One size does not fit all: How microcultures help workers and organizations thrive

What’s needed now is to embrace and nourish the multiplicity of microcultures within an organization that adapt to the unique needs of a specific team, function, location, or even worker type. Microcultures reflect the subtle variations in how work gets done in different teams, functions, and geographies and are an important way that organizations can get closer to and respond more quickly to the people they serve.

Leaders are recognizing this shift: Nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents in our 2024 Global Human Capital Trends research say that focusing on individual teams and workgroups as the best places to cultivate culture, fluidity, agility, and diversity is very or critically important to their success. Additionally, 50% of executives report that an organization’s culture is most successful when there is a moderate degree of variation. Yet executives ranked this as the most difficult trend to address. This difficulty points to the importance of culture for workers—73% of people have left a job due to poor cultural fit⁶—and the “fuzziness” of defining and driving culture for organizational leaders.

Taking a “micro” approach to culture can enable organizations and leaders to paint a more detailed picture of “the way we work around here” to drive different experiences and outcomes that mutually benefit both workers and the organization. Indeed, according to our research, organizations that have embraced microcultures are 1.8 times more likely to achieve positive human outcomes and 1.6 times more likely to achieve desired business outcomes.

A key to harnessing the power of microcultures is aligning around a set of global values while encouraging some autonomy of functions, teams, and geographies, not only permitting them to flourish, but also providing them with the resources they need to establish their own localized blends of culture.⁷ The organization can then embrace the diversity of thought, innovation, agility, and tailored ways of working that each microculture is emboldened to foster. Robin Leopold, chief human resources officer of JPMorgan Chase, recognizes that, “For an organization of our size and scale, it's normal for teams to have microcultures. But how those cultures come together and rally around our firmwide values of service, heart, curiosity, courage, and excellence is the secret sauce.”⁸

Some leaders may balk at the idea of intentionally cultivating different behaviors and practices to support workers. Indeed, some practices may need to be standardized to conform to regulations. However, attempts to root out all unique practices and behaviors may limit organizations’ agility and impact worker experience and retention. In a conversation with Sanjiv Gajiwala, former chief growth officer of a leading US consumer products company, he noted a direct link between microcultures and organizational agility, saying “If you accept volatility as the norm, a ‘monoculture’ is extremely vulnerable to shocks.”⁹

When asked how organizational culture has changed since the pandemic, most leaders say it is better now (60%). One reason for this could be an increase in microcultures as a result of more hybrid or remote work.¹⁰ This contrasts with the narrative often reported in the media, citing some organizations’ need for a strong, common culture as the primary driver for return-to-office mandates. Research shows this may have the potential to negatively impact worker experience.¹¹ Our research shows that while senior leaders rate microcultures as less valuable, directors and workers who are closer to the work itself recognize the importance of microcultures to their success (figure 2).

Empowering teams to define and implement their own ways of working, rituals, and norms becomes increasingly important in the new era of human sustainability. Enabling workers’ autonomy, in alignment with organizational goals can act as a catalyst of business and human outcomes.¹²

Current trends underline the importance of “thinking small” when it comes to culture

The growing importance of workplace microcultures is being driven by several shifts related to worker preferences, technology, and ways of working.

Hybrid and remote work arrangements. Managers may be unsure about how to drive culture in a hybrid environment and could be struggling to apply old models of a single, uniform culture that are no longer relevant in hybrid work. Research shows that remote and hybrid arrangements have a significant impact on worker experience and retention—hybrid work can reduce attrition by 35% and improve employee satisfaction. Indeed, 61% of US human resource leaders say that culture is more important in a hybrid model than it is in an on-site work model.¹³ Conversely, more than a third of leaders report that remote work has weakened their culture, and concern for culture has often been cited by C-suite leaders as a rationale for “return to office” initiatives.¹⁴ With nearly 70% of workers globally preferring a hybrid arrangement, leaders may need new ways of empowering team cultures beyond the four walls of the office.¹⁵

Microcultures represent a possible solution to the challenge of driving culture in a hybrid and remote environment—by focusing on connection at the team level, managers and workers can collaborate to define how and where they work together best. Research shows that workers on hybrid teams are creating closer bonds within their teams, though weaker ones across the organization.¹⁶ However, workers who have greater freedom over location and schedule report a far higher degree of connectedness compared to those who don’t—and the more connected workers are, the higher they perform.¹⁷

An increasingly diverse workforce. Attempting to apply a single culture to an increasingly diverse workforce is not likely to meet the needs of today's workers, who now vary more than ever across geographies, employment types (contingent, gig, full-time, part-time), working arrangements (on site, hybrid, remote), demographics (life stage, education level, identity), and even motivations or thinking and networking styles.

