Company Culture & Employee Engagement

photo by stuttermonkey

In a recent post about boosting employee morale, David Irvine sites a number of compelling and depressing stats about the disengaged state of the workforce amidst this global recession.

If you are a stats person and would like to see the damage, I recommend you visit last week’s RoundPegg post on the Modern Survey results. Today, however, I would rather focus on the solution – CULTURE.

David Irvine would agree and listed culture as one of his three solutions.

The reason?  Culture is the one of the main reasons employees thrive and stay engaged. It is the alignment of unique individuals through shared values, and a well-aligned culture is one of the biggest drivers of a company’s success.

Person-Environment Fit research shows that when people fit their work environment they perform better, turn over less and are more committed to the company.

Another way of putting this is that when people can go to work and be themselves then they have a lot more energy to apply to the challenges the company requires solving.

When your computer is asked to process multiple programs at once you often see the spinning beach ball or the hourglass, right?

Well, as complex as the human brain is, it too only has so much processing power.  When we ask people to conform to an unnatural (for them) behavior it requires a chunk of that processing power.  They are no longer 100% free to process work challenges.

You are probably wondering if this is the case, then why aren’t all companies quantifying their culture and hiring for cultural fit?

Culture initiatives are hard because they are typically conducted by the senior leadership team, a high-priced outside consultant, several flip charts and a lot of debate about which values (e.g. respect, integrity, communication, excellence)* matter.  Nothing ever changes.

What nobody does is ask all of their employees what they value.  It’s no wonder employees are disengaged because they’re being asked to live by somebody else’s values.  And probably pretty vanilla ones that are only occasionally followed at that.

Active culture management can’t happen if you don’t know what you’re dealing with already.   If you’re lost in the woods a new map isn’t going to do you any good.  The most helpful thing is knowing where on that map you are at the moment you’re lost.

Culture matters in getting your people to perform.  If you want to make a difference, then you need to know what your culture is from the bottom-up.  Because the values pasted on your lobby wall are probably nothing more than very cheap decoration.

*Sound like your company?  Those were Enron’s. 

Creating Cohesive Teams

photo by jczart

I never would have imagined that my beloved Boston Red Sox would ever cross paths with my day-to-day work; presenting company and team culture analyses at RoundPegg.

Then, over the weekend, The New York Times published an article by Neil Paine in Keeping Score: Collapse of Red Sox Offers Stark Lesson in Team Chemistry that tied these two worlds together.

“If you could quantify Boston’s chemistry for the 2011 season, it probably would be revealed as the worst in baseball. But therein lies a major problem for objective baseball analysts: team chemistry, as perhaps baseball’s most beloved intangible, defies all measurement.”

The reality is that you can quantify team chemistry – that is, you can assess the cultural preference, personality traits, and communication style of individuals and aggregate those results into a quantifiable profile of the team.

That is the analysis we at RoundPegg are doing for our clients via our automated TeamPegg software. The output is a development guide that summarizes strengths and misalignments of individuals in comparison to the team, and recommended actions to improve team cohesion.

Would the Red Sox have won another Championship had they been aware of team misalignments – probably not, bad pitching is bad pitching. But much of the “historic late-season collapse” may have been avoided had Terry Francona been aware of his player’s attributes and worked to develop a well-aligned squad.

One of the reasons RoundPegg came about was because of this very reason.  Quantifying people isn’t easy, but it’s a data point.

Maybe next year the Red Sox will take my advice and even start scouting for players that are well aligned with their clubhouse culture – call me John Henry…

Communicating Corporate Values

photo by pasukaru76

Harvard Business Review’s latest email tip of the day is around how to communicate your company’s values.  While this isn’t exactly rocket science it’s often easy to fumble identifying, communicating or changing the value system.

Rosanna Fiske’s first two points are vital.

1. Ask employees what is important to them

2. Establish values across the company, not just within management

A company’s value system cannot be mandated top down.  You didn’t mind being told what you valued when you were 6, but you also didn’t know any better.

Each day you contribute to your company’s culture based on what you value, how you get things done and how you behave.

In fact, everyone does.

So while a plush corporate off-site to hammer out new values feels like important work, it’s a boondoggle.  Without assessing the value systems of the employees, not as they experience the existing culture, but what they truly value in the workplace, the initiative is destined to be a very public flop.

Culture initiatives typically suffer the same fate as the boy who cried wolf.  You don’t get many chances to make an impact on the culture so don’t waste that bullet trying to create something without the feedback of everyone who walks through your doors today.

