How to Stay Culture-Conscious: A Check-Up
How to Stay Culture-Conscious: A Check-Up
Why aligned company cultures lead to better business outcomes
September 2, 2021
Watch a recording of our 30-minute webinar with Perry Anne Scott.
Company culture is like a garden. If tended to well, a healthy culture produces a bounty of quality customer engagement, higher productivity, increased retention, and substantial profit gains.
A neglected culture, however, may grow a few crops by chance or sheer power of will at best. It is more likely that your whole harvest will be choked out by poor growing conditions which can invite a toxic environment and threaten the very life of your organization.
The reality is every company comes with a culture. Whether or not you cultivate yours is entirely up to you. Check up on your culture with our summary of Owner and Principal of Converge Coaching & Consulting LLC Perry Anne Scott’s webinar on engineering a culture that wins.
CULTURE IS THE LIFE OF YOUR ORGANIZATION
It may be tempting to think of culture as a passive phenomenon that organically grows over time. Yet culture touches every part of your business: it affects your hiring, leadership development, and performance appraisal practices. Culture can dictate your organization’s pace of work, what you celebrate, what you tolerate, how you handle risk, and how you treat failure.
At its most basic level, culture is made up of people: your employees. Healthy and aligned cultures are fueled by engaged employees who enjoy their work, environment, and colleagues.
In the Gallup article, “Employee Engagement on the Rise in the U.S,” engaged employees are reported to have up to 4x higher earnings per share and 21% higher profitability than unengaged employees. With so much power over your business’ outcome, why leave your culture to chance?
DEVELOPING ENGAGED EMPLOYEES
People don’t buy in unless they have a chance to weigh-in. Companies that foster collaboration and dialogue set themselves up for success. This is achieved through emotionally intelligent leaders who are self-aware, ask open-ended questions and empathetically listen in response, can explain the why behind their requests, and don’t assume their employees' commitment. Rather, they request it.
Good leaders bring people with them to achieve their goals. But unless the leader makes perfectly clear what the goal is and why it is being pursued, people won’t follow along.
Alongside having emotionally intelligent leaders, aligned values are of primary importance to fostering a community of engaged employees. While goals can push a company, values pull—attracting both employees and clients who align on key values.
Borrowing from Edgar Schein of MIT, values are made up of 1) seen artifacts, such as PTO, 2) the value itself, such as work-life balance, and 3) unseen assumptions around that value, such as that the personal lives and health of employees are important. These examples show an aligned value—the company's behavior reflects the stated values. On the flipside, behavior contrary to a stated value will result in a lack of trust and disengagement from employees.
A 5-STEP CHECK UP FOR ALIGNING YOUR CULTURE
There are no one-stop solutions to addressing an organization's misaligned values—behavior that does not match stated values. Quick fixes such as team meals or fun company events only touch the tip of the iceberg and fail to address the misalignment at a deeper level. In order to help you properly address misalignment and avoid quick fixes, Perry Anne lays out five steps to aligning your culture.
Values: Your organization’s foundation is made up of values that need to be understood and articulated by the leadership team. Avoid one-word values as well; instead go deeper and explain how your company executes a certain value.
Hire: Prioritize values from the beginning. In addition to your typical interview questions, include questions that get at a potential employee’s values, as well as utilize referrals, recommendations, and value-identifying assessments. One tool we recommend is the Hogan Assessment.
Develop: Develop your company around your values. And rather than neglect training the leadership and management staff as many companies do, intentionally focus your attention on them to develop high emotional intelligence from the top down.
Measure: What gets measured gets done. Measuring around goals is of course essential, but spend time measuring values as well. This can be done through 360° evaluations, performance appraisals, and measuring how customers and clients perceive the way you are embodying your values.
Rituals: Put something on the calendar that will visit and celebrate your values or routinely correct for them. Whether you value innovation, generosity, or anything else, find ways to consistently recognize work that exemplifies these values.
Aligning your culture based on the above steps is a great place to start. But you can go even deeper by consulting with us on leadership development. If you are interested in cultivating a healthy workplace culture, then we’d love to help you explore impactful and sustainable Leadership Development practices.
We launched our Inspire Series of free 30-minute webinars as a way to stay connected over the pandemic. It turns out we should have been doing them all along. With over 50 webinars in the books and over 2,000 total registrants, we think we’ll keep them around. Experience the power of collective wisdom: sign up for our next webinar.