Eighty percent of respondents to an MIT-Sloan Management Review workforce ecosystems survey, for example, say it’s important for external workers to participate in the culture of their organization, yet only 18% take an integrated approach to managing internal employees and external contributors.¹⁸ But trying to integrate external workers into an organization's single, monolithic culture can often be challenging, for a variety of reasons both practical and legal, suggesting microcultures might be a better route. Kori Covrigaru, chief executive officer of PlanOmatic, explains, “It’s really hard to get contractors to embrace the culture. Typically, contractors have multiple gigs going on. They are their own brand; they are their own culture. Trying to instill core values and get buy-in from people who may be here one day a week, two days a week, and trying to figure out where that balance is—there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to bring them in.”¹⁹

With globally distributed teams whose workers represent diverse identities, microcultures can allow for deep and meaningful connections across teams or functions. Rather than requiring sameness for all by applying a single set of norms to everyone, microcultures don't confuse fairness with sameness. By helping to ensure equity rather than equality (or sameness), microcultures can celebrate and capitalize on individual and team differences.

Advances in technology. New technologies are giving some leaders more visibility into ways of working across an organization, enabling them to feel some degree of control and thus more comfortable embracing local cultures. For instance, natural language processing can analyze subtle elements of culture, such as the use of different terms and phrases across the organization in collaboration platforms, to highlight potential issues and opportunities for improvement. Generative AI-enabled tools can consolidate and interpret that information at the organization level, leveraging existing data and producing real time insights. For example, a global pharmaceutical company has created a view of real-time employee sentiment based on collaboration platform data that provides a constant pulse on pockets of culture to identify hot spots that may need attention.²⁰

The importance of empowering frontline workers with decision-making. New technology can enable workers who are closest to the customer to rapidly sense and react to changing customer needs. As leaders are increasingly aware of this, they can provide access to data for frontline workers and empowering the edges of the organization with the autonomy to make decisions. For example, factory floor workers at Michelin have digital workflow boards that visualize stock levels of different tire types, enabling the workers to prioritize which type of tire the factory produces based on real-time information. Empowering frontline workers to make decisions based on data has led to increases in yearly production, greater agility, and increased engagement among workers by enabling them to quickly solve problems in the production line based on their expertise.²¹

Rising worker agency. Today’s workers often have more choice and influence over where, when, and how they work than ever before.²² And workers have expressed a clear desire for localized cultures that reflect their team’s ways of working: One in three workers responding to our survey say the unique culture of their immediate workgroup or team is most important to them when it comes to their experience at work.

The growing importance of human sustainability. Human sustainability is increasingly recognized as a vital component of workforce experience and organizations’ contributions to people and society. In a survey of UK professionals, 80% of respondents said that fostering a supportive workplace culture should be part of an organization’s purpose.²³ While organizational leaders can establish the broad guiding principles of a supportive culture, it’s mainly managers who bring that support to life in the microcultures they foster—sensing worker needs and priorities and supporting their career development.

Merger and acquisition activity. Many leaders recognize that a newly acquired company or merger may have its own unique culture. While there are some things that may need to be standardized, many leaders are mindful that squashing the unique culture of the newly acquired organization could be detrimental to business outcomes. This presents an opportunity for organizations that are highly acquisitive to embrace microcultures. For example, Cristina A. Wilbur, chief people officer at biotech and medical solutions company Roche, explains, “When we acquire companies, we are very mindful of the things that are most critical to connect into the Roche organization without crushing a culture. If you acquire a company and then you sweep it completely through, you lose the whole sense of why the company was acquired in the first place. Culture is a big part of that.”²⁴

Benefits and barriers to fostering workplace microcultures

Fostering microcultures does not mean discarding the idea of an organization-wide culture. Instead, the organization-wide elements should shift to become broad values and a shared vision and purpose, articulated by senior leaders who then empower local teams to create the unique ways of working they need to be successful. The result can be an organization with a very clear identity—some might call it a set of “north stars”—that also has developed flexible ways of working that are uniquely suited to the needs and interests of local teams and groups.

