Can organisations repair toxic culture? Two experts say how they would fix the Met Police

Eat Sleep Work Repeat

Bruce Daisley

Management, Workplace Culture, Science, Work, Business, Culture, Social Sciences

4.7 • 989 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2022

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is greatly enhanced by reading the newsletter that comes with it.

In today’s podcast I talk to two guests who have slightly different perspectives on how to fix the culture of the Met Police.

Dr Megan O’Neill is Associate Director at the Scottish Institute for Policing Research. She has extensively studied the police and has worked closely with them - most notably helping to revise a stop and search policy that was found to be failing. She explains the challenges of the job, and how we should think about getting buy in to reform.

Simon Holdaway is Professor emeritus of Criminology at the University of Sheffield. He joined the police after he left school and was promoted to sergeant. His study about the police has explored the culture of the profession and how themes of race could be more effectively tackled.

While the police (and the Met) might not feel adjacent to your business there are critical lessons about cultural change.

Four lessons of what good culture requires:

Space - good culture can't exist when there is no slack in the system
Voice - workers need to feel like they are heard (Megan says this is part of 'organisational justice') - this makes workers feel valued
Values - explaining what the organisation stands for,
Middle management - behind any culture problem there's the need to purge the organisation of cultural misfits - getting the middle management right is the best way to make this take hold

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Transcript

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0:27.7	Registered reference number 900846. Hello this is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture, psychology and life.
0:44.0	Thank you so much for listening today.
0:46.0	A really interesting episode I've been preparing for the last couple of weeks today
0:51.0	and it's specifically about toxic culture and
0:55.0	whether we can change it and I've taken a sort of naughty issue to consider.
1:00.8	So firstly why toxic culture there was some really interesting research that's just
1:05.8	gone out in today's newsletter which was looking at a piece of a really fascinating
1:10.5	piece of work that was published in MIT Sloane Review which looked at one of
1:17.4	the reasons why so many people were quitting their jobs right now. Really
1:20.6	intriguing I've linked to it in this week's newsletter and you can see the
1:23.7	newsletter in the show notes today and it looked it looked at the context of
1:28.0	people quitting in the midst of this great resignation, this moment we're in
1:32.1	right now. Anyway, they evaluated the reasons.
1:35.9	Reason number 16, the 16th biggest reason why people were quitting was pay and what the people who run the research did is they said, okay, let's benchmark pay as the index. So that was one. That's increases one. The scoring 10, so 10 times more important as a reason for people to quit
1:57.9	their job was toxic corporate culture. So really intriguing research, you'll see all of that laid out in the newsletter today.
	...

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