Your company doesn't feel like the place that you set out to build. Your people don’t seem to care about the business and aren’t working as hard as you want them to. As your business has grown, it feels as if your new recruits just don’t get what you’re doing.
Your organizational culture isn’t where you want it to be.
Here’s how to identify the root of the problem and build a plan to get where you want to be:
Organizational Culture: The Sneak Attack
So often, people come to me and say, “we’ve been working on the business for a few years and now we want to work on culture. ”
Entrepreneurs setting out to grow a business are focused on the bottom line. Afterall, there won’t be a culture to work on if the company goes under; we’ve got to keep our priorities in line!
The thing is , you’re always creating culture, you just might not realize it. That lacking recognition can have a pretty devastating effect on morale, execution, and growth.
At the very early stages of a company, the leader themselves is the culture of the organization. When there are just a few employees, it’s easy to keep a pulse on ideologies, practices, and attitudes. It may seem like you don’t need to pay much attention to the way these collective norms develop, so long as you’re leading by example.
But if things go as planned, your business will grow. Your reports will have a team and there will be multiple degrees of separation between your people and you. And just like the people you hire, the culture will evolve over time. Will it change in a way that you’re happy with?
You may find yourself at the head of an organization that you don’t recognize. One that you might not be entirely proud of, with a culture that’s not aligned with your vision or your values.
Turns out, you’ve been creating this culture all along.
What is Organizational Culture?
Organizational culture, simply put, is “how things get done here.” More technically, culture is the norms and practices of a company’s operations and its peoples’ interactions.
Formal rules and policies aren’t culture in themselves, but help shape the culture for better or worse. But rather, norms are the unwritten agreements between everyone in the group, which can only be understood by seeing them play out firsthand.
For example, many companies have a policy which says normal work hours are between 8am and 5pm. Walking through the office at 5:15pm will tell you a lot about the unspoken, but collectively understood reality of cultural expectations. Maybe your office clears out at 5:01, maybe people hang out chatting until 5:35, or maybe your people are heads-down-email-up until 7pm.
Same policy. Very different agreement.
Where Do Leaders Go Wrong in Creating Culture?
One cultural agreement is not inherently better or worse than another. A place where people work until 7pm is not doomed to a toxic culture anymore than a company whose people take off at five.
What’s important to note is simply that the practices, traditions, and artifacts of a work culture contribute to the picture of “how we do things.” These things differentiate us from them and define our collective identity.
Long-standing conventions, company programs, and the stories we tell are the framework of culture. In strong cultures, the framework is so well-established, it’s clear to all when you’re off-culture.
These artifacts will be established. It’s only a question of who will create them. Leaders go wrong when they fail to be intentional about the components of their culture framework.
When that entrepreneur focuses on operations and finance, putting people and culture on autopilot while they work toward revenue goals, they are not the ones in control of the culture.
Chances are, they won’t be happy with the one they end up with.
Building Culture Intentionally
Every organization--no matter how new/old, large/small, localized or dispersed--has culture. It’s never too late (or too early) to start building that culture intentionally.
Now, that doesn’t mean simply adding a line item in the budget for ping pong tables, First-Round Fridays, or company parties. These have their place, but they’re not synonymous with a “good culture”.
Strong culture isn’t based on trends or gimmicks, it’s founded in something entirely permanent: Core Values.
The organizations which have staunchly weathered the test of time--through multiple generations of fads, politics, recessions, and more--are grounded in, and guided by, their inalienable values.
Battle-tested businesses like General Electric, Hudson’s Bay, and IBM have learned to adapt and evolve with (or often in advance of) changing times. They have to, or they’d be left behind as a footnote in business books. But these businesses have been intentional about what they reconstruct. As the business changed, they’ve evolved how they talk about their core values (read: how they get things done), but they haven't changed the values themselves.
“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” — Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Former CEO of IBM
Values are the foundation of everything in the most successful businesses. They will attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.
How To Reclaim Your Company’s Culture
Step 1: Document “How We Get Things Done Here”
The tricky thing about humans is, there’s often a disparity between what we believe in and what we do. That’s why your core values likely don’t parallel how things get done in your organization. The first step to reclaiming your culture is to gain alignment among leadership of what it currently is.
The retailer Aritzia has the 7 Principles of being an Aritzia-ite. They are cleverly related to fashion, with one of them being Measure Twice Cut Once. It’s clear to anyone reading this principle that at Aritzia, detail is important; we avoid making mistakes. It’s an idea that’s very different, for example, from 1-800-GOT-JUNK?’s ideology of Willing To Fail (WTF).
So how do things get done at your company? To answer this, gather the leaders, the People team (HR), and key representatives from each department. Have an honest dialogue about the reality of culture, not a self-indulgent roundtable claiming an aspirational current state. Try not to attach value or quality to it, but approach the analysis functionally.
