Anthropology
Culture as lived practice: rituals, symbols, informal rules, status systems and meaning-making, studied through immersive observation rather than instruments. Organisational and workplace anthropology reads the office as a cultural site — who sits where and why, what the unwritten constitution actually says.
Surveys capture what people say; anthropological observation captures what they do and what it means. The informal rules that govern desk choice, territory, presence and status are invisible to every quantitative stream — and they are frequently what decides whether a workplace concept survives contact with the organisation.
- What are the unwritten rules that actually govern this workplace?
- What do spatial arrangements communicate about status and belonging?
- Which rituals hold this organisation together, and where do they physically live?
- Why do people say one thing and do another?
- Ethnographic fieldwork: structured observation, shadowing, contextual interviews
- Organisational ethnography literature
- Artefact analysis: what people put up, move, mark and leave behind
Concepts tested against the informal constitution before launch; rituals given deliberate spatial homes rather than displaced by efficiency; status communication in stacking and setting allocation treated as a design decision, because it is one either way.
Workplace Behaviour Review
The periodic qualitative review of how people actually behave in the workplace — the norms, adaptations and workarounds that quantitative streams register but cannot explain.
Organisational Culture Assessment
A structured assessment of culture, values, behavioural norms and leadership model — as enacted, not as espoused.
Establish a Community Group
Build a representative employee group that grounds the strategy in daily work reality and carries change into the organisation.
Targeted Insights
Focused mixed-method investigations that explain specific contradictions the broad evidence has surfaced but cannot resolve.
Ethnography-washing: a two-hour walkthrough branded as anthropological research. Genuine ethnographic insight requires sustained observation and interpretive skill; its findings are also particular — rich about this organisation, not generalisable beyond it.
Hybrid work has moved much organisational culture into digital space; the methods for ethnography across physical-digital settings are still forming.