorced. It didn’t have to come to this)

• Former podcast subject Ange Postecoglou talking about culture: “I’ve got a simple definition for that - culture is people. It starts with me and my behaviours, what I say, what I do, the way I speak to people… Then you try and get the right people. I've had times where I've walked in and experienced players haven't really bought into it… and I've had to to move them out”. As a follow-up here’s the podcast if you missed it

• You thought your boss saying badge data was being used to track you was a bit moody? Serco, an outsourcing firm that fulfills government contracts, was ordered to stop using facial scanning to track employee attendance

• I was sharing this with a group this week and thought I should send it to a wider audience. If your meetings feel broken you might want to try silent meetings. Before you roll your eyes and say ‘Ok Bezos’ this document, The Silent Meeting Manifesto, explains how to do these things properly