Company Culture: A game worth playing

Company Culture: A game worth playing

What do you and your employees experience when walking through the doors of your business in the morning? Is there a feeling of tension or indifference?

Do your employees share your values? Are they performing as you wish them to? Is there a sense of camaraderie and of playing on the same team? If not, perhaps it's time to take an honest look at the state of employee relations and your company culture as it stands today.

Objective observations: A basis for change

Adam, the owner of a dental clinic, wants to build a world-class business but feels like he can’t get past the daily employee frustrations. Adam’s desire is for his employees’ behavior to match the standard of the franchise prototype - with a collective dedication to excellence, high performance, and professionalism.

But before trying to "fix" what he assumed wasn’t working right, I suggested that he must first strive to understand what the true day-to-day situation really is in the company; and that to understand it properly, he must observe it objectively.

But Adam felt that he was too close to the situation and wouldn’t be able to observe the office environment as an objective bystander. Therefore, he called for some outside help. "I asked a family member to come work as a janitor for a short time so that she could observe the company culture. She was able to collect some important information about what she noticed, which helped me see the situation with fresh eyes. Since then, I’ve come up with some great ideas about how I can improve things."

While many other business owners can, and do, observe their companies culture themselves, it is important to note that in order for this exercise to work, they must be able to remain impartial.

Developing a common perspective

When developing your company culture, it is essential to look at things from your employees’ perspective. People want to work for companies that have a clearly defined structure through which they have opportunities to grow and develop.

But how do you define what this structure looks like? It all starts with you as the leader and your vision for the company. You need to relate your passion and drive to everyone who works for you, and to use your vision to create your organizational strategy. This should include an organizational chart and position contracts that clearly communicate the game you’re playing and the rules you play by.

Defining the game

To get your employees to act as you want them to, they have to want to play your game. The degree to which your employees can buy into your game is the degree by which you’ve communicated the results and rewards of that game to them. Employees want to know what game you are asking them to play, and then they want to decide if this is something they want to learn to do and to become experts at.

As a starting point, you may want to consider the following:

• Are you willing to jump in and play the game yourself? (If you don’t buy into the game, no one else will.)
• Do you stop to celebrate benchmarks and victories along the way? (If you don’t take the time to recognize people’s accomplishments, they won’t want to accomplish anything.)
• Is the game appealing to people, or is it the same boring thing everyday? (It’s important to have a strategy, but it’s okay to switch tactics to keep things interesting.)
• Do you expect this game to be self-sustaining, with no additional support or reminders? (People don’t want to guess; they want to know the exact rules of the game.)

Communication is key

Communication is the key to building your company culture. Employees get frustrated and quit when they feel like they are not heard, appreciated, or valued. The antidote to that is to develop a regularly-scheduled time and place for employees and managers to talk with one another.

Holding regular employee development meetings can literally transform the business. The way these meetings are set up is extremely important because an employee needs to know that he or she won’t be judged or discriminated against if they speak their mind.

Ground rules for conducting the meetings should detail requirements and agendas so that everyone knows what to expect. At a minimum, this is a place to review employee work and follow-up with assignments. It is also a great opportunity to find out about individual’s passions and goals in life, and then to find a way to connect and align these passions and goals with what they do in their jobs.

Practice, determination, and commitment

For Adam, successfully implementing the appropriate systems took practice, dedication, and commitment. "It wasn’t easy to change from the old way of doing things to how we do it now," he told me, "but it is amazing how working on developing a positive company culture has transformed my business. As the business has grown, I have delegated the responsibility of conducting the meetings to my managers, who have also been developing their employee mentoring skills."

And when frustrations do come up, employees know that there is a blame free systems solution for discussing the problem that they are experiencing. "It completely opened the doors of communication and added a renewed sense of excitement and fun for my employees than any incentive program could have produced," he concluded. "The managers and I listen and respond to the employees, and the employees say that they feel we genuinely care about them. When everyone walks through the office door in the morning, there is a good feeling because we all know that we’re playing on the same team."

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