As I said, this isn’t rocket science.  The best way to guess what someone is thinking is to ask them.

Company Culture and the Rockstar CEO

photo by michellerocks

It’s almost universally acknowledged that a company’s culture matters.

Some companies go to great lengths to ensure that they maintain their core values and it truly is the work of everyone in the company to set the social norms and out undesired behavior.   Often though, the ‘good cultures’ become inextricably linked to a ‘visionary’ CEO.  Even when their motivations are pure, so much of their time becomes dedicated to writing books and giving speeches that it makes it difficult not to get a little cynical. 

(note: we’re big fans of any CEO touting treating employees like intelligent, full-grown adults, but we don’t want their public ubiquity to make it easy for others to dismiss the importance of their words because there are lessons to extract.)

Cynicism aside, there are two massive issues with the rockstar CEO that tend to get overlooked:

• Culture usually starts at the top so the praise isn’t unjustified.  But it’s time we give credit to the people who manage the culture over the long haul.  The line managers who promote the right behaviors and admonish the wrong ones, the HR teams who build the internal programs to highlight core values and the hiring managers who do a better job than most of identifying those who ‘fit.’ A lot goes into building and maintaining a culture.  The fact that these CEOs have paid as much attention to it as they have is a testament to their understanding of what drives their business forward, but they get too much credit.

• Furthermore, there is no one right culture.  These guys wouldn’t be able to make as much money on the books if they said that but look at the list below.  Almost every one of them has/had a different style.  There is little in common between Jack Welch and Tony Hsieh other than their success.  But, each made it work by fostering a culture that worked for them and their business.  And each was ruthless in their own way of ensuring that the values stuck.

[Just a few off the cuff examples - Lee Iacocca, Yvon Chouinard, Jack Welch, Gary Erickson, Tony Hsieh, Gary Hirschberg, Herb Kelleher...and we could go on and on and on.]

Celebrate your culture and live it everyday – just don’t forget that in order to lead you need to have people willing to follow.

Bad Boss Stories

photo by macaron*macaron(Est Bleu2007)

A good friend is a teacher in a charter school and her principal has shown a repeated pattern of passive aggressively hiding behind email instead of discussing issues with his staff or with the individual who is creating ‘the problem’ directly.  This staff-wide reproach was just too good (read: atrociously awful) not to share.

The moral of this story for us is that if you have something that really bothers you and don’t know who is causing it, gather everyone together and discuss it in person.

At the very least it gives you plausible deniability.  Otherwise, you wind up with everyone laughing behind your back and forwarding your email to all their friends.  You just look like a complete jackass (hard to argue otherwise).

Subject: Disgusted Beyond Belief…

“I believe this email will be read by one person for whom this message applies. I hope the strength of it encourages you to be thoughtful enough or simply embarrassed enough to change your ways. I know I speak for everyone when I tell you this is unbelievably disturbing behavior for an adult. Please read below. There is actually no humor intended on any level in this message. It is written by someone who is deeply concerned, disgusted, and angry.

Dear adult who continues to pee all over the staff bathroom seat,

I have to believe that if you are a thinking, feeling adult with even a measure of humanity and decency that you must be deeply embarrassed and disappointed in yourself for repeatedly peeing all over the seat in the staff bathroom even after your colleagues have begged you to change that practice.

You are an adult so you must be fully aware that all you need to do to avoid peeing on the seat is lift it up. Really, all you have to do is lift it up and you won’t leave a disgusting mess behind. If that feels too disgusting for you to do, I find that both ironic and sad. All you need to do is grab a piece of toilet paper to put between your fingers and the seat as you lift it up.

I am really troubled that someone I hired comfortably does this nearly every day knowing that the privacy of bathroom use gives them anonymity.

It is the choice of a small child who does not know better. It is a choice that lacks humanity, citizenship, and basic decency. Really? This is so unbelievable to me. Really?

Why do you believe that it is up to us to clean up after you if we want to use the toilet ourselves or send a visiting adult to that bathroom?

If you make it a habit to let students use that bathroom, cease that practice immediately and let me know so I don’t worry about determining which adult is doing this.

I find this so disturbing that it is nearly worth putting a card reader security system in place to determine who is doing this and when.

I truly hope this email effects some change.”

- [name redacted to protect the horrible boss behind this mail]

Hope you find some solace in this and realize your boss could be worse.