How to Cultivate Your Company Culture For Success

On September 23, 1926, the Ford Motor Company adopted what has come to be known as the standard work week—8-hour days, Monday through Friday. This was in part a response to escalating worker strikes, but also thanks to the vision and direction of Edsel Ford, company president and son of the famous founder, Henry Ford.

Ford knew something that his competitors did not: happy workers are more productive. Once rival companies realized the financial benefit and earnings increases that Ford experienced after reducing hour requirements, they followed suit. And thus, Monday became the most hated day of the week.

So what does this have to do with company culture?

Company culture has been around since a time before Silicon Valley, when “Amazon” was only a place on a map. And it has been steered and shaped by those leaders innovative enough to pay attention not only to the product, but the means of production. It’s just now that we have the research and language to talk about it. Ford changed the way Americans think about “work” and any company who wanted to compete with Ford had to pivot to retain workers and increase output.

It’s easy to imagine the pride in the voice of a Ford employee, working less and making more than anyone employed by any other auto company, when he said, “I work for Ford.” Ford was the best—not only in terms of industry, but as far as places to work. It’s the same pride you hear when people say they work for Google.

For the past ten years, Google has been rated by Business Insider as one of the best places to work. Every tech employee and tech company knows this. Google built and curated the lexicon for how we talk about company culture today, going so far as to create the “chief culture officer” position in 2006. Now, this position is a common inclusion on the higher-ups roster of tech companies eager to compete in the dynamic and ever-evolving market.

According to Forbes Contributor, Blake Morgan, “It’s no coincidence that the chief culture officer position is growing in popularity now—more and more organizations are realizing the importance of culture and the role it plays in creating a quality experience for employees and customers. In fact, studies have shown a clear connection between culture and things like a company’s reputation, financial performance, and attitude of its employees.”

In the same way that Ford championed company culture in 1926, forcing a massive game-changer in the world of industry, Google started a culture movement that cannot be ignored. The thing that both changes have in common? It starts with people before product.

The Big Realizations

Before a company can design and implement a cultural change, the leadership team must realize two things:

1. Leadership’s understanding of the company culture might be wrong.

2. A fundamental element of culture is change.

The higher up an employee is in a company, the more people who are parallel or subordinate in power will attempt to please him or her. This may provide a somewhat distorted reading of the current company culture. The CEO may have a very narrow understanding of the cultural reality of his of her company.

Once this realization is made, if leadership truly desires to go forward, they must take a qualitative approach to understanding the culture through listening to and learning from all levels of employees. Oftentimes, leadership teams hire this task out to achieve more honest results.

Sometimes, because the old ways produced viable results, leaders are reluctant to accept that culture is an evolving organism. Innovative leaders will embrace this and turn towards reevaluating their views on production. Those who do not will miss out on growth opportunities and, like Ford’s competitors, experience a decline in revenue—or worse, employee retention rate.

The workplace is rapidly morphing, shifting, and preparing for a market in which repetitive tasks can be automated. The new human capital is creativity. When leaders and managers are seeking employees to produce ideas and innovations, they must provide a space that fosters the growth of the capital that they desire and in which a new breed of culture can take root.

Once management can endure a necessary series of potentially uncomfortable paradigm shifts, the next step is taking a close look at what the company currently has and what the company may need to implement change.

Defining Success in [Insert Number of Company Employees Here] Ways

One tried and true means of measuring the success of a company has been revenue. It’s a quantifiable metric that provides a succinct measurement. However, when the sometimes fuzzy components that make up the revenue reading are inspected, the results consistently show that it is the engagement, and happiness, of the employees that lead to the success of the company.

According to Catherine Clifford, Senior Entrepreneurship Writer at CNBC, “Disgruntled, disengaged, unsatisfied workers are less productive, less creative and more likely to leave.”

A 2013 Gallup study on the state of the U.S. workplace found that unhappy workers cost the U.S. between $450 and $550 billion dollars in lost productivity a year.

“While keeping employees happy requires some attentiveness on the part of managers, it’s not rocket science,” Clifford writes. “Workers want to be recognized when they do good work, have their personal life respected and have friends at work.”

Leaders must analyze what employees feel are lacking in their personal definitions of success before company culture can shift. Individual employee goal setting and engagement is the first step in changing a company’s culture. By and large, if the company is in need of a change, the frustrations and unmet needs of the employees are going to be similar in nature. Once leadership takes initiative, the path towards a company wide culture shift will begin to appear.

Take Stock

“Unless you know the road you’ve come from, you cannot know where you are going.” -African Proverb

Culture is an enigmatic, shape-shifting presence in a company that can be loosely summed up as the habits, behaviors, and things that people do while striving to get work done. Culture is the processes and procedures of a company that are enforced and bound by rules and enticed by incentive or forced by deterrent. It is the “way” in the saying, “The way things work around here…”

Before a company can proactively evolve their culture in a more productive direction, leadership must define what kind of behavior is desired and what actions are enabling this behavior and, more importantly, what actions are blocking this behavior. Going through this process will help the leadership team understand the current company culture and where change should begin.

Good Work

One of the most defining factors of company cultures is whether or not employees feel like their work is valued and appreciated. A Job Exodus study, conducted in 2017, found that lack of appreciation was the third most common reason employees left their company. Likewise, a 2015 Achiever’s study found that 93% of employee participants hoped to be recognized by their employer at least quarterly and that 53% didn’t feel recognized for their achievements at work.