Discuss and take notes on the policies and unwritten agreements of things like:
- How projects get done (collaborations v. independently, agile v. waterfall)
- How people speak to each other (thoughtful emails v. messenger, meeting v. memos, public v. private)
- What are the do's and don'ts (what's rewarded vs reprimanded)
- What stories are retold and what is their message?
In these discussions, work to define management expectations clearly. Don’t worry about making it sound clever yet. Keep communicating until when you speak with different leaders independently, you get the same explanation of how to get stuff done.
Step 2: Look Outside The Boardroom
Having all of your leaders in one room for an honest conversation is something more organizations should do a lot more often. But getting this core group together isn’t a silver bullet for your culture. Your culture is defined by more than just the people at the top, so it’s important to have insights at all levels.
Whether by system-wide survey or representative focus groups, before taking action, it’s important to take stock of how non-leaders believe “things get done.” Compare these results with the findings of your leadership and discuss where ideas are validated and where they are challenged.
Often, there is a gap between these two groups’ understandings. Where there’s a gap, there is learning.
Step 3: Define What’s Important to You
So now you have a clear picture around the state of your company culture. Next, you have to define what is actually important to you. Here’s how to go about doing that effectively:
Reach out to your leadership team and key influencers from across the company. Ask them to get feedback from their teams and spheres of influence on what’s important to them. Encourage them to gather these insights through 1-on-1 meetings or surveys.
Take all this information on what’s important to the people in your organization and hand it over to the communicators in your company to distill it into digestible principles.
Step 4: Note the Gap
You’re staring at the foundation for your current company culture, the core values as defined by the people who create your organization. Reflect and ask yourself:
- Do you believe in these values
- How do they compare to what you want for your business?
- Do these feel like the values of the place you set out to build?
Having a gap between reality and your aspirations is completely OK. Your work to reclaim your culture well underway, but there are a few more key steps to take until you have what you’re striving for.
The Core Values of an organization guide the culture like a beacon. Culture will organically shift overtime, but you have to intentionally establish and maintain foundation and direction. When you identify what it important to you, don’t let a grassroots campaign exclaim tyranny.
Step 5: Take an Inventory of Your People
It should be clear now the beliefs, behaviours, and attitudes that need redirection in order to recreate your ideal culture. At this point, you have to recognize if the people who are in your organization are really the people that need to be there.
Are these your people? This is an opportunity to define (or redefine, if necessary) who you need in place to create and uphold the new foundation of your company culture.
The longer a culture has been in place, the more challenging it will be to overhaul it. It’s imperative to have your leadership, key influencers, and the People team fully aligned on the outcomes you’re aiming for.
Behaviour is difficult to change. Belief is near impossible. Those who don’t align with your vision don’t belong in the organization.
This may feel ruthless, but we’re talking about the future of your business and the livelihood of everyone within it. Culture is delicate and even one or two key people can be enough to derail your concerted efforts to correct it.
Step 6: Establish New Norms
Just like you would launch a product or unveil a re-brand, make a point to address the commencement of your new way of doing things.
The way that you introduce these new norms will either catapult morale or burn it down.
Because it’s futile to try and change others, this commencement will introduce the new way you lead; your revamped leadership principles and practices. This top-down approach shows your people that you’re committed to this change; they’re welcomed to be part of it, or to part ways.
During this process of reclaiming your organizational culture, you’ve taken care to seek feedback and insight from all the people through your organization. This will pay off in them being far more likely to adopt these new norms and eventually perpetuate them.
How Do You Know if Your Culture-Building Efforts are Sticking?
These five steps require a lot of consideration, man hours, and effort to undertake. What are the indications that all your hard work is paying off?
A clear sign that your people have adopted your new way of doing things is when they use your language organically.
The core values of O2E Brands, the parent company of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, are Passion, Integrity, Professionalism and Empathy: PIPE. These values are pasted on the wall, monitors, awards, and more. But how we really know the culture embodies them is that you will hear “PIPE” being referenced regularly by employees of all levels. “Keep it PIPE” is a playful reminder of who we are and how we do things.
Culture and Profits Aren’t Mutually Exclusive. You Can (And Should) Have Both
Those entrepreneurs who are looking to finally work on their culture in light of turnover and lackluster employee performance are better late than never. What they didn’t know that could have saved them time and money is that you can’t focus on growth without focusing on people: Culture drives growth .
Better culture = Better quality hires = ⅓ Higher revenue
But the benefits of culture don’t stop there. Highly engaged business units achieve 59% less turnover, a 41% reduction in absenteeism, and a 17% increase in productivity (
Gallup
).
Turns out, investing strategically in your culture is one of the best things you can do for your P&L. The path to success is through inspiring and engaging your people, not on the backs of them. To take advantage of culture’s bounty, follow these steps to reclaim your company culture.
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