what’s the difference between morale and culture? let’s talk about pizza.

What’s the difference between morale and culture? It’s all just vibes, right?

Not quite.

Morale is about how people are feeling. It’s their global, all-things-considered judgment about how satisfied they are at work. Building morale improves satisfaction, increases energy, fosters loyalty to the organization and strengthens relationships at work.

Culture, on the other hand, is the set of shared beliefs, values and actions that people in a group have in common. Building culture is all about the deliberate linkage of morale to the mission. In other words, when feelings are high, you’ve got high morale; when high morale is indexed to doing things that improve performance and advance your organization’s mission, that’s culture. 

Suppose your organization has ritualized pizza parties. Consider the difference between: 

- Here, we have pizza parties every Friday

- Here, we have pizza parties every time we accomplish X milestone

The former definitely improves morale, builds connections, and makes people like your organization more. The latter, however, builds culture. Improving culture, by definition, improves outcomes and/or performance. 

Any time a leader does something to improve morale, there’s an opportunity to improve culture by connecting that thing to performance.

The nice thing about culture is that people’s motivation/vibe-enhancement is not dependent on the leader’s personality. I’ve seen plenty of organizations with salty leaders and joyous teams; I’ve also seen plenty of organizations with effervescent leaders and laser-focused teams. It all works. Unfortunately, though, I’ve also seen too many teams that are happy, outwardly joyful, and full of camaraderie while organizational performance flags. This is when things go wrong in ways that are hard to fix. The other nice thing about culture is that it does not depend on the leader’s own affect; in high-culture organizations, leaders can have a stressful week and the vibe of the organization won’t shift because morale is tied to things going well at work not how much happiness orchestration the leader is doing for the team.

A leader’s job, then, is to constantly be making connections between morale-boosting actions and performance-boosting behaviors.

Try it this week: Any time you do something (that you were already planning on doing) for the sake of morale (icebreaker to launch a meeting, cake in the break room, whatever), make a deliberate connection to performance (“We’re starting with an icebreaker because doing our best work hinges on our collaboration,” “I brought in cake to celebrate ___,” and so on). You can even do this for negative vibes and you can even do this retrospectively, too: “Seems to me that things have been feeling a little funky the past few days. I think this may be because last week was a tough week in terms of [outcomes, behavior, or whatever else was sagging] and not doing our best just makes everyone feel worse.”

The exciting thing is that culture becomes self-sustaining: The more you make these connections explicit for your team, the more they start doing this spontaneously for and among themselves.

-Ben