What do you love about the company you work for? What don’t you like? What things make you think ‘I’m really glad I work for this company’?
The answers to the above questions likely reflect your view on the company culture. Culture is really about how businesses ‘do things’. Not things like the style and formatting of word documents, or how they organise their parking spaces, but the patterns, behaviours and expectations that exist in the company, and employees have and express towards one another.
Culture is a sum of all that makes organisations function and perform, from their values and purpose through to lunch time rituals and standard operating procedures.
High-performance organisations are great at articulating, communicating and demonstrating aspects of their culture. They can tell you what makes their organisation uniquely theirs. They can demonstrate and incubate the behaviours and ideals that ultimately lead them to success. Winning organisations invest in curating their culture, both internally and through external assistance.
We love working with organisations who have a positive performance culture, and helping organisations to develop these types of culture. We want your organisation to have a great culture, because ultimately, we love people. Its people that make up your business.
Here are a few tips on developing your company culture:
1. Define
This is the foundation of culture building – to clearly define what is the centre of the organisation. Any performance or action by the employees or the organisation will be driven by these behaviours and ideals. There are many ways you can do this, by getting people together, sharing ideas and thoughts on what you will both agree upon, and uphold, as the company standards.
My personal favourite activity is to get employees to personify the company. Ask the question ‘If our company was a movie character it would be…’, or ‘If our company was an animal it would be…’. Then ask the questions around why the employees chose that animal/movie character (or whatever item you want to liken your company to). You will soon see that people have ideals and behaviours that they think the company should aspire to.
Also, clearly define the ideals and behaviours that are definitely not in the company. You can use a similar exercise as listed above, but in the negative form.
2. Promote and Communicate
Once you have a clear idea of the ideals and behaviours, begin to communicate and promote the culture. Clearly identify them in values statements, mission statements, expected behaviours, policies, meetings and any other place you can reasonably insert them. Make sure everyone knows and articulates them with the same language.
Recognise and reward employees actions and decisions that align with the culture. Give praise for culture aligned behaviour. Also, recruit based on culture fit – do people have the same understanding of your culture that you do? How have they demonstrated an aligned culture and behaviours in their life or previous jobs?
3. Uphold
One of the most powerfully damaging things that any employee can do in an organisation is to see someone acting contrary to company culture and simply walk past, doing nothing. This devalues the culture rapidly and sets a new culture of ‘anything is accepted’.
Companies must be willing to manage employees for things which are not aligned with culture. There must be simple mechanisms for employees to mutually encourage and confront each other on behaviours and ideals that do not align with culture. Something such as a visual tool placed in key places can help, or including it into employee reviews or organisational surveys.
Whilst culture change is possible without the top brass being on-board, it is rarely successful. Culture should be lead from the top. Instead of ‘do as I say, not as I do’, managers and leaders should live as a perfect example of the culture.
If you want some help identifying or transforming your organisational culture, reach out to us at Hutchinson Resources and we can help.
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