We’ve spoken before about the importance of company culture. Whether you like it or not, whether you designed one or not, your organisation already has a culture. It starts to manifest and grow from the moment you start that company and continues to evolve the more you hire and interact with your employees and colleagues.
Your culture will be an integral part of your employer branding, which in turn, will be a key factor in attracting and retaining the best talent. Therefore, it’s important to fix any problems your culture may have.
If you haven’t already, make sure you assess your current company culture. As we said, you definitely have one even if you didn’t consciously establish it yourself. This isn’t just a matter of casually walking around and asking your employees to tell you what the culture is like. It starts with your onboarding process, includes evaluating your EVP and, when you do talk to your employees, it’s about asking the right questions.
Once you’ve assessed your culture, you’ll have a good idea what’s good about it and what may be problematic. Highlighting the positives is great, but it’s more important to fix the problems first. A 2018 PwC survey found that the top three problems that affect company culture were: the tone of top leadership, the tone at middle management and too much focus on short-term goals. So how, do you go about improving these?
A report from early 2019 showed that almost half of employees have had fewer than five interactions with their CEO in the last year, while a third say their CEO doesn’t even know their name.
Internal communication is a vital part of any organisation, particularly from leaders. Regardless of what your culture’s particular strengths might be, every culture needs open, honest communication from its leaders.
This means that if you have rules and regulations (which all companies should have), it’s important that they each have a purpose or explanation so that employees understand why they’re there. It’s also important that your employees don’t feel out of the loop when it comes to business-wide decisions. After all, how can your employees feel truly included and valued in an organisation when its leaders don’t trust them with important company information, or don’t inform them how decisions are made?
Too often, leaders and CEOs will slap some inspirational words on a wall and call it the company’s core values, beliefs or mission statement. However, when a company doesn’t actually live and work by these beliefs, employees view them as hollow and just one for show. This is where the issues of both C-suite leaders and middle management can come together to have a positive or negative impact on the culture.
If you have values or some sort of mission statement, take some time to really look at it. Does it actually mean something or is it just nonsense on a wall? If it means something, how is it instilled in the culture? What tangible examples do you have of these beliefs in action? Can you think of situations or even employees who might go against these values?
Remember, values can’t be written up as a mantra and forgotten about, leaders an managers have to live by them in work every day. This is how a good culture filters down.
Given that the third biggest culture problem in the PwC report was too much focus on short-term goals, it will come as no surprise that ensuring your team is looking at long-term goals is the best way to rectify this problem.
Think about how often you’re shifting your employees’ priorities. Short-term goals may be important and lead to a bigger picture, but if that picture is not clear, it can leave your employees feeling frustrated and wondering what the point of their work is. If an employee isn’t motivated by the work they’re doing, or if they don’t see value in what they’re doing, they’re not going to want to do it and their best work won’t go into it.
Both leaders and middle managers need to think about the goals and tasks they are setting for their employees, ensuring there is a genuine, valuable purpose to each goal and that it is somehow tied in to the overall business objectives.
Long-term goals are often important because short-term goals can come with expectations of instant results, which can put pressure on your employees and make the goals seem to granular. With long-term goals in mind, employees and managers alike both know that the pay off will be a slow burner, leaving room to think creatively and innovatively and allowing employees the space to do their best work.
Find out more about building an effective employer branding strategy and how RECRUITERS can help your business.
Written with contributions from the RECRUITERS team
Women working photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash
Inpirational quote photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
