an essay about unwritten rules

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Social Norms in Society

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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The functions of social norms, the influence of social norms on behavior, limitations and potential for change.

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Why You Should Write Down Your Company’s Unwritten Rules

• Karen Niovitch Davis

What goes unsaid can have a profound influence on employees’ actions.

Unwritten rules and ways of doing things — both good and bad — are ingrained in the corporate world. Often, these norms become so enmeshed in company culture that leaders don’t even think about them. But if a company’s norms aren’t regularly revisited to ensure they align with the organization’s goals — and if leaders aren’t careful about how their behavior contributes to them — they can morph from a positive force to a destructive one. That’s why leaders need to periodically revisit the firm’s unofficial rules. Write them out, so that you and your employees can compare notes about what’s expected of them. Consider whether unspoken rules reflect the kind of behavior you want to promote. And when norms change, overcommunicate so that everyone is on the same page.

Unwritten rules and ways of doing things — both good and bad — are ingrained in the corporate world. Often, these norms become so enmeshed in company culture that leaders don’t even think about them. But if a company’s norms aren’t regularly revisited to ensure they align with the organization’s goals, and if leaders aren’t careful about how their behavior contributes to them, they can morph from a positive force to a destructive one.

• KD Karen Niovitch Davis is a partner and the chief human resources officer of the strategic communications firm Prosek Partners.

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How Unwritten Rules Shape Your Culture

You won’t find your company most important rules in the employee handbook. The rules that people follow are usually unwritten.

By Gustavo Razzetti

October 6, 2017

In the workplace, behavior matters more than words

“Let me tell you how things work here.”

The first day at a new job is rough.

We’re excited and proud, but also feel nervous. Will I fit in? Will the reality of the job match my desires?

The first day at a job is when expectations meet reality. And that’s why both employers and employees feel anxious.

The first contact with the company’s culture makes us wonder if we’ve made the right decision.

That’s what recently happened to a former client when she had just finished her onboarding at her new job. Maggie was sitting at her new desk while trying to memorize the company’s vision statement.

“Let me tell you how things work here” — someone from the spontaneous welcome committee said.

This aspiring leader was reminding Maggie of the most important lesson at a new job; fitting-in is more than just being liked. It’s about behaving according to the unwritten rules that govern an organization.

Unspoken rules define your culture

“Culture is the behavior you reward and punish.” — Jocelyn Goldfein

Maggie — a former client — is a high-performing, confident, and driven executive. That’s why she was so successful at her previous job.

But her smarts seemed less valuable now.

One month into her new job, Maggie was called to her boss’ office to discuss her performance. Maggie works in a large training organization in the business development department. Written rules say she should be making ten calls per day.

As her boss was reviewing the stats, Maggie couldn’t understand what was going on. Since she’d joined, thanks to her vast network, she was closing business at almost twice the rate of the rest of the team.

She was “accused” of making fewer calls than expected.

As illogical as it might sound, this particular company rewards fitting-in over being extraordinary.

In this case, the unspoken rule seemed to be: “playing by-the-rules matters more than results” or “ bosses reward mediocre employees and fear top performers.”

The behaviors organizations promote and tolerate, determine their real culture. They are more powerful than any written rules – or a mission statement, for that matter.

Many times, unspoken rules encourage mediocre behaviors from both employees and managers.

This pattern creates a paradox in the workplace.

Companies believe that the most talented people are expensive. If they just analyze the salary/ cost, maybe so. The truth is that organizations pay mediocre employees way too much.

The ROI on mediocre employees is much lower. That’s what makes them more expensive – especially if you factor in how they negatively affect top performers.

Mismanagement makes unwritten rules official.

Understanding Your Unwritten Rules

“You can observe a lot by watching.” — Yogi Berra, baseball catcher

As I discussed in a previous piece , an unsafe or toxic culture harms not just employee retention, but your bottom line too.

That’s what unwritten rules do: they erode trust. People want to survive, rather than to do their best work.

There’s often a gap between the ideal state that organizations communicate and their reality. This lack of transparency is what feeds unwritten rules.

Steve Simpson, the author of Cracking the Corporate Culture Code, explains how research in Australia and New Zealand has shown a dangerous gap between the desired culture and the actual operating one.

When managers’ behaviors are different from their words, employees become cynical about the organization’s mission and values, the author states.

