Start creating the corporate culture you crave today
There’s been a lot of talk about corporate culture lately (why else would we focus on this topic for our monthly blogs!) Who has it? Who doesn’t have it? And who desperately wants it but just can’t make it happen? A strong corporate culture is like that thing you saw on Pinterest that you are just desperate to have/ make/ purchase/ cook/ write. But then you realize that it’s probably too expensive, too far out of reach, and totally impractical. Well we have discovered the ultimate corporate culture hacks and you are not going to believe how 3 simple (and not expensive, not too far out of reach and not impractical) steps can turn your office into the Zappos of whatever industry you’re in.
- A strong corporate culture is personnel: No, not personal. But personnel. A corporate culture is not about a bunch of individuals within the company, but rather the culture as a collection. With this corporate culture hack, it’s not about hiring the person that only has the best qualifications, most experience, and other remarkable resume notables, but rather it’s about identifying the particular qualifications, experience, and notables of your existing personnel and how best a new candidate’s person will fit in. A strong corporate culture doesn’t succeed based on things written down on paper; they succeed based on the interaction of all those resumes coming to life!
- A strong corporate culture doesn’t work, it lives: For a long time there was a clear work and life separation. Then came the blurred lines where it was impossible to tell whether you were on your way to work, at work, on your way home from work or asleep because those were really the only options. So many of us have incorporated work into our life – writing emails while sitting on the bench at our son’s soccer game or having a quick phone conference with our boss while making Sunday lunch – but the really smart companies have put the living in work. Those smart companies may not be giving their employees extras including higher salaries or other perks – but they are giving them something even better. At any company where there’s a strong corporate culture you’ll find that each employee has been given ownership of their role, and the room and encouragement to grow. And that’s called living!
- A strong corporate culture weighs contributions, not performance: This may be the greatest of all the corporate culture hacks we discovered. You hired the best people and a lot of living started happening at work and that seems to have created a pretty great corporate culture. But someone has to keep that culture alive or like a houseplant in my university apartment, it will quickly die. One person, or department, cannot be relied upon to feed the beast, errrrr….culture. A strong corporate culture acknowledges, thanks and thrives on the individual contributions of each team member.
Corporate culture doesn’t have to exist solely in articles on other companies, or in how-to books, or in stories that just have to be mostly urban legends – resolve to build, foster and improve your corporate culture, starting today!