New Business columnist Andy Burrows from The Trades Coach kicks off his first column with a look at the importance of a good company culture, and how to practically implement core values into a company’s everyday operations.
Having the right culture in your company is vital to its success. The culture that exists in a company can make or break it, so it’s important to make sure the right one is proactively developed.
Establishing an agreed set of core values is the best place to start.
By not taking a proactive approach, the culture will simply evolve in a random way, usually by drifting towards whoever is making the most “noise” in the company.
If that person is a positive, uplifting type then you are lucky, and the culture will generally be positive. If, on the other hand, the noisy one is a moaning, slack-arse, negative type, then you have a problem.
Other people will be dragged down to this level and the whole company culture will become negative. You will lose your best employees and retain your worst.
You will end up annoying your customers and risk losing them too. Ultimately, you may be driven out of business, or be driven insane by the negative energy, or both.
Establishing an agreed set of core values is not just important if you have a problem with a negative culture in your business and need to make some changes.
It’s actually harder to turn the ship around in this instance, and can be quite disruptive. The best time to do it is when the culture is generally quite good.
That’s the time to get it down on paper, codify it and make sure it is lived every day to help a good (or okay) situation get even better. Also, it will help when recruiting new team members, to ensure they will measure up against the stated core values.
So how do you go about it?
The process should be team-driven. You should not take it on yourself and be like Moses coming down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments. The wider the input, the better the output.
I recently went through this process with the owners of a small-to-mid-sized construction company as part of a wider organisation structure and roles review.
The company had grown spectacularly from, effectively, a one-man band to around 35 people in the space of eight years.
Growth had not been planned or expected. It just “happened”, and the lack of systems and structure were starting to have an effect on the owners.
Stress, long hours and frustration were creeping in, and the owners almost wished the growth hadn’t happened.
However, the culture was generally pretty good but, in order to implement new roles, responsibilities and systems, we felt it was necessary to document what the core values environment needed to be.
This would help maximise buy-in for the changes, and make sure everybody played their part and kept rowing in the same direction.
If you haven’t done this process yet, I suggest you wait no longer, and make documenting and implementing your chosen core values a priority project over the next quarter.
Contact me at [email protected] to discuss where your company culture is currently at and how I can help you effect some change for the better.
The 10 steps to developing strong core values:
• Introduce the topic and your vision to have your core values documented at a full team meeting. I use sports team analogies to help explain the need as most people at the pit-face are guys, and most know what a top-performing sports team with good core values looks like.
• Conduct a simple survey of the team members. It might only be a couple of questions — How do you think we work as a team, and what sort of culture do we have? Secondly, what is important to you as a value, and what do we need to improve on around here?
• Gather the results after a few days. Chase people up for a contribution.
• Analyse the suggestions. Develop a rough draft and refine as you go through the process. Make sure your values are high on the list.
• Communicate the draft list back to everyone and request any final comments/suggestions.
• Publish the final list and ensure it is distributed widely. Will people see them every day?
• Top to bottom. Make sure the culture is spread and embraced by everyone in the company.
• Measure contribution. Make contributing to the culture a KPI for everyone in their performance reviews. You do performance reviews, right? No? You should, so contact me to learn how.
• Reward contribution. Decide how you’ll reward positive contributions to the implementation of the company culture. These could be “Caught being Good” bonus rewards, public recognition in meetings, or a non-cash award.
• Live it daily. Ensure you look for ways to live the culture every day in practical ways. These may be quite small and, by themselves, quite insignificant, but they are important, tangible ways to keep the culture alive. Without practical examples the culture may wither, as people feel it is just a theory and has no practical application in their daily lives.