Many senior managers speak about wanting a culture that encourages innovation, collaboration, open communication, and teamwork, but their behaviors are promoting mediocrity, fear, politics, and individualism.

Here are some examples I’ve seen in both large corporations and fast-growth startups. Use them to reflect on how your organization talks and behaves.

Sound familiar? Which behaviors are promoting unspoken rules? Why?

I’m not telling you to lower your organization’s ambition, but when a company’s visions and goals are disconnected from reality, they fuel skepticism.

That’s why I’m always helping my clients build and promote a culture of transparency .

Being candid about the reality of how an organization operates will inspire people to help you. Doing the opposite will only widen the gap of trust.

How to deal with the unwritten rules in the workplace

If you are a manager:.

Provide a safe space for people to speak up: Are people rewarded for sharing their ideas? Do you let team members speak up first? Are you actively listening to other opinions? Or simply pretending there’s an open dialogue…

Make sure everyone abides by the same rules: Some organizations allow favorites or bosses to play outside the written rules. This creates a sense of injustice and unfairness.

Address the tensions between written and unwritten rules: Encourage your team to bring up their observations. Don’t just ask them to do so, regularly touch base to address silent issues ( or the stinky fish , as we call it)

Become more aware of your own behaviors: Are you consciously and/ or unconsciously behaving in a way that promotes unspoken rules rather than being consistent with the values you preach? That’s okay. We all make mistakes. Make necessary adjustments and, most importantly, let your team know you are challenging your behaviors.

To show you are serious, behave boldly: Your actions — what you reward and punish — is the standard that will define your team’s behaviors. Don’t just make statements; leaders need to behave boldly. The more risks you take , the more your team will trust your words.

Acknowledging your mistakes will build trust. Embracing vulnerability not only shows that you’re human, but also that you trust yourself and are confident enough to confront your own flaws .

If you are a new employee:

Be patient. There’s always a gap; comparing things now with how you felt at your previous job won’t help.

Don’t fight what’s different; try to learn and reflect.

Ask questions, rather than provide solutions. As I told Maggie, most people resist ideas from newcomers – even if they’re right. If you detect something that can be improved, present your observations as a question.

Challenge the team to reflect and find a solution rather than show them how wrong they are. Most probably, they have tried to “change things around here” before.

The problem with unwritten rules is not just that they define informal behaviors; it’s that they represent the real culture, one that is not aligned with the company purpose .

Addressing and adjusting behaviors will help build a healthier culture. Promoting transparency drives the necessary safe space for people to speak up and resolve these tensions .

Unspoken rules are just symptoms; what do they say about your company?

Which management behaviors are promoting those unspoken rules?

Who benefits from those unspoken rules?

What do you think?

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Related posts.

The Power of Rituals: Building Bridges in Remote Teams

5 Things That Separate the Best Workplace Cultures From The Rest

Culture Is the Behavior You Reward and Punish

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Unwritten (and Written) Rules

by Jim Bruce

…  they surround us

No matter where you look, you will find both unwritten and written rules – rules at work, rules that are personal to you, rules for your family, rules about your social interactions, rules at home, rules everywhere. Some are “written” by others including your organization, and many, likely the majority, by yourself. Most of these rules are so emmeshed in our lives that we do not spend much time thinking about them, we simply follow the rule. For the most part, these rules have a positive impact on ordering and improving our lives. However, they can also morph into unhelpful and sometimes manipulative behaviors that are not helpful to either ourselves or those around us.   The provost at a small New England college told me in a coaching session some years ago, that one of the unwritten personal rules he had for workdays was, after breakfast, to get in his car, drive to the college, park in his parking space and go to his office. And, that worked well except that on one particular day, a Sunday, he discovered as he was parking at the college that he missed the word “work” as he was unconsciously applying his rule and had gone to work instead of church. I’m sure that you have had occasions where you have misapplied one of your rules as well. Most of the time, as it was here, no major catastrophe occurs.    An IT manager at an organization had a rule of typically working until around 6 p.m.  and  expecting the staff to work until he had departed for the day. On days when the manager needed or wanted to leave early, he would have someone pick him up away from the parking lot so his staff wouldn’t see him leave and could continue to see his distinctive car in its usual parking space. They just believed he was in meetings elsewhere, at least until they figured out what he was doing. Here the result was a loss of credibility on the part of the manager.   Unwritten rules and the ways things are done, for good and for bad, are ingrained in all parts of our lives. They are a key part of the “cultures” we exist in. If you stop for a moment and do a quick inventory of your actions since you woke up this morning, you’ll discover rules have significantly guided your actions from the moment you awoke. And, they are both little rules, e.g., how you put toothpaste on your toothbrush, bigger rules like coordinating your calendar with your family or apartment-mates or dropping kids off at the bus stop, as well as a myriad of plans and rules for your workday. For the most part, we don’t give much thought to any of these rules. We just execute our day.   Karen Davis, 1  in her paper  Why You Should Write Down Your Company’s Unwritten Rules , while focusing on your organization, argues that we need to revisit our rules from time to time (at least annually). She writes, if our “norms aren’t regularly revisited to ensure that they align with the organization’s goals, and if leaders aren’t careful about how their behavior contributes to them, they [the rules] can morph from a positive force to a destructive one.” This need to revisit our rules is something that exists in  all  phases of our life.   Davis provides a process with three steps to guide us:

