How Can Organizational Cultures Impact Society at Large?

Life Science Marketing Radio

If you’ve been following me on LinkedIn lately, you know I spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of company culture and how marketing content can both reflect and drive culture. Done well, I believe the same content can both motivate employees and attract customers.

In this episode, we’ll take the impact of culture even further. Mykella Auld is the founder, Chief Culture Officer, and Executive Director of The Workwell Studio, and her work focuses on the intersection of organizational culture and societal well-being.

Mykella’s vision is to help organizations see culture as a strategic asset—a mechanism that not only supports employee engagement and productivity but also shapes the societal landscape in meaningful ways.

The relevant question, I believe is, “How can organizational culture best work to achieve the desired outcomes, whether in the public sector, the private sector, or in any community?”

Culture’s Ripple Effect

After getting a sociology degree, Mykella was working with a school district and the National Institute for Educational Leadership. A challenging legislative session on school reform opened her eyes to the impact of internal challenges. As is likely often the case, the culture within organizations and its impact often reaches as far as the services they provide (perhaps farther).

The Genesis of The Workwell Studio

Building on her experiences, Mykella pursued a master’s degree in leadership and later led a research team exploring the intersection of local government policies and community well-being. This work illuminated how public institutions—schools, nonprofits, and government agencies—impact not just their immediate stakeholders but society at large. Her findings reinforced the idea that organizational culture can be a powerful tool for driving positive change both internally and externally.

Strategies for Building Healthy Cultures

Culture doesn’t happen by accident—it must be strategically planned and invested in. Brian Thomson made the same point for life science companies in a previous episode. How does it happen. Mykella pointed out that HR departments, although essential, should not bear sole responsibility for culture. While initiatives around leadership and organizational development often fall to HR, they likely have enough to do and it might even be a conflict. Instead, she suggests organizations consider roles like a Director of Culture Initiatives to ensure dedicated focus on this critical area.

Key strategies include:

* Co-Creation: Building cultures that prioritize shared leadership and accountability. By involving employees in decision-making processes, organizations foster trust and inclusion.

* Well-Being: Focusing on social and emotional development, trust-building, and systems of care. Health outcomes are just one facet of well-being—the broader goal is creating environments where people thrive emotionally and socially. It strikes me that this is the kind of environment where people would be most happy and productive.

* Innovation: Encouraging a mindset that embraces trial and error, creativity, and exploration.

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The Role of Public Sector Organizations

Mykella noted that public sector leaders often lack formal leadership training, perhaps due to budget constraints, which can hinder their ability to prioritize staff and culture. (I wonder if it’s significantly different in the private sector. It seems most often that people who are good at their job get promoted to management without additional leadership or management training.)

Additionally, public institutions tend to focus outward on their mission to serve society, sometimes neglecting the internal health of their organizations. The behaviors and norms within these institutions often ripple into the communities they serve. It strikes me as a misalignment of values if an organization trying to serve the public isn’t modeling the world it hopes to create.

Mykella mentioned an art piece from the 1950s illustrating how workplace dynamics influence home life. This insight remains relevant today, emphasizing the societal responsibility public institutions have to model healthy behaviors and norms. Am I naive to think we should need to be reminded to treat others, whether they are colleagues, co-workers, employees or service providers with respect?

The Intersection of Public and Private Sectors

Here is why the above matters. To no one’s surprise, private sector leaders are having a huge impact on society in their public roles. While this trend brings opportunities for innovation, it also raises questions about balancing business-oriented approaches with the unique purposes of public institutions. From my point of view, none of us should outsource our cultural initiatives to people who don’t share our values. While there are certainly successful workplaces that reflect lovely communities, I don’t think that it makes sense to govern a society in the same way one would run a business.

The First Step

A centerpiece of The Workwell Studio’s work is its cultural audit tool. This comprehensive approach gathers data and human stories to assess an organization’s culture across areas like HR policies, well-being, social intelligence, and innovation. The findings provide a roadmap for organizations to align their strategies with their cultural goals.

Innovation, in particular, stands out as a critical component. Fostering an innovative mindset and new initiatives requires leaders to support risk-taking, value employee input, and view failures as learning opportunities. Without this openness, efforts to build a thriving culture may falter.

My Thoughts

One might ask if it’s the place of organizations, public or private to be the arbiters of culture. Fair enough. In a capitalist society, our workplaces often become our communities. For any organization, but especially large ones, there is the opportunity to shape societal culture - for better or worse I suppose. So if your mission is to make the world a better place, does your internal culture align with that?

At the same time I was recording and editing this interview, I was reading a book by Matthew…. entitled Shop Class as Soulcraft. The thesis of the book is largely about the value of manual work. The author is a motorcycle mechanic with a PhD in Physics.

The book explains how our educational system and workplaces are set up in some ways to devalue certain types of work.

In the course of reading it, I contemplated whether I am closer to being a craftsperson or a cog in the machine. All of that got me thinking about how we justify making organizations centers of culture to some degree. That may overstate their impact.

It strikes me that there are many legitimate ways of working, all of which have value, even though the satisfaction that comes from it may vary both in kind and degree. The motorcycle mechanic learns from experience and a hands-on approach. He or she is intimately connected to their work and the end product. For many organizations or businesses, however, this doesn’t make sense. It takes a lot of people to design, build, procure, and ship a mass spectrometer, for example. In that situation, leadership and teamwork are critical for success, which is why I believe that thinking about culture strategically is important.

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