Culture Counts!
Culture Counts!
One of the top challenges for organizations around the world is culture and employee engagement. In fact, fully 87% of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges, and 50 percent call the issue “very important.”
Deloitte University Press reports that “Organizations that create a culture defined by meaningful work, deep employee engagement, job and organizational fit, and strong leadership are outperforming peers and will likely beat their competition in attracting top talent.”
Developing such a culture is a challenge, but doesn’t have to be.
What is critical for organizations to appreciate is that engaging employees isn’t like fixing a machine. It’s not a linear, input-output process.
This should seem obvious, but way too often, organizations concern themselves only with tangible things that are easy to measure, not things like employee perception, satisfaction, and engagement.
Furthermore, when companies don’t fully engage employees, solutions to issues of concern to employees don’t hit the mark. For example, in terms of wellness programs, companies end up offering cookie-cutter solutions to people in ways that:
Presume to know what people’s personal concerns are based on objective measurements, such as biometric screening that can include body mass index, and cholesterol and blood pressure levels
Offer solutions based on those potentially unfounded presumptions
Overlook and/or ignore the actual people—their “backstory,” their needs, desires, interests, and abilities—almost entirely
Engaging employees isn’t like producing products on an assembly line, and fostering well-being among employees isn’t about offering just the right “program.” It’s about a relationship. If you are not interacting, engaging with, and listening deeply to the people in your organization, it’s a good bet that whatever programs you invest in may well miss the mark.
Building an Organization Where People Thrive
Fostering a great culture starts with getting to know your employees and supporting each on their personal journeys to define and achieve goals that are important and meaningful to them—not the problems you think they face or the problems your data tells you are an issue. It’s about the perception each of your employees has about how their lives are going, what they like, what they’re pleased about, what concerns them, and what they’d like to change.
Of course, measurement and assessment are important, but what you measure and assess must serve the people on whose behalf it’s being done.
The first step towards success is having a corporate culture that values the actual person.
Kathleen Hogan, the Executive VP of HR at Microsoft, got it really right in her recent post on Microsoft’s official blog. In the first paragraph, she mentions the importance of building a culture that values people and supports their success by:
Actively involving employees in building a shared culture
Embodying a growth mindset
Embracing diversity and inclusion
Values and Relationships: The Bedrock of a Great Culture
Values and relationships are what make your culture. The values you hold dear must be reflected in all aspects of your organization. Values matters, but they only matter if you act on them. The environment you create, your organization’s social constructs and expectations, and your official policies all drive how your employees perform.
Equally important, how people perceive your culture and relationships within the organization can determine how well you are able to recruit and retain the best and brightest.
As Rachel Pryor, author of a Kissmetrics blog recently suggested, “Culture is about relationships; it’s what happens between people. It’s not about ‘I,’and it cannot be ‘solved’ with ‘I’ thinking about ‘I.’ Yet most of our performance measurements are in terms of ‘I,’ or ‘things.’ This is what derails many cultural initiatives.”
Relationships? Sounds easy enough, but what does it really mean? It means that to establish a culture that fosters success, the focus needs to be on people and person-to-person interactions, not on people as objects. The focus needs to be on them as human beings whose needs and concerns matter. As Pryor continues:
“People are not ‘things’ that get in our way. People are not problems to be solved. People are not tools to be used. People are people, each equally important. When we see this, we are wholehearted towards them, and our results reflect that motive. We think in terms of ‘Us.’ When people are objects to us, we think in terms of ‘me,’ and our actions and results reflect that motive.”
