A consumer company established itself in Asia. Sales were below expectations. Admittedly, there were multiple reasons for this, but the main ones were price and quality. The older generation who had long worked with product development at the company were stuck in their own prejudices. They thought that customers from the region, new to the company, liked cheap goods and it was acceptable to compromise on quality. In fact, design and quality were what determined how consumers spent their money.

A traditional company had existed for more than a hundred years. Gold watches were typically presented to retiring employees. After all, they had spent most of their careers at the company. The way people introduced themselves in meetings almost always included a mention of how many years they had worked at the company. If an employee said that they had worked for less than ten years, they could be met with outright laughter and smirks –what did they know about the business? People who had worked for 20 years or more were treated with respect. An insignificant detail perhaps, but it was widely considered to be the main reason why new and younger employees did not feel welcome. They found it difficult to contribute their ideas and gain trust. This drove people to apply for jobs outside the company.

A global company, headquartered in Sweden, had a tradition of communicating twice a year to all employees around the world, thanking them for their hard work and wishing them a pleasant holiday. Despite the fact that the company has grown and now had employees from several countries, this tradition had not changed. So they continued to wish employees a Merry Christmas and a Happy Midsummer, (a major holiday in Sweden). Employees who did not celebrate these holidays wondered why their holiday was never noticed and felt both forgotten and excluded. If an employee requested leave to celebrate a holiday that did not coincide with either Christmas or Midsummer, they had a hard time getting their applications approved. The system was not designed for such requests. In addition to disappointing and frustrating a large proportion of employees as they did not feel that they were fully part of the company’s culture, the company missed the opportunity to spread holidays more evenly throughout the year and thereby avoid major downturn in business in July.

A fast-growing tech company had relatively young founders and the first employees belonged to the same group: young, single, no children. In the first years of the company’s development, the focus was on “work hard, play hard” – something that became part of the company’s culture. But as people outside this circle of founders were recruited, people with other life situations, ages and religions, the constant partying became uncomfortable. Especially when it was assumed that everyone would participate because important decisions, idea generation, and strategy meetings had traditionally been carried out together with alcohol. If you did not participate – and did not drink – then you were not considered sufficiently committed and became even more excluded.