Multi-national, global workplace teams need to add anthropologists to their organizations now more than ever. Anthropology provides a framework for understanding how economic uncertainty, political unrest, and social changes power the workplace. Anthropologists argue that organizations are complex cultural systems embedded in larger socio-political economic environments—where power, identity, and meaning are constantly negotiated.
By using ethnography to observe the hidden social dynamics, unspoken rules, and cultural behaviors, workplace anthropologists can provide the human-centered perspective to solve problems and turn data into workplace strategy, culture, and design. Drawing on my academic and applied anthropological training, I enable organizations to address inequality, leadership development, workplace design, and organizational culture that optimize people’s ability to prosper in physical and digital environments.
For two decades I have grounded my work believing that anthropologists’ insights are most valuable when shared and expanded by others. Cultural anthropology is often the missing piece for grappling with human problems—but only if the anthropologist is a true collaborator, a partner in making the abstract concrete. We must work to translate qualitative field studies into strategies we can integrate with quantitative data.
The professionals and forms of expertise needed to formulate, design, and execute workplace experiences, including hybrid working, co-working, and flexible workspaces, have changed dramatically. Especially noticeable are post-pandemic shifts in workplace management towards a growing focus on workplace culture, behavior, and human centric workplaces and the rise of AI. As businesses focus on recruiting, retaining, and optimizing their employees’ productivity, workplace design has become a crucial element in corporate strategy.
In my consulting practice, I collaborate with workplace teams in financial services and other industries in a dynamic, collaborative, multi-step process. Partnering with team members—including researchers, designers, data analysts, and managers—we first determine a client’s core needs. Our questions include: Why do people choose to come to the office? or What makes a collaborative space effective? or How does our company culture actually impact productivity? Together, we co-develop a research design that blends immersive ethnographic methods with quantitative data, providing a holistic view. This ensures we know both “what” happens in a workplace and begin to understand “why.”
The role of ‘workplace’ anthropologist
What is the value of adding an anthropologist to a team? There are three key tenets of the discipline that explain optimizing workplace collaboration.
1. An all echelon ‘Worldview’
The first is that workplace anthropologists are experts in understanding the worldview and behavior of employees from the bottom to the top of organizational hierarchies. Discerning differences according to cultural and life experiences can initiate a more equitable, cohesive, and productive workplace.
2. Ethnographic direct engagement
The second is that ethnography involves interviewing and observing different types of employees, to make meaning of their physical and digital workplace(s) including the adoption of new technologies such as AI. This enables anthropologists to discern employees’ mindsets, including their assumptions, aspirations, anxieties, joys, and hopes about future work and life. Ethnography provides insights into how physical and digital spaces can support individual workers, their needs, and ways of working individually and collaboratively.
3. Focus on workplace cultural aspects
The third is integrating workplace culture into the broader cultural-economic and socio-political context. Workplace culture is defined as a shared system of beliefs, values, rituals, and symbols that shape how people work and interact within an organization. But anthropologists ask, “By whom?” and “In what ways?” and “Under what conditions?” An anthropologist understands that a company and its “culture” are embedded within, and shaped by, broader societal forces.
My role as an anthropologist is to collaborate with teams to see beyond the walls of the office—physical or virtual—and understand how these external forces impact on an organization’s internal dynamics and the people within them. By analyzing these complex interconnections, we can identify immediate challenges and anticipate future shifts, enabling teams to develop more resilient and forward-looking strategies for the design and management of the workplace.
Looking at the core of an anonymized, imagined case study:
A hypothetical business found it difficult to address why a new company policy mandating five days in the office was failing (after the Pandemic) showing low adoption rates particularly among women, and especially in offices outside their U.S. headquarters. They needed to understand this low compliance in order to invest in designing offices that maximized employee attendance, satisfaction, and performance.
By focusing our cross-national, cross-city interviews on both men and women, our team could uncover why a disproportionate number of women were not returning to the office. The role of the physical and digital workplace was a core focus, especially that of the office, as we observed and translated our cultural analysis into clear directives, suggesting specific workplace design changes, targeted policy adjustments aimed to address women’s roles as caregivers, and new culture-building initiatives. We linked our anthropological insights to practical, business-oriented solutions that decision-makers could understand and act upon.
Seeing the workplace as a culture to understand—and not just as a space to manage—is not merely an academic exercise. It is a profitable, productive, and necessary step toward building the future of work.
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