Pryor suggests the following truths about organizational culture:
Culture belongs to everybody— it is not just a top-down concern
Culture isn’t just important for your results—good culture is the result
Culture doesn’t like to be measured—it exists between people and does not conform to expectations or metrics
Culture sees through selfish motives—it knows when you care and when you are being manipulative
Culture can’t be faked—pretending you care when you really don’t will set your whole endeavor back and destroy goodwill
Culture can be helped but not controlled—behavioral strategies alone will not create success
Culture can’t be half-hearted—It requires a total commitment to caring
Corporate success and failure are different now—How you connect with people is the bottom line today
Culture is ambushed by the intellectual and the expert—it comes through not in what we recommend, it comes through in what we do…every day…across the organization
Culture is easier said than done—being open and real is hard, but closed, divisive cultures kill organizations
Strong culture is tough—culture is the number one factor in success, but it requires everyone to care
To create a strong culture that promotes the best in people, Pryor offers 10 suggestions:
Follow through with what you say you’re going to do based on the feedback you receive from employees
Trust and involve people in decisions that affect them (“No decision about me, without me.”)
Recognize people who stand out because of their positive contributions to the culture you want to create
Promote strong relationships so people can work together to solve their own problems
Accept people “where they’re at” by dropping the judgment and demand for perfection. Respect that people are trying to do their best and that people are fallible
Demonstrate that you have everyone’s back and that they can count on your for support, not blame
Reduce silos and rigid hierarchies by enabling people to influence what happens in the organization
Commit to the “long haul” and not just immediate gains
Stand up for yourself, your people, and your organization
Demonstrate your wholehearted commitment to building and sustaining a healthy, supportive culture
Having a Growth Mindset
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, Microsoft’s Hogan emphasizes the value of a growth mindset.
What is a growth mindset?
Carol S. Dweck, PhD, Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of motivation. Her pioneering work demonstrated how the attributions people make about the nature of ability affect the consequences.
According to Dweck, people fall within a continuum according to their belief about where ability comes from. These beliefs are “mindsets.” Dweck defines two: a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset.”
She describes these 2 mindsets as they apply in the educational setting:
“In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.
In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching, and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”
These two mindsets, either fixed or growth, play out in all areas of life, regardless of the setting or age of the people.
Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer comments that Dweck’s research has implications for managing employees’ performance at work and scolds businesses for spending too much time grading and evaluating people instead of developing their skills. “It’s like the Santa Claus theory of management: who’s naughty and who’s nice.”
Dweck’s research shows that how we perceive possibilities for growth is much more important to our success then our innate abilities or talents.
As Microsoft’s Hogan emphasizes, organizations should nurture a mindset that invites exploration, effort, experimentation, and persistence; and get out of the “blame game.” Work to create a culture that values everyone’s inherent potential to grow and advance.
Caring About the Person, Not Just the Data
I started this post by mentioning Kathleen Hogan’s blog in which she suggests that it’s really important to offer employees benefits to people that matter to them.
Way too often managers get sucked into buying the sizzle of benefits packages that look great based on their perceptions of what employees need, or decide what would look good and be most friendly to the bottom line. The focus for creating benefits packages should be instead, on what makes employees feel productive, happy, and secure. That’s what builds a quality organization that delivers results.
In the case of wellness programs, employers can gather important data about metrics that reveal certain details about how healthy employees are, but in most cases, those information-gathering exercises do not uncover the back story of what employees want, what drives them, what they need, and what resources they have to achieve their unique goals.
In other words, employers should be more concerned with how employees perceive their lives are going and not presume to know and then put together some package that misses the mark. That’s not just a waste of time, money, and effort, but jeopardizes your employees’ goodwill.
How can you foster a growth mindset and nurture a culture that invites everyone into the conversation?
Having a cadre of trusted employees who are cross-trained as wellness coaches can help make sure you are getting not just the data, but also putting human faces on your data.
Wellness coaches work with where people are “at.” They use proven science-based tools and techniques to help people make sustainable changes that are meaningful to them and then build on that success.
What you perceive as problems for employees may not be at the top of their lists, but if you support them to achieve their immediate goals and enjoy success, there’s a lot better chance that they’ll be on board to consider other possibilities for themselves…including those that you’d like to see happen.
How is your wellness program operating? How well do you know your employees? How healthy and supportive is your corporate culture? What is one thing you do that really works that you think is worth sharing with others? We all know managing small business can be a tall order and it might be hard to get time for all your employees. Salesforce can help give you some more time back so you can learn more about your employees. That will certainly improve your company culture. We would love to hear from you, leave us a comment!
