An introduction to Unwritten Ground Rules (UGRs)

When it comes to defining workplace culture, many companies put idealistic behaviours into carefully- crafted documents that may be shared with new hires, or posted on the wall for all employees to see.

These may be value statements such as “We encourage collaboration between departments” and “Our customer is our number one priority.”  While at face value these are obviously noble considerations for most organisations, the daily behaviours of employees may in fact exemplify the opposite of these. 

The term, Unwritten Ground Rules (UGRs), was coined by Australian consultant Steve Simpson. In summary, UGRs are really what make up your company culture. These are the behaviours and routines followed by many employees which may or may not line up with the concrete business “values”.

For example, if a new employee begins work in the accounting department and is told that “our company encourages collaboration between departments,” they might approach the purchasing department with an idea for better cross-departmental communication. If a manager tells them to stick to their own lane, they’ll quickly learn that this explicit rule is not true in practice. The UGR is actually to “not meddle”. 

Through these daily interactions and real-world examples, people learn “how things are done around here” – which ends up being the reality of your workplace culture. Having so much of the true culture of an organisation being formed by these seemingly-harmless interactions is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is simply more difficult to see, control, and monitor them.  In the next section, I will list some potential negatives and positives of UGRs in the workplace:

Positive & negative UGRs

The above example of shunning the new employee for making a suggestion about cross-departmental communication would be a negative example of UGRs at work. This occurs when your organisation has an idealistic value or mission statement, but the behaviour which is encouraged and reinforced by management directly opposes that value or mission statement. 

These scenarios can be common in older organisations as the “that’s the way we do things around here” mentality can be difficult to change when it comes to employee behaviour. When new employees join teams and are dealt with this set of negative UGRs, the impact can be exponential – as they then pass on the habits to new members. This perpetuates the cycle, and can create a toxic working environment. 

But UGRs aren’t all bad news! If you can cultivate a positive set of UGRs, they can have a natural and lasting impact on company culture – positively influencing the way that team members behave. 

For example, if you work in an industry with tight deadlines and fluctuating project-based workloads, a positive UGR would be that people stick around to help get the job done, rather than heading home at 5pm no matter what. This level of commitment can’t be forced – but it can be considered as “the right thing to do” by a workforce, if they have bought into the wider mission and feel respected.

Other positive UGRs might be things like: not undermining or talking over colleagues on a client call, addressing concerns direct with a colleague rather than going over their head, being open to helping new joiners get settled into the group, collaborating with people in other departments, chipping in to help with customer support when required, and much more. 

How to change the UGRs within your organisation

Just as cultures can vary as much as organisations vary, cultures can also vary in the same organisation – depending on the stage of that organisation at the time. For example, an organisation in the start-up phase may have a completely different culture once the company reaches maturity twenty years later. 

A 3-person company getting off the ground may have the “20-hour workday” mentality, which gets the company to the point where things are running smoothly – and the team grows to 100 employees. Whilst the management team might keep this pace, it’s unrealistic (and unhelpful) to expect the wider workforce to invest the same number of hours as the business expands. 

While it’s easy to put a grand statement on the wall about how your company should “embrace change” or “think outside the box,” it can be easier said than done, especially when it comes to human behaviour. 

The first step is to consciously learn what your company’s UGRs are.

I wrote another piece recently, which outlines the step-by-step process for figuring our UGRs. In a nutshell, it follows this structure:

Awareness

• Making all staff aware of the concept of a UGR, and what it means. Make them think about what the UGRs are within your organisation. 

Take stock

• Get together to talk about the common UGRs in your business. Ask them to finish the sentence, “around here…”. For example, “around here, being open and honest gets you…”.

Agree positive UGRs

• Get the team to plan out their chosen positive UGRs which will create an ideal working environment and contribute to business success. 

Embed positive UGRs

• Incorporate these UGRs into what you do, and enforce them stringently. Request that staff confront managers if they break them, and 

The first step will be the most difficult, as it involves getting to the core of what UGRs exist within your organisation. This might involve picking apart relationships between managers and team members, and might drag up incidents or mistakes in the past. 

This will damage egos, but it needs to be done in order to get UGRs out into the open. 

Blayne Webb, a Director at Barringtons does a great job of breaking down how UGRs can begin and be reinforced on their blog. In essence, it’s important to keep in mind that employees are always watching management and paying attention to which behaviours are reinforced, punished, and ignored. 

In order to change UGRs within an organisation, there needs to be clear and consistent action from management which encourage positive UGRs and discourage negative ones. 

By leading by example, Managing Directors and C-suite executives can consciously choose how their team sees them acting. This is a powerful thing to keep in mind when looking to make a positive change in an organisation – and a dangerous thing for MDs and CEOs to forget. 

Final takeaways…

From the outside looking in, any company may seem like a very complex and diverse organisation. However, as complicated as any company might look from the outside, they are all simply communities of people working with the resources they have to get their jobs done.

The underlying foundation for how employees, managers, directors, and C-level executives interact with each other and the world around them stems from the culture that runs through the organisation. 

Culture is a living and breathing thing within an organisation. It is seen to be formed through mission statements and official initiatives, when in fact every small interaction and daily decision has a cumulative impact on the “way things are done”. These UGRs are passed throughout the organisation, and given to new recruits. As a leader, you need to ensure the UGRs are positive and helpful.

In order to ensure that your culture is not emerging in harmful direction, it’s crucial to keep your finger on the pulse of UGRs and make sure the positives are reinforced and negatives are nipped in the bud.