Back in the early dot-com days, I was in charge of technology for the merger of two public companies. During the eight weeks leading up to our big launch, I had some concerns that the network team wasn’t prepared. I checked the details of their plans, and my gut told me that something was missing.

The day of the launch arrived, and we were having all sorts of issues.

Every team was blaming another team for the problem. We finally realized that we didn’t have enough Internet bandwidth. The network team hustled and resolved the issue, but by that point, we’d had a few hours of an embarrassing public launch.

You might be expecting my next sentence to be about how that story is an example of a broken company culture — we messed up! We were publicly embarrassed!

Except as I was heading out that evening, the head of operations stopped me and said, “Thank you very much — for letting me make that mistake.”

Stepping back and letting that team manage their own portion of the project wasn’t easy. There was a part of me that wanted to micromanage. After all, we were about to put ourselves out there very publicly. But if I’d stepped in and taken control, that team would have lost the opportunity to grow. I would have disempowered them.

We valued innovation and risk-taking, and that meant that I had to behave in line with those values. I had to create a safe space for trying and failing.

We had a shaky launch, but everyone recovered. The company didn’t go under, and our network team was stronger and smarter from the experience.

Whether you intentionally created it or not, you have a company culture. And it’s impacting your business.

How Company Culture Impacts Your Bottom Line

Company culture isn’t just a buzzword for ping pong tables and nap pods at the office. Your company culture is derived from your values and how you implement them, impacting everything from employee retention to innovation.

Employee retention: In organizations that have traditionally high turnover, those teams that have highly engaged employees experience 24% less turnover than their less engaged peers.
Recruitment success: Companies with strong employer brands — including a reputation for being a great place to work — spend half as much per hire.
Employee productivity: In one study, companies with employees that were highly engaged — and who were provided with the tools and freedom to channel that engagement — had revenues two and a half times higher than their peers with low employee engagement.
Customer satisfaction: Companies with highly engaged business units see a 20% increase in customer sales and a 10% increase in customer ratings.
Profitability: In 2017 Gallup meta-analysis, highly engaged employees led companies to 21% greater profitability.

How to Create the Company Culture You Want

When a client calls us because their culture is broken, it’s often because they haven’t clarified their values, hired for their values, or behaved in alignment in their values. Fixing those issues leads to the culture they want.

But the best way to create the culture you want is to prioritize it from the beginning. No company is too small or too young to solidify their values and the culture they want to achieve. Here’s how to get started:

Define the values that are important to you

We use the word “culture” a lot, but what we’re really talking about is values. If you start by thinking about how much fun you want everyone in the office to have, you’re probably going to end up on the wrong path.

Case in point: I worked with a client that was struggling with their culture, and I asked them about their hiring process. They were doing a culture interview after their skills interview, and they had good questions. But then their final internal assessment was: is this someone I’d like to have a beer with?

Yes, you want to like the people you work with, but that question was undermining their success. They were hiring people just like them — not team members that would complement them and help them reach their goals.

Defining the culture you want starts with defining your values.

You may already know exactly what those are, or you may need to do some hard thinking. Do you value innovation, over-the-top customer service, transparency, employee growth? What is fundamental to carrying out your organization’s primary mission?

Develop a hiring process that prioritizes those values

Remember the folks above who were asking whether they wanted to get a beer with a candidate? When they started calling the second phase of their interview a values interview (instead of a culture interview) and changed their final internal assessment to how do they align with our values?, guess what happened. Exactly — their culture improved.

They only had to make a minor change, but if you’re starting from scratch, consider these things:

Make sure you’re including values-focused questions in your interviews, such as asking a candidate to describe a time they had to deal with an angry customer or how they have handled working with a teammate they didn’t like.
Create an in-depth hiring process. These shouldn’t be one-hour interviews with someone in HR. Schedule a few hours where multiple people on the team get an opportunity to meet a candidate. You’ll get a much more accurate sense of who the person really is and whether their values align with the organization’s.
Be willing to train for knowledge. You might not want someone who’s completely green, but training to build knowledge is significantly more effective than training for values. If someone has the right values but needs a bit of sprucing up on their knowledge, put in the time and you’ll likely be rewarded down the road.

Create processes that validate and reward

Knowing and hiring for values isn’t enough. You have to identify behaviors that would implement those values and then develop meaningful ways to encourage and support behaviors that uphold those values.

The core of every worthwhile cultural investment is time: how do you and your employees spend your time?

In its early days, Google famously gave each of its employees 20% of their time to work on innovative new projects. That’s 20% of every.single.employee’s time that could (and probably often did) result in projects that go nowhere, bring in no revenue. But it aligned perfectly with their value of innovation. And certainly those hours are partly responsible for where Google is today.

Sometimes programs are intended to validate the values, but they end up doing the exact opposite.

For example, a company may say that community engagement is one of their values. To that end, they request recommendations from their employees of local organizations to support and schedule quarterly volunteer events for the company.

Seems like a great plan, except for one hitch. Senior management never makes it to the events. Instead of showing their employees how much the company values community engagement, they’ve telegraphed the exact opposite.

A similar problem can occur with programs like Free Friday Lunches, which have become quite common. Offering free lunch, on its own, isn’t a bad thing.

Unfortunately, it’s often intended to show employee appreciation, but it’s done in place of the things that engaged employees are really looking for: one-on-one conversations with leaders who are investing in their personal development — not having status updates but really diving into what they need to grow and succeed and to help the company do the same.

After all, there are only so many hours in a week. Creating a positive culture requires difficult decisions about how you and your employees will spend your time.

How to improve a company culture that’s not working

Changing a culture that’s not what you want can be more challenging than building one from the start, but it’s not impossible.

When we go into a company to perform an organizational assessment, we look at the organization’s structure, conduct interviews, and administer assessments to key personnel. We often find that one of the primary reasons the organization isn’t meeting its goals is that their culture is dysfunctional.

What do I mean by that?

The leadership either hasn’t identified or hasn’t broadcast their values. And without clear values, team members experience a lack of consistency around desired behaviors. Employees that don’t know what values they’re upholding or what behaviors are expected will have a difficult time meeting their goals.

The culture becomes one of confusion, finger pointing, and disengagement.

Changing a dysfunctional culture requires you to understand the existing culture and where it needs to change.

Involving employees in a thorough process of identifying values and creating an implementation plan can lead to greater buy-in and adoption of culture evolution. At the same time, companies that are making big cultural shifts should anticipate some resistance. Allow time for transition.

That being said, for many companies, cultural change involves personnel change. Revamp your hiring process so that you’re bringing in more people whose values align with the company’s, and let go of those individuals who refuse to embrace your values.

How to nurture your company culture

Creating a company culture isn’t a one and done process.

You’ll need to continuously — and consistently — remind employees of the values, recognize and encourage behaviors in line with those values, and reward employees when they’ve exemplified the company values.

And of course, as with any business action, you must check periodically to see if what you’re doing is working. Solicit feedback from employees. Do they feel valued? Do they see the leadership as transparent? Are the values you established making their way down the proverbial totem pole.

Check your bottom line, too. While everyone values a positive workplace, no organization’s primary mission is simply to have a great workplace. Are you achieving your profit, revenue, fundraising, or innovation goals? If you’re not, could your values and your culture be part of the problem?

For many organizations, the guidance of a knowledgeable and objective third party — often through an organizational assessment — helps set them on the right track by identifying the gaps between their current state and their desired performance. Book a free consultation to find out whether an organizational assessment with Trajectify can help you create a company culture that drives success.

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