When it comes to organizational culture, day-to-day work can get short shrift partly because it's role specific, but also because it's difficult to redesign an entire system based on isolated experiences. Still, it's ultimately the collective feelings around day-to-day work that tend to validate however culture is being described.
In light of that, despite the best efforts of companies to craft clear, relevant cultural playbooks, 46% of employees report that their manager doesn't actually know what they do.
This plays out in a number of ways, but most significantly, it generates an advocacy vacuum between management and the functional roles that report to them. It's easy to argue that this is a hiring or training problem, especially when both managerial skills and subject matter skillsets don't quite match up at the price a company is willing to pay. But whatever the reason, the result is usually deteriorating morale, and eventual distortion of job roles.
As a case study, an individual contributor at a large non-profit related their experience to me. They initially reported to a leader who understood what they did, why they do it, and how they achieve good outcomes for their clients.
This leader moved on and was replaced by someone who didn't fully understand the work they oversaw. This set off a chain reaction: despite well articulated organizational values, there was no one to check this blind spot. Despite the working team's best efforts to communicate what they needed to be successful, no one could understand what they were trying to say.
In hindsight, it made sense that the original leader left: they were a lone island of advocacy for their function within the org structure. Through attrition and finally reorganization, the team dissolved.
49 years ago Harvard Business Review published the surprisingly timeless article Why Employees Stay. Their thesis still holds up: employees stay in a job out of inertia: they only move if some force makes them. A vacuum can act like a force when there's pressure elsewhere. To address this, organizations should discuss this topic candidly with their employees and identify ways to rebalance the pressure. The result can be the difference between tone deaf leadership and a sincere expression of values.