Business
Well, the cat’s been out of the bag now for more than ten or fifteen years. There is, indeed, a proven and direct correlation between the health of a company’s culture and its overall success.I’ve been on my rant for quite a long time that if employees don’t love to come to work every day, the company they work for will never be able to reach its full potential. Unmotivated employees give, on average only 60-70 percent effort and disengaged employees, even less.That’s like an airline pilot giving only 60 percent power to get off the runway. Not going to happen. So, in that vein, I’ll share an experience I had not too long ago with one of our clients to help communicate my point.I met a business owner who often talked about struggles she had with her business partner. Her partner was brilliant in terms of industry knowledge and his ability to bring aboard new business, but his alter ego was that of a bully with respect to his style of management and leadership. Morale at her company was low, and the turnover was high. He was a micro-manager with a near zero-tolerance policy for mistakes, and he truly believed that the occasional dose of intimidation coupled with fear was the best way to keep everyone on their toes.Because of this, she was worried that the company’s key players and top producers would jump ship if things didn’t change.I was hired to do an employee insight assessment, and after conducting numerous interviews with her employees, her fears were confirmed.When she and her partner were presented with the employee feedback (evidence), they restructured their relationship so that she would be in charge of all employees, and he was going to play to his strengths in growing the business through focusing more on sales, managing vendor partners, corporate strategy and being the visionary for the company.One the employees were aware of the change, I provided a strategy for building a fanatical culture of high-performance, accountability and continuous improvement. Here are the components:1. Replacing the dreaded annual review with ongoing face-to-face, in-person, authentic real-time feedback. 2. Keeping employees in the know about what is going on at the company through newsletters, summits, an intranet and town hall meetings. One of the biggest gripes employees have is not knowing what is going on at their company. 3. Investments in training. A few thousand dollars and a couple days out of the office for sales, service, leadership, technical, industry or human resources training will generate a very nice ROI. Employees warm up more to employers who care enough to invest in them.4. Investments into better tools to improve efficiency. We worked with a client several years ago with a database of customers well into the thousands, and their customer management system was housed on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet because the adoption of a system like salesforce would require a large investment and the training would be too much of an interruption to their day-to-day operations. Yet when they needed to email groups of their customers, it took more than six days to assemble an emailing list. I’ll let you think about that one.Okay, moving on… 5. Celebrating failure. Not willy nilly failure from negligence and sloppiness. Rather, intelligent failure where new hypothesis are tested based on a culmination of knowledge and research, and emerging with new knowledge based on trial and error experimentation. 6. Organizing a day of respect. This is day when, for example, salespeople spend a full day in the life of production, and production spends a day and the life of sales. Doing this is the only way each group will understand and have an appreciation for each other’s challenges, struggles. 7. Cleaning house. Going through the office to declutt