Consider Dutch health and nutrition company Royal DSM’s “flotilla-style” culture, in which strategy and overall direction comes from the center but is activated by agile teams with their own microcultures that are empowered to drive desired outcomes. The company provides the “flotilla” with guidance to sail in the right direction, but it does not prescribe the norms and behaviors aboard each independently “piloted boat.”²⁵

However, fostering microcultures can involve an element of risk. For example, if an individual microculture is misaligned with the organization’s core values, it can become a breeding ground for “us versus them” thinking and affect contribution to overall organizational goals. Other potential risks include perceptions of unfairness as ways of working vary, reduced collaboration if the interfaces between microcultures are not clear or functional, and change fatigue for workers as they move through different parts of an organization and struggle to adapt to different norms and ways of working. To help stave off these dynamics, organizations should prioritize intentional communication and coordination with clear interaction points, enabling collaboration across functions and geographies.

When organizational leaders embrace microcultures, a host of positive results are possible:

Attract and retain in-demand talent. Creating and communicating about various internal microcultures that may vary from an organization’s perceived or primary corporate culture has the potential to attract different types of workers to fit in-demand skill needs. For example, a health care organization on a digital transformation journey may be looking for advanced technology skills. Microcultures could allow this organization to have tech teams or functions that feel and operate more like startups to meet the expectations and preferences of a software developer.

Drive better business outcomes. Organizations that are rated as great places to work outperform the market, with culture being a key driver of that experience.²⁶ With microcultures, leaders can adapt ways of working for their team, which can improve workers’ ability to drive business outcomes. Additionally, workers who identify with and care about the culture perform at higher levels than other workers by as much as 37% and are 36% more likely to stay with the organization.²⁷

Increase ability to anticipate and respond to future demands and changes. Empowering microcultures to thrive can enhance organizations’ ability to respond to customer, market, worker, and stakeholder needs, enabling greater agility. When teams are granted autonomy to define microcultures centered around broad organizational principles, they remain aligned to the what but have freedom and flexibility on the how.²⁸ NASA, for example, allows microcultures to thrive to enable greater flexibility. “NASA has multiple microcultures that are the result of [a] decentralized workforce that is dispersed across many NASA Space and Research Centers,” says Nicholas Skytland, NASA chief technologist. “This allows NASA to remain flexible and distribute its work effectively.”²⁹

Make strides toward human sustainability. By embracing more fluidity across team cultures, managers can have greater ability to support their team’s well-being goals—70% of managers report that internal barriers like corporate culture make it difficult to support their team members.³⁰ When ways of working are customized to the unique needs of the people on those teams, organizations are more likely to meet workers’ needs to support well-being and purpose.

How to foster successful microcultures

Creating the conditions in which microcultures can flourish requires coordination among organizational leadership, team leaders, and HR. To facilitate microcultures, organizations should consider the following steps.

• Define a microculture by focusing on the work. To define where and how you want to create a microculture, start with the work itself, as the work will often drive the development of a microculture. Working backward from the outcomes the organization seeks to achieve, the work can be broken down into its component parts to understand what needs to get done and then where and how.

For some companies, starting with the work enables them to create workplace microcultures that cut across traditional functional siloes. For example, one microculture may exist for those who work primarily on-site for roles like IT infrastructure specialist, because while the work is done independently, specialized equipment is required. In contrast, roles like customer engagement manager or HR business partner may have a microculture with more remote and flexible time arrangements because their work is collaborative but not location- or time-specific.

• Integrate microcultures into the talent life cycle. Talent processes like hiring, performance management, development, and deployment should be flexible to adapt to the unique culture of a team, function, or location. When it comes to talent acquisition, organizations can tailor recruitment communications to capture the distinctive cultural elements of the hiring team. In the same way that organizations have sophisticated methods for targeting customer segments, they can similarly target workforce segments internally or externally with tailored messaging and practices specific to a given microculture.

