A while back I posted about Culture Posters, a technique for trying to build your culture by writing down the core attributes. It’s worth doing, but is a poster enough? How do you get the team to truly absorb it?

The CIO I work with right now took those same values and had them put onto a cube thing like the image above. It folds this way and that way, each side has one of the values from the poster – same colors, same fonts, same logo. One for each employee to put on their desk. Do they get used? Here’s something you might not expect – the cube has a couple magnets to hold it closed and as you flip it back and forth there is an audible ‘click’. It’s not loud, but it’s noticeable, and she hears it on the phone all the time. People play with the cube while talking on the phone, I do it myself.

Does that translate into learning and internalizing the values? I’m not sure about internalizing, but as a tool for sharing them I think it’s more effective than the poster idea, though the two work nicely together.