The term “Company Culture” has come to represent a way for employers and employees alike to uncover what makes them different and desirable to one another. For employers, culture has historically been all about defining, communicating, and promoting core values. For employees, it has been all about evaluating whether those core values have any real meaning beyond just words on a wall and whether they actually generate actions that drive meaningful workplace practices. Here’s what most leaders miss when thinking about improving their workplace culture:
Focus areas that typically contribute to a successful company culture often include defining core values, hiring leaders who demonstrate those values, surveying employees to learn what they care about, striving to build and maintain a well connected team, and learning from past mistakes by evaluating pre-hire screening process and by conducting exit interviews. These things are all important, but what’s often missing for many businesses is the ability for leaders and employees to actually understand and effectively translate their company’s values into practical, tangible strategies that empower decision making and judgement calls in their daily work. It’s one thing to communicate your values, but it’s another thing to get your employees to understand how to apply them.
Helping your team apply your company’s values in a way that drives the results you want boils down to effective interpretation, and it requires specification.
An effective way to accomplish this involves demonstrating how to apply your values in real time by using real examples so your team understands how to use them to approach common problems and situations encountered in your workplace on a regular basis. In order for this to happen, your values have to be specific. Simple and broad values like “integrity, innovation, collaboration” sound great, but what do they actually mean? How are your employees supposed to think about those words when it’s time to solve a problem? Try thinking of your values as phrases or examples instead of single words. For example, instead of “innovation,” consider “researches multiple ways to approach a project before beginning” or “defines critical questions before imagining possible solutions” …or simply outline whatever you want “innovation” to mean at your organization. By approaching values in this way, it gives your team critical direction when approaching their work and helps ensure everyone is aligned in understanding your company culture more broadly.
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