Every team has a culture. Choose yours.
ARCH is Inclusion Design Group’s framework for helping teams consciously co-create a shared workplace culture built from the strengths each person brings, instead of defaulting to unexamined norms.
Your team has a culture right now that’s mostly invisible. ARCH makes it visible, so your team can keep what works and co-create what could work better.
That culture lives in the unspoken. Do meetings start right away, or with small talk? Do colleagues discuss their home lives with each other? What counts as “urgent”? Is conflict quietly brewing under the polite hello?
Most workplace culture training teaches static etiquette rules: do this, don’t do that, never say this, always write this in your emails. Lists feel safe, but they never work. They’re always incomplete, they go stale the moment someone new joins, and they treat culture as something fixed to tiptoe around rather than something teams actively make and remake together.
When culture forms by accident, it defaults to the norms of whoever is loudest, most senior, or in the majority. Half the team thrives. The other half quietly adapts, burns out, or leaves. And the friction gets explained as personality clashes instead of culture.
Teams that genuinely thrive don’t memorize each other’s rules. They build a shared way of working that belongs to them, intentionally. ARCH is the method for doing that.
The Framework
A
Authenticity
The Personal Goal
Staying genuinely yourself while you adapt to the team. Each person defines what they need to do their best work.
R
Respect
The Team Goal
Authenticity is your job; respect is the team’s job. Making real room for everyone to stay genuinely themselves through specific behavior, not vague niceness.
C
Communication
The Strategy
How respect and authenticity get delivered across the gap between people. Naming the unspoken and making the implicit explicit.
H
Hybridization
The Result
The new shared culture your team ends up with, one none of its members had on their own. New rituals, norms, and expectations, chosen together.
How Teams Experience ARCH
Introductory ARCH Training
An overview of our complete framework in one facilitated experience. Our facilitators bring all four components of ARCH to life through hands-on exercises drawn from our Cultural Audit and Team Charter tools and your team leaves with its first hybrid norms in writing.
Component Intensives
Prefer to build the arch stone by stone? The series covers Authenticity, Respect, Communication, and Hybridization in depth, with time between sessions for your team to put each one into practice.
Online Courses
Our upcoming course “Developing Cross-Cultural Intelligence” puts ARCH at the center of working across cultures, available in English and Spanish on major online learning platforms.
The Book
The forthcoming ARCH book brings the full framework and its practical toolkit, including the Cultural Audit and the Team Charter, to your shelf.
The App
What happens after the workshop? The app keeps ARCH alive in your team meetings with guided prompts, captured answers, and an evolving charter, included with every facilitated training.
Developed through IDG’s work with hundreds of teams.
Trusted by 300+ organizations since 2018 including Amazon, LinkedIn, YouTube, Stanford, and Kraft Heinz. IDG’s online courses have reached over 1 million learners in 10 languages.
