Rules & regulations

What you should & shouldn't do

Rules tell people what the organization has decided matters enough to enforce, and the gap between written rules and actual practice is one of the most honest readings of culture you can get.

Every organization has formal rules: policies, codes of conduct, procedures, compliance requirements. These are the things written down, agreed on, and in some cases legally mandated. They represent the organization's official position on what behavior is acceptable.

Then there is practice. Rules that everyone follows tend to reflect genuine shared values. Rules that are widely ignored reveal either that the rule was poorly designed or that the culture has moved on without the policy catching up. Rules that are selectively enforced are a particular problem: they create a two-tier system where some people are held to account and others are not.

New rules should come with a reason. When people understand why a rule exists, they are more likely to follow the spirit of it rather than just the letter, and more likely to flag it when the rule stops making sense.

How it shows up

How this facet of culture actually appears in everyday working life, and what a healthy version tends to look like compared to one that is strained or ignored.

Formal rules

Written policies, codes of conduct, legal requirements, and official procedures that set out what the organization has decided is required or prohibited.

Informal norms

The rules no one wrote down but everyone follows anyway: behavioral expectations that have the force of culture rather than policy behind them.

Healthy

The formal rules broadly match actual practice, there are clear ways to raise a rule that feels wrong or outdated, and enforcement is consistent across people and levels.

Strained

People can readily name rules that exist on paper but are not followed, or policies that are applied differently depending on who is involved.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Are there formal rules here that most people treat as optional in practice?
How does the organization respond when someone breaks a rule versus when they bend one?
Who decides when a rule needs to be updated, and how easy is it to get an outdated rule changed?
Are rules applied consistently across different levels of the organization?
What informal rules carry more weight in practice than anything in the official handbook?

Things to notice

A long list of formal rules does not necessarily produce a culture of accountability. What actually governs behavior is which rules people believe will be enforced.
Rules written to address one-off incidents can accumulate over time into a compliance burden that no longer reflects what the organization actually cares about.
Selective enforcement of rules, even when unintentional, is one of the fastest ways to damage trust in the fairness of an organization.