Episode #369: How To Join The Culture Champion Workplaces – Part Three

In Part Two we have looked at getting engagement, having transparency and the impact of tech.

One issue can be the lack of means to measure whether what the big bosses are saying is actually happening or not. The Culture Champions do measure and track progress, so that they can correct issues. These can be staff anonymous postings on speciality externally hosted third party sites, that allow the team to freely talk about problems with no fear of attribution. Staff satisfaction and engagement surveys also work. In the old days, these used to be every couple of years, but in some cases companies are doing light versions every quarter. When Covid-19 settles down, we are all returning to back to the War for Talent. Recruit and retain will again become major concerns of the organisation’s leaders. An attractive culture is a strong enabler in being successful in this regard. How will you fare in this talent grab scrap?

The research we did was interesting, because even though the Culture Champions and the rest, both said that culture is a priority, 95% of the Culture Champions compared to 75% of the rest, recognised it had a strong impact on engagement. Mystifyingly, only 72% of the rest, compared to 91% of the Culture Champions connected the importance of employee engagement to achieving strong financial performance. In fact, regarding the connection of culture to delivering financial performance, only 62% of the rest thought it had a strong impact, compared to 89% of the Culture Champions. How about at your firm? Are your leaders making a connection between the company culture and engagement and between engagement and financial performance?

The Culture Champions, when considering why they had a strong corporate culture, attributed it to creating a strong customer focus (52%), developing and maintaining trust in the leadership (46%), providing corporate training (46%) and providing a clear strategy and goals (44%). If we compared the priorities of your own organisation, how important would these elements be and to what extent do you think you can create a strong corporate culture without them?

Are you taking action to improve your company’s culture? In the example of the Culture Champions, they reported in the survey that 86% had taken recent, specific measures to improve it whereas only 63% of the rest had done so. As dale Carnegie said, “knowledge is not power until it is applied”. After absorbing the results of this global survey are you going to apply the results to build your own company’s culture?

There were four clear steps for the C-Suite leaders to work on, as a result of the research findings.

1. Ensure there is a broad understanding of the financial impact of culture amongst the senior leaders.
2. Clarify whether the leadership team truly believes in the value of an engaging culture.
3. Check to what regard the leadership team has a firm grip on the current state of the organisation’s culture.
4. Explore how the current culture aligns with the challenges of Covid-19 and are there any changes to be made?

For the HR professionals, there is a lot of work to do. Are your current initiatives reinforcing or eroding the corporate culture you are trying to create? What are you doing to strengthen the culture you want and eliminate the aspects you don’t want? Have you developed any culture metrics? Do you hold the leaders accountable for the culture of the organisation? Are your own HR colleagues fully bought into these ideas? Are your training and HR policies strengthening the culture?

These are weighty matters and I repeat this insight, “As much as half of the difference in operating profit between organisations can be attributed to effective cultures”. That gets my attention, I can tell you. It is obvious we should all join the ranks of the Culture Champions on the sunny uplands and let our competitors get stuck down there, fighting it out with each other in the mud and the blood.