Business Alert: Grow Culture, Not Perks

How can a company turn its audacious vision into a results-driven reality? It starts with a winning company culture.

Company culture can have an enormous impact on performance. For example, Steve Jobs built a challenging culture at Apple, where “reality is suspended” and “anything is possible.” Foster a culture of employee empowerment such as this and it’s no small wonder Apple became the most valuable company on the planet.

 

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But not all businesses get it right. And a poor culture can affect your business in terrible ways.

Mirrors and Cascades and Bad Behavior…Oh My

We know it’s a tall order, but leadership needs to set a good example.

In his book, Workplace Morality: Behavioral Ethics in Organizations, Dr. Muel Kaptein draws on scientific experiments to show how different surroundings affect decision-making. But what is interesting is some of his findings reveal the unsettling but obvious notion that the behavior of leaders filters down through the chain of the rest of the group. And while employees mirror leadership, the theory known as “negative social proof” suggests that doing the “right thing” becomes difficult when people see the right people doing the wrong things.

Toxic behavior by leadership can cause a number of issues in the workplace:

• Loss in productivity
• Poor customer perception
• Low employee retention
• Inability to hire the best and brightest
• Damage to brand on social media
• Hostile work environment

The takeaway here is that a strong culture starts with leadership. The definition of “strong culture,” however, is not setting up a Ping-Pong table or posting values on a wall. A perfect segue into our next section!

Dear Management,

If your company has a flawed culture, an unclear culture, or worse, no culture at all, your employees will leave. Especially the good ones.

Businesses should not confuse culture with a complimentary ice cream bar or a pool table in the break room. They inherently play a role in nature vs. nurture, which directly affects an individual’s behavior and the culture within the organization. To put it in clear terms – as cool as it is to have a pool table in the office, the office is not a frat house. We especially love how Lisa Earle McLeod said it in her article published on LinkedIn, Why Millennials Keep Dumping You: An Open Letter To Management: “A purposeful culture is more important.”

Today, a career means much more than a stable place to work. Employees look at company values, meaning, community and culture. The trick is to find the right balance of each.

Just as dangerous as a flawed culture is, an unclear culture will almost always lead an employee down an unproductive path. Successful people tend to work for successful companies. And a successful company has clear and purposeful values.

A great example of a business that carries purposeful values to the core of its existence is Whole Foods. They incorporate social responsibility (corporate giving, volunteering and sustainability) into the essence of their business: “We serve and support our local and global communities.”

Winning at Culture

According to the article written by Michael C. Mankins, The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture, “winning cultures” among high-performing organizations encompass the following seven attributes:

• Honesty
• Performance-focused
• Accountable and owner-like
• Collaborative
• Agile and adaptive
• Innovative
• Oriented toward winning

Bottom line: company culture is a must-have, for the sake of your employees and your business.