Welcome to episode 238 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 2 of an interview with Leanne Elliott, discussing the work Leanne and Al do at their company Oblong, what culture is and how they became podcasters, advice for those considering a management career, defining what culture means for a company, and how managers / leaders can impact culture and even help their teams own it.
Original Recording Date: 07-04-2023
Leanne Elliott is a certified business psychologist and leadership coach. She founded a consultancy to help owner-led businesses navigate people and culture with her co-founder and husband Al Elliott. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Leanne you can find it in Episode 237.
Topics – The Work at Oblong, Becoming Podcasters to Widen the Message, Managers Should Expect Challenges, The Keepers of Culture
3:09 – The Work at Oblong

* We decide to turn the conversation to some of the work Leanne and Al focus on at OblongHQ to foster high performing workplace cultures. John references Truth, Lies, and Workplace Culture Episode 2 – 4 Elements of an Amazing Team.

* Culture can feel like something very intangible, and there are over 50 definitions of workplace culture in existence.
* To translate this into commercial outcomes, Leanne says they have tried to distill it into foundations leaders can provide, nurture, and embed within the organization. This covers things like creating a vision, how people do recruiting, how they performance manage, and how people are led.
* Leanne and Al take practical, actionable lessons which translate to positive employee attitudes and behaviors.
* They talk a lot about employee engagement because this is the output of culture – things like how engaged people are, the amount of job satisfaction someone experiences, the sense of belonging they experience, how much extra effort they are willing to put into their jobs (dedication / commitment to the organization), etc. These are things we can measure, track, and link to commercial outcomes.
* More engaged employees at a business usually indicates they will experience less turnover, less absenteeism, have higher profitability, more agility to change, faster speed to market, etc.
* Most of the lessons tend to come back to employee engagement and insights because they are things that can be measured and things that can be changed / adjusted within culture.

* For example, putting a ping pong table in the break room might be quite difficult to measure as far as impact on business performance.
* Leanne tells us what is being done in an organization can often be detached from why things are being done within an organization, and what works in one organization may not work in another. The reason ping pong tables and such were put into organizational break rooms is they encourage people to take breaks, move around, and collaborate / build relationships with colleagues (all of which have a positive impact on employ...