Bookmark This! The Organizational Culture Edition
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Every organization has a culture. The question becomes does the organization’s culture deliver the results they need? I ran across an article on Forbes recently titled “Building a Company Culture to Drive Success”. Honestly, I don’t know that the article had anything new to report but it was a reminder of what great organizational cultures do: they attract candidates, boost productivity, increase revenue, and decrease turnover.
That’s why it’s important to make building and maintaining a positive organizational culture a priority. Here are a few articles to help your organization conduct a “culture check” and confirm that the culture you want is the culture you have.
How Organizations Can Build an Intentional Culture
Organizations use their culture to attract, engage, and retain the best talent. Keep in mind there’s a proven process to build culture: 1) Identify the organization’s purpose. 2) Agree on how the organization will reach its goals, along with what customers and employees should expect. And finally, 3) Apply those concepts by giving managers the training and tools to support the organization’s culture.
Leaders Drive Organizational Culture
Company’s culture is what sets the business apart – both from a candidate and a customer perspective. Which is why I can see how company cultures are fragile. A few bad leaders can have a detrimental impact on cultural structure. When that happens, it becomes very difficult to turn things around. That’s why investing in leaders is so important. Because they touch and shape and mold the company’s culture.
4 Steps to Create a Support Driven Company Culture
Feedback is a good thing. Over the past few years, many organizations have dedicated a lot of resources toward improving feedback mechanisms – at every level of the organization. While I think that the initial focus of those resources has been to replace outdated processes like the traditional performance review model, that doesn’t mean it can’t be used to develop a support driven company culture.
Organizational Culture: Do the Work to Get the Benefits
Whether it’s communicating what the organizational culture is, allocating time and resources to creating / maintaining it, or making the commitment to change when necessary, if organizations want the benefits of having a great culture (and we all know they do) then they have to do the work. No shortcuts. That’s how you get the reward. And the reward benefits the company, the employees, and the profit line.
I realize that creating and maintaining culture is tough. It takes a lot of time and conversations for organizations to get to the place where everyone agrees about what the organization’s culture should look like. But getting everyone on the same page can be a great way to refocus and might be exactly the strategic activity that the organization needs right now.
Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby while at the Wynwood Art District in Miami, FL
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