This can even be done on a team-level basis, where workers are hired or deployed to teams based on which microculture suits them best. For example, manufacturing company ACS has increased its hiring effectiveness by adding a behavioral assessment to its talent acquisition process, which has led to the placement of higher-quality candidates into teams that fit their behavioral profile and team culture, resulting in more productive teams and significant time saved.³¹

When it comes to reinforcing microculture behaviors, rewards can be a powerful lever. Leaders should ensure that performance management processes and rewards reinforce behaviors that are consistent with—or at least not in conflict with—teams’ unique ways of working. One organization that is embedding microcultures into performance management processes is Google Cloud. Because Google Cloud is a business-to-business company, unlike the rest of Google, which works directly with consumers, the Google Cloud People team recognized the need to have a unique microculture that reinforced customer empathy. The tenets of customer empathy are embedded in the Teamwork attribute of Google’s performance review process, so while all Googlers are expected to exemplify teamwork, Cloud Googlers’ Teamwork assessment is tied to the customer empathy culture tenets.³²

• Tap managers, leaders, and boundary spanners to be “modular” across microcultures. While microcultures move some of the perceived locus of control away from an organization’s leadership, leaders have an important role to play in establishing and articulating guiding principles that apply to the whole organization and enabling managers to make connections across teams. Managers and team leaders can serve as the connection points between teams that can align potentially disparate cultures to accomplish common goals.

The growth organization at one leading consumer products company, for instance, includes innovation, research and development, and marketing functions, which are united broadly by curiosity, but each has a distinct microculture due to unique differences in the nature of the work. The research and development function is highly technical, so its microculture is focused more on education and discovery processes, with a medium- to long-term view of work products. By contrast, the social media marketing team prioritizes speed and creativity to produce viral content aligned with social media trends.³³ Despite the different microcultures across these three groups, leaders of these teams are able to work across them due to the overarching value of curiosity, which fosters more collaboration and engagement.

Organizational network analysis can also help identify the “modular” collaboration points across microcultures. This analysis can identify not only people that overlap between multiple microcultures to be ambassadors for each but also when two microcultures are not collaborating at optimal levels.³⁴

General Motors tapped into organizational network analysis to drive innovation and change through agile teams, which were formed based on network roles that could be leveraged in different ways to drive new ways of working.³⁵ For example, when General Motors acquired a technology company, it intentionally did not fully absorb the team in order to protect its microculture led by the founder. Rather, General Motors tapped into “boundary spanners” to connect the entrepreneurial team with the operations side of the business for access to resources like engineering or testing. Preserving this microculture helped General Motors become the first in self-driving test vehicle assembly in a mass-production facility.³⁶

• Provide the tools and data needed to enable ongoing sensing. Consider investing at the organizational level in survey-based tools, AI, and other data collection and analysis mechanisms that allow organizations to understand microcultures in real-time. While sensing of microcultures can be used to course-correct teams or groups that have gone rogue, it can also be used to shine a spotlight on best practices or learnings across groups. This approach can provide insight into work groups’ functioning and allow leaders to relinquish tight control of microcultures.³⁷

For example, Dutch software company KeenCorp scans internal emails and chats (aggregated and anonymized, never at the individual level) to gauge culture, engagement, and flag potential problems.³⁸ For instance, if there are microaggressions in a particular microculture, the analysis may find normal patterns of engagement for one population but a dip in another.

Looking to the future of microcultures

Organizational leaders may worry that acknowledging and enabling microcultures will cause the organization to lose its identity or focus as microcultures proliferate. However, thoughtful use of new data and technology to understand various microcultures, coupled with empowering managers to “own” their respective cultures with a boundaryless HR approach to people expertise can help strike the right balance between control and empowerment.

Failing to embrace microcultures—whether by passively ignoring the microcultures that already exist or actively discouraging their existence—is likely to create misalignment between workers and leadership that hinders the achievement of business and human outcomes. Instead, organizational leaders, managers, and workers should cocreate a set of flourishing microcultures that are aligned with the organization’s guiding principles. The likely results: better collaboration, stronger business and human outcomes, and increased agility—all key contributors to an organization’s long-term success.