In 2024, we will commit to ensuring that those who want to work on growing a strong corporate culture have the support they need.
Let’s start with a question: When is the need to grow a corporate culture most often expressed?
Answer: Usually, the moment someone gets fed up with a negative trend.
Negative trends such as low morale, reduced employee engagement, misalignment, high turn-over, and customer complaints, to name a few, are the result of your organization allowing its culture to grow unfettered and organically.
Reality check: Culture Happens! Whether you grow it intentionally or not, culture is growing organically right now in your organization. You just may not like what is flourishing.
So, how do you prevent this from happening?
Grow and nourish your corporate culture with intent, purpose, buy-in, and follow-through.
More precisely:
- DO: pay attention to the negative trends and use them as a catalyst for change.
- DO: Identify what sets your company apart. Why should employees and customers care about the company?
- DON’T do this exercise in a vacuum. One of the most concrete ways to earn people’s support is to engage people from all levels of the organization in the process.
- DON’T delegate. Leaders must take the lead and be involved. Passing off the identification, creation, and implementation of a corporate culture to a committee out of frustration will simply lead to more frustration!
- DON’T: confuse core values with bare minimum requirements. Integrity, respect, employee wellness, customer care…are nothing “special”. If you don’t already have those highly important values and priorities, you’re in way more trouble than you think!
- DO: share your corporate culture once the exercise is complete. This could be a manifesto, guidebook, manual, video, etc.
- DO: keep it top of mind for everyone to help guide their actions and behaviors.
- DO: evaluate the impact it is having.
BONUS: DON’T assume that what flourishes this year is perennial. You may have to make some changes.
Ready to get started?
Here is my calendar link. Please book a 30-minute exploratory/fact-finding session so that we can agree on what strategies would work best for your team and organization.
NOTE: It doesn’t matter what your seniority level in the organization is, or whether you are a decision-maker or not, your input could be the seed that changes everything. Book the call and we’ll guide you through the initial process.
Sneak peak: we are launching our new version of World Café with a Farm to Table theme to producing a sustainable corporate culture that will thrive. This session will help kick off a series of activities that you will be able to engage in for the rest of 2024.
Participants will go through a S.W.O.T. analysis to determine what parts of their corporate culture need to be nurtured, improved, or removed.
The traditional use of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats will be referred to as Sunflowers, Weeds, Onions, and Thorns. This will help participants stay on theme while creating a more accessible, creative, and engaging learning environment for all.
Read the original article on LinkedIn here.