By Shelley Abrams
In my last article, Company Culture: The Force Behind Success, I discussed the role a strong company culture plays in the success of a company. In that article I stressed that success must be constantly nurtured so it becomes what the company envisions, rather than turning into something unexpected that could eventually lead to the downfall of a company.
So what factors go into establishing and maintaining the culture of an organization, especially successful ones? That’s what we are going to explore in this article.
Components of a Successful Culture
A 2013 Harvard Business Review article lists six key components that are essential to a company culture that thrives and leads a company towards success:
Vision: Encompasses the mission and drives every decision. Employees need to understand the purpose, believe in it and embrace it. If they do this, customers, vendors and other stakeholders will likely embrace it as well.
Values: What it takes to make the vision happen. Employees need to know this and live it.
Practices: Includes daily activities of the business through ethics, behaviors and communication. Companies must implement practices that build trust, focus on the goal and reinforces the values of the company.
People: Hiring those that believe in the culture and reflect it in their behaviors, and firing those that don’t. Companies need to establish hiring practices that enable them to find the best fits with the culture and then help retain those employees by creating an atmosphere of respect, compassion and trust.
Narrative: The image the company projects, the story it tells itself, its employees and the public. Companies need to craft a story unique to its heritage and its values and then share it. Everyone has a role to play and they need to understand that role, to keep the story alive. This also ties into the brand.
Place: Where the company chooses to set up shop, and how it structures its space, can make or break the culture. Culture of the community is as every bit an influence on the culture of the company as it is on the community. Work space also has its role in allowing company culture to take hold and thrive.
Each of the above components, while critical to a company’s success, cannot be implemented and accomplished on their own. It takes strong leadership to propel an organization to success. An organization’s leadership sets the tone for the organization through vision and goals. They also define the expectations—the culture—that when reinforced and nurtured is the means to the end.
How do they do this?
Leadership leads by acting and communicating in ways that clearly demonstrate their vision, mission and values to their employees to such a degree that the employees embrace this vision as their own. In other words, they walk the talk and expect employees to do the same. They do this through daily interactions with employees, decision making, and behaving in ways that establish trust.
In addition, leaders align the culture with their values and continually monitor and reinforce it using a number of tools and strategies, including:
Management structure and hierarchy
Employee and management empowerment, engagement and interactions
Strong commitment to mission, strategies and goals
Workplace practices and traditions
Employee hiring and reward and recognition systems
Policies and procedures
Organizational and employee social responsibility and volunteerism (“goodwill”)
The flow of information and communication, from the top down and vice versa, between employees and leadership as well as between the company and the outside world, especially customers
In essence, if employees and customers clearly understand the vision, mission and values of a company, then it is much easier to help the culture, and the company, thrive.
Brittany Forsyth, VP of Human Relations at Shopify says “Determine what behaviors and beliefs you value as a company, and have everyone live true to them. These behaviors and beliefs should be so essential to your core, that you don’t even think of it is as culture.”
Correcting Culture’s Path
So what’s a company to do if it’s struggling with its culture, or the culture is gaining a life of its own that is not what the company envisioned?
The company’s leadership needs to actively assess what behaviors and beliefs, both overtly and covertly, seem to be driving the company and take corrective action to bring those beliefs and behaviors back in line with what the company seeks—what it wants it brand to be and look like.
This can be accomplished in a number of ways. Here are some suggestions:
Re-look at the company’s vision, mission and values. How well are these communicated to employees? And more importantly, do employees understand them, believe them and live them? An employee-wide survey can help assess this.
If employees seem to understand the message but the behaviors don’t line up accordingly, or the employees are clueless or less than engaged, then it’s time to review and renew the messaging and how it’s reinforced.
Do a full audit of what the Society for Human Resources calls the cultural “artifacts” - “the core business activities, processes and philosophy that characterize how an organization does business day-to-day.”
Identify subcultures that may have taken root within the organization (i.e., departmental cliques that seem to follow their own set of rules and standards that are not in line with the stated values of the company).
Compare these artifacts to the current business objective, values and the desired culture.
Take active steps to steer future activities and artifacts towards the company’s ultimate goals and values and help drive future success.
Implement new policies, procedures and practices.
Create fun and creative training classes to help re-instill the values of the company and reinforce the end-result, the culture, the company desires.
Adopt new ways of communicating the company’s expectations and values and culture to the employees and ask for continuous feedback. Make it two-way street!
It’s also important to give employees a sense of ownership in this process. Changing the culture is not always an easy thing to do, but in order for it to happen, everyone in the organization needs to buy in.
A strong company culture that leads a company towards long-term success isn’t something that “just happens.” It must be actively created, actively nurtured and actively reinforced, every day. Employees need to see the culture being lived through its management and they need to believe in it, and live it, themselves.
When everyone is on the same page, working towards the same vision, mission and goals, the culture becomes apparent, inside and outside. The culture becomes the brand, the brand attracts customers, and the company thrives. After all isn’t that what every company strives for?
At TSC, we guide our clients through the process of culture improvement through several steps. Read more about our Company Culture Management approach and services.