A workplace culture isn’t just about an organisation’s stated values – it’s also about the processes that make those values tangible. In other words, how stuff gets done. Before today’s era of hybrid and flexible working, employees tended to absorb their workplace culture almost by osmosis. “You’d be living and breathing it five days a week,” says Nish Chowdhury of the marketing agency Oliver.
As the agency’s global director of people systems and operations, Chowdhury has had to grapple with the dramatic upheaval in working practices of recent years. While the shift started with the global work-from-home experiment that many companies underwent during the Covid pandemic, it has continued apace. “Covid really put a spanner in the works in terms of how we see company culture,” says Chowdhury.
