A strong organizational culture can greatly enhance productivity and the overall business value of your workforce. Why? Because culture represents commonly understood values and priorities and expected behaviors, and when those are clear to everyone, then everything can move much more smoothly. Removing uncertainty makes it easier for value-adding behavior to occur, because people have a clearer idea what is needed. Common understanding means lower level employees can take initiative without too much oversight, you need fewer restrictions limiting actions, and people can feel more confidant about being innovative when they understand what’s acceptable and what isn’t. When everyone understands the rules, they spend less time trying to figure out how to play the game and more time playing it. It also becomes very obvious when someone doesn’t fit into the culture, making it easier to take remedial action.
How can you have a strong culture? By making sure three key attributes are aligned:
STATED VALUES AND PRIORITIES What is important to your organization? Your values and priorities are affected by many things, such as the industry you’re in, the nature of your market, your customer base, and more. Tech firms may focus on innovation, but for an airline that has safety as its top priority, encouraging innovation — where failures are expected — may not be as important. Are you more interested in annual revenue, or in market share? Do you emphasize scalable solutions, or individualized products? Know what is important to your organization, and be sure it’s clear to everyone so they can work toward the goals you set while following the values that matter. It’s not enough for business owners and top leadership to know what they want; it needs to be understood by everyone if you expect people to do the right things to move forward. Remember, too, that if you say everything is a top priority, then nothing is; you really need to know what matters.
POLICIES AND PROCESSES Everything from how you recruit to how you get work done shapes the expectations your employees have. Depending on how you expect people to work, should you be hiring team players or individual “rock stars?” How strictly do you set timelines and schedules? What is your office environment like? The way you reward people incentivizes certain behaviors; paying individual commissions and paying bonuses based on group performance lead to different working styles. The organizational structure affects things like oversight, communication, and collaboration. Again, your industry may have an impact on this; financial institutions face a lot more regulations than hair salons do, the public sector typically has to be more transparent than the private sector, and so on. The rules you put in place for your organization help determine how your employees act.
THE REAL WORLD Your employees see what is happening around them, both inside the company and in the rest of the world. They observe demographic changes, as the Baby Boomer generation retires and as Gen Z prepares to enter the workplace. They note changing consumer demand, especially when they are also consumers of the products they make. Employees at an NGO working in developing countries can see changes happening in the society they help serve. People read the news and recognize trends and evolving situations that affect the organization. Your employees’ real world observations shape their expectations about what they should be doing.
So what happens when what you say, what you do, and what people see do not line up? You get a weak culture, with all the uncertainty and confusion that comes along with it.
Think about it this way: if you have posters in the elevator saying “We value innovation!” and then your employees see people get punished for trying something new and having it fail, that makes them wonder what you really value. If you say “We value collaboration!” and then 95% of a performance feedback form covers individual work, then people are not going to be sure how to work. In the 1980s, IBM employees saw their company continue to emphasize mainframes while Microsoft was busy creating the PC market, causing them to question their leadership’s judgment. When young US Army officers in the 2000s found themselves in situations that required innovation and creativity, but saw that innovators and creative thinkers were not the people being promoted, many of them got so confused that they left the service as soon as they could.
You cannot say one thing and then do another, and expect to have things work smoothly. Your employees are not mind readers and cannot be expected to know that what you say and what you really mean are in fact two different things. For you to have a strong culture, you cannot afford a conflict between what you say, what you do, and the reality that your employees observe. A strong culture reduces uncertainty; a weak culture adds to it. Uncertainty slows down your business, so whatever you can do to reduce it is a good thing.