At a fundamental level, these trends make sense. Humans have a natural desire to be recognized as individuals and to be appreciated for their contributions to a larger group. This correlates with earliest and most influential studies of human psychology. In Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs, belongingness is a basic human need and a motivating force in behavior. The human need to belong can shape attitudes and beliefs of individuals as they strive to demonstrate their value to a group.

The first thing leaders should look to as they aim to implement a cultural change in the workplace is the presence of encouragement and recognition employees are getting from management and from their peers. Are there systems in place that recognize employee contributions? Or are the efforts of employees going unnoticed? In order to retain talent, improve production, and provide the basis for creative development, it is critical that employees achieve a sense of belonging at their workplace.

Trust

“Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and let him know that you trust him.” -Booker T. Washington

Trust is implicit in the very act of an exchange. The employment exchange is no exception to this rule. The employee shows up to work each day, trusting that the employer will compensate them for their time. In exchange, the employer must trust that the employee is giving maximum effort to the tasks expected of him or her.

Being trusted with something signifies responsibility, another form of belongingness. In a PayScale study based on surveys of 54,827 U.S. employees, the results showed that trusted workers are happier workers.

Author of the report, Sean Leslie writes, “The most trust that workers have from their managers, the more likely they are to report high job satisfaction.”

In fact, a similar study conducted by BambooHR cited lack of trust from leaderships as one of the top five deal breakers when it comes to employee breaking points.

Like the need for recognition, these findings are not surprising through a human psychology lens. If leadership diminishes the employee’s faith and confidence in themselves by not trusting them to complete a task to the best of their ability, that employee has received a strong and clear message about their value to the team from a superior. These kind of micro-messages are highly detrimental to the intrinsic value system of the employee and to the overall productivity of the team.

In short, telling your employees what to do and leading with rigid oversight sends a loud and clear message that their higher-ups do not have faith in their decision-making skills. A byproduct of this is employee disengagement, lessened job satisfaction, and a defensive attitude.

The solution for leadership? Loosen the reins and let employees grow back trust and confidence. The increased production and range of their competent capabilities will be surprising not only to the leadership team, but to their peers and themselves as well.

One way to do this is to listen and ask reflective questions. Employees know when they are not working to their highest potential or when a product is not their best work—especially employees responsible for creative or innovative tasks. If groundwork is laid for a relationship of trust, an employee will honestly reflect on potential improvements to their own work performance. Start conversations with, “Have you thought about…?” or “What do you think about…?”

Another way to instill trust is to delegate tasks fully. Leadership should communicate a vision, and let the team have at it. Delegation provides employees exciting opportunities for growth and progression. Growth always comes from struggle, so even it seems like too big a task, let individuals and teams rise to the occasion.

Empowerment

One of the major downfalls of the modern workplace is the assumption of leadership that employees do not like to work. This is simply not the case. When people find their work meaningful and find a sense of belonging at their job, they make positive contributions.

Over the years, studies have consistently shown that money is a sub-motivator for employees. According to Forbes contributors Jon R. Katzenback and Zia Khan, the true motivation to do good work comes from appreciation and autonomy.

“Organizations often assume that the only way to raise an employee’s status is by a promotion, but status can be enhanced in many less costly ways. The perception of status increases significantly whenever people are given credible informal praise for daily tasks rather than waiting for annual results,” Katzenback and Khan write.

“People are also motivated by having autonomy, but more money doesn’t often equal greater perceived autonomy. In fact, you usually have to give up autonomy to rise up the compensation ladder. The real heart of autonomy as a motivator, however, rests with the perception that you are executing your own decisions without a lot of oversight or rules, which is hardly common in the corporate world today.”

However, the companies that are embracing appreciation and empowerment are surging ahead and setting the standards for company culture. Even just having a conversation about culture opens the doors to change. In 1926, Ford took a risk, focused on people over profits, and embraced innovation. Nearly 100 years later, and over 350 million automobiles sold, Ford ranks in the top ten auto competitors world wide. Needless to say, embracing and evolving a company culture isn’t such a bad idea.

The Bottom Line

Just the act of company leadership have a conversation about company culture sets the foundation for cultural growth. The important questions about appreciation, management-employee trust, and empowerment bolster the framework of change and creates a shared language among the team members.

In the beginning stages of culture shifting, it’s important to focus on progress instead of perfection. The journey toward integrating elements of proactive culture is, in and of itself, an empowering experience that allows leadership and employees to come together and focus on improvement.

Truly, the bottom line is not just profit and revenue based—it’s about creating a culture that fosters the growth and development of the new human capital: innovation and creativity. When employees are treated like autonomous, responsible, and trustworthy team members, they are empowered to step up to tasks with a sense of ownership and belonging.

Dr. Marvin Marshall, the “International Stress Expert” and author of Live Without Stress: How to Enjoy the Journey, writes,“The simple belief that something can be done is the spark that ignites the brain to act.”

When employees think that they can, they will. It’s up to leadership to create an environment that not only allows for accomplishment, but inspires employees to believe that they can accomplish.

Sources & Additional Resources:

https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2016/10/youre-not-the-boss-of-me
https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/employee-breaking-point/

https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/27611/Build-trust-managers-employees