Amid great change and great demands, a strong workplace culture has never been more vital. Many people have endured negative work experiences: the monotony of uninspiring tasks, the absence of genuine camaraderie, or unclear, disjointed expectations that leave employees feeling unmoored. At the other end of the spectrum, the most powerful endorsement a workplace can receive is when someone says they genuinely love going to work. Creating that feeling — of purpose, connection, and clarity — depends on cultivating a truly thoughtful and intentional culture. But many leaders don’t know how to get there.

In “Building Culture From the Middle Out,” Spencer Harrison and Kristie Rogers don’t just state a management principle — they spark a crucial conversation about workplace culture. “People are more likely to own a culture when they are involved in building it, and employees who feel more connected are more likely to stay,” they write. “They are better able to understand how to navigate a culture so that it feels visible and real, rather than invisible and mythical.”

Fostering a good work culture takes more than just posting corporate values on a website: It is created through intentional leadership that fosters belonging, accountability, well-being, and opportunities for growth. This leadership realm matters as organizations wrestle with still-evolving hybrid work models, burnout, changing employee expectations, and volatile global politics and economic policies.

At MIT SMR, we’re committed to sharing practical, research-backed strategies that can help leaders build stronger organizations. In this collection of articles, discover expert perspectives on how to create workplaces where people feel valued, supported, and motivated to do their best work. Then watch our bonus video to learn how GE Appliances CEO Kevin Nolan built a culture of distributed power using microenterprises — and how you can do the same.

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1. Design Work to Prevent Burnout

Sharon K. Parker and Caroline Knight

“Managers are responsible for keeping employee morale and productivity high. Yet when they try to reduce burnout and improve worker well-being, many report not knowing where to start or what to do.

“Absent clear solutions, they tend to focus on fixing the person, such as by offering the overworked employee productivity tips and encouragement to assert healthy boundaries, or providing stressed-out workers with training in mindfulness techniques or yoga classes at lunchtime. However, fix-the-worker strategies do little to resolve stress caused by long hours and unreasonable workloads. …

“A better approach is to create healthier and more sustainable jobs through good work design. Decades of research show that when jobs include positive characteristics such as autonomy, variety, and social support, employees are more satisfied, motivated, and committed to the organization, and they perform better. Meanwhile, minimizing work characteristics that harm people, like excessive time pressure, is crucial to preventing burnout.” Read the full article »

2. What the Return-to-Office Debate Misses: Employees Are Customers

Deborah Lovich, Gabrielle Novacek, and Chenault Taylor

“The ongoing debate about return-to-office mandates is a symptom of a bigger issue. Most companies treat employees as a cost to be managed rather than customers who choose how much of their personal energy and effort to bring to work every day. Your organization likely knows a lot about customer value: There is also tremendous value to be generated when employees love their work — or to be lost when they are frustrated or exasperated by it.

“The concept of employee centricity isn’t new, but the way organizations have pursued it has been largely simplistic and problematic for various reasons. For example, most employee engagement surveys simply ask workers what they want. Meanwhile, consumer researchers use sophisticated analytics tools, like conjoint, max-diff, and regression analyses, to gain much deeper insights. …

“Perhaps even more unfortunate, nearly all organizational attempts at employee value delivery treat employees like a monolithic group, rarely recognizing segments with differentiated characteristics and needs. And when they analyze the overall results from annual surveys aimed at better understanding employees’ needs, leaders often use that one-size-fits-all lens. If companies do segment their workforce, they usually do so based on demographic identity — often as part of efforts to support specific communities, such as women.

“But our research has shown that segmenting employees based on traditional demographics can obscure critical information about them. Instead, rigorous qualitative and quantitative research and analytics, like those used in consumer research, can reveal what truly differentiates and drives employee outcomes — and what organizations can do to address the various groups’ needs. Without these deep insights, efforts to improve the future of work at your organization, such as improving the hybrid work model, will likely fail.” Read the full article »

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3. When Team Accountability Is Low: Four Hard Questions for Leaders

Melissa Swift

“It turns out that some concrete evolutions in how we work are making personal accountability in the workplace a tougher challenge. Now, true to an article on accountability, I’m not letting anyone off the hook here … but we’re not going to solve for it simply by shaking our index fingers at folks and scolding them to ‘be more accountable!’

“Rather, a leader needs to understand what’s stopping folks from behaving accountably and then overcome those challenges. But there is some bad news: You may have to actively disrupt some of your own long-held behaviors as well.

“Think of these moves as ‘circuit breakers’ — shutting the whole system down and bringing it back up with responsible actions built into your organization’s modus operandi.” Read the full article »