• Discover your own unwritten rules.  They primarily exist in your memory, manifest by your actions. This can be exhausting so do it in pieces while also being alert to behaviors you (or others) do that catch your attention and cause you to ask “Why?” and whether that rule is helpful. Be mindful of how your rules impact others. For example, if you have a rule that “all of the meetings you lead start on time,” be sure others who attend your meetings know that. And, you be sure that  you  arrive before the appointed time. Here is a place where the oft-quoted leadership rule that “if you arrive after five minutes before the meeting, you’re late” truly applies.
• Challenge your own unwritten rules.  After you discover the rules that you, with contributions from others, have set for yourself, ask whether they are accomplishing what was intended. Does the rule indeed help you accomplish what you expected it would, for you and/or for others impacted by the rule? For example, if your practice is to start all of your staff meetings on time, and there are stragglers, seek to understand why some staff are late. Do they always arrive late to early morning meetings? All meetings? Do they come late because they are disinterested in the early topics on the agenda? Do they feel the meeting is a waste of their time? Look for ways to change the rule so that it works better for everyone.
• And,  when you change one of your rules, you communicate  (Davis’ word here is “overcommunicate”) that the rules are changed, and why they were changed. You cannot assume that others will read your mind and observe the change and immediately fall in line. 

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, in their paper  Culture Takes Over When the CEO Leaves the Room , 2  also stress the importance of communicating the change in the unwritten rules that define the culture. In the essay they told a story about David Neeleman. When Neeleman started JetBlue one of his rules was that everyone was in service to the customers. To demonstrate that he really meant everyone, once each month he flew as a member of the crew. “He would put on an apron and serve coffee up and down the aisle, introducing himself to passengers. The gesture not only electrified passengers on these flights, but also sent a buzz throughout the entire organization. [In this way,] Neeleman made it explicit that everyone, at every level, was in service to JetBlue customers.”   We all live in an environment that is rule rich. Most of the time we execute the rule without giving it much thought. Most of the rules are solid, and good for us personally and organizationally. Some, however, may be beyond their “use date” and need to be rethought, rewritten, and/or abandoned. Do take some time this week to begin the process of revalidating your personal rules as well as those you have “installed” in the organization you are responsible for.   Make it a great week for you and those around you.  .  .  .  .  jim     Jim Bruce is a Senior Fellow and Executive Coach at MOR Associates.  He previously was Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Vice President for Information Systems and CIO at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.     References:

• Karen Niovitch Davis,  Why You Should Write Down Your Company’s Unwritten Rules , Harvard Business Review, October 2019.
• Frances Frei and Anne Morriss,  Culture Takes Over When the CEO Leaves the Room , Harvard Business Review, May 2012.
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Can Knowing the “Real Rules” Help Us Co-Exist?

Understanding each other’s customs and norms helps us exist with each other..

Posted May 9, 2022 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Social norms are the unwritten rules that no one talks about, but everyone figures out.
• Knowing social norms can lead to thriving, but not knowing them can become a barrier to entry and to success.
• A clever new game helps scientists identify social norms.

We’ve all had this experience in some way or another: You find yourself in a new environment, and you don’t know what the rules are for how you should behave. What I mean is that you don’t know the “real rules.” The “real rules” are the ones that are not posted or talked about; they are the ones everyone knows and expects you to know. They are the rules that everyone is playing by.

I didn’t know the real rules when I took my first job after college. My boss was a well-known economist on the faculty of a very prominent university, and I was regularly sitting in on research meetings as his team of scientists prepared their reports for a conference I was hired to organize.

During my first week on the job, I arrived every day at 8:30 a.m., took a one-hour lunch at noon, left at 5 p.m., and stayed at my desk working (even if I had nothing to do, in which case I would read printouts of articles from the newspaper so that it looked like I was working). I kept the rhythm the staff kept.

But this was not the rhythm of the scientists. They often arrived later in the morning, they worked different (often longer) hours, didn’t take lunch breaks, sometimes ate dinner at the office, often handled personal and work tasks during the day, put their feet up on their desks to read academic papers or ponder statistical results, and wore clothing that was sometimes not ironed. The women tended not to wear makeup, and young scientists openly disagreed with senior scientists. It was a different world.

After my first week, I started coming to work later, and I adopted the work hours and mannerisms of what I believed to be “my tribe”—the scientists. The scientists said nothing about this, but the staff let me know I had crossed a line. There were no more warm smiles when I arrived and no more asking me if I wanted to go in on a coffee order. I never enjoyed their trust or friendship thereafter because I had signaled, through my choice of which rules to adopt, that I was not in their tribe.

Social norms are the unwritten rules that no one talks about, but everyone figures out. They are defined as collectively understood rules regarding appropriate behavior in a situation. If you know them, then savvy navigation can lead to success. But if you don’t know them, then they become barriers to entry and to success.

Identifying Social Norms in the U.S. and Abroad

In a recent paper, "When in Rome: Identifying Norms Using Coordination Games," my co-authors and I examine how people not born in the U.S., but currently attending a U.S. university, perceive American norms. We created our own protocol for gathering information: We described two scenarios that are known to vary across countries (one about tipping on a lunch bill and one about arriving on time to a meeting with friends). After reading the scenario, we asked U.S. and non-U.S.-born subjects to play a game.

In the game, they rate how appropriate it is to tip 0 percent, 5 percent, and so on, up to 25 percent. They also rate how appropriate it is to arrive early (10 minutes) or late (2, 5, 10 minutes) to a meeting with friends. But we told them there was a catch. In one case, we told them we would only pay them if they could guess how most Americans would respond in the two scenarios; in another, we told them we would only pay them if they could guess how most people from outside the U.S. would respond. We also asked them to tell us what they personally thought was appropriate (in this case, there was no game; they just told us what they thought).

What’s neat about this method is that you can use it to identify the “real rules” that are collectively known but not posted or typically spoken about. We were able to show that non-U.S.-born nationals have different norms from Americans, and we were able to show that those rules they told us about were different from what they personally believed would be appropriate.

For example, if the respondent was from a country where people often arrive late to events, then they told us that arriving late was collectively viewed as more appropriate than their U.S. counterparts. We also found that when we asked them to tell us what the U.S. norms were, they were able to predict very well that tipping 20 percent and arriving on time are the most appropriate actions to take here in the U.S.

While we picked situations where we knew that norms differed by country, the study showed us something else important about how people live and work together, even when they don’t share the same norms or personal beliefs. The non-U.S.-born respondents were remarkably good at telling us what the “real rules” were in the U.S. They were also keenly aware of the rules back home. Through their knowledge of the real rules in both cultures, they would have the ability to do something I was not able to do in my first job—be part of two tribes.

How they learned these real rules is a story for another day. Learning about them using games has transformed how we can study them and share them with others. One thing is clear: Having a local guide sure helps. In my own life, having studied how the real rules have real consequences for well-being, work, and family happiness and success, I try to be that guide for others. This is one way that we can help each other exist in the world and with each other.

Krupka, E., R. Weber, R. Croson & H. Hoover. (2022). When in Rome: Identifying Social Norms as a Group Phenomenon. Judgement and Decision Making Journal , 17(2), 263-283.

Erin Krupka, Ph.D. , is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She is an experimental behavioral economist who explores how social norms and collective values emerge, the forces determining their content, and how they are transmitted and maintained.

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