Assessing Your Company’s Culture
In part two of our series on company culture, we address how to assess your current company’s culture. If you missed Part One of our series, click here.
Not every business has had the foresight to completely figure out their long-term plan for growth. In reality, very few businesses do this, because it demands a high level of confidence in your company’s survival – something that can be hard to come by for a whole host of reasons. But, if you’ve been spending a lot of time recently on growth-strategy and bringing in new staff, it might be time to hit the pause button and evaluate our emerging culture.
While there are plenty of consultants out there that would be happy to charge you lots of money for a “company culture audit,” the far easier – and as Jim did himself (see Part One of our series on Company Culture for more info) – method is to simply take a look around.
How do your employees act when they’re at work? Are there common behaviors (either good or bad)? What does having this job mean to your employees, and would they go somewhere else if afforded the opportunity?
These things are not your company’s culture – but they’re symptoms of the health of your culture. Recall in part what we heard from Jim (part one of our series) – Spartan’s culture was already being shaped before the real hiring began. Knowing how your employees are reacting to what you’re building is tremendously important if you want your company to thrive.
Planning for the Future
If you’ve done a thorough job of assessing your company’s culture, then you’ll be able to see patterns emerging – and probably areas where your employees seem regularly dissatisfied. Spartan’s COO, Brittney Bolin, did a fantastic job of sharing with our group how she’s able to keep a constant pulse of the company’s culture and reinforce it on both an individual and enterprise-wide level.
The good news is, you don’t need to start fro scratch. Focus on just a few key areas to see what kind of environment your workplace has developed. Here are a few of them that I took away from Spartan:
- Clarity of purpose: This one is deceptively simple. It’s not enough for you to just state a purpose for your employees; they also must buy into it. They have to feel that what they do matters, and has a measurable impact on the success of the company.
- Employee engagement: Engagement is tied directly to purpose. Employee engagement is how well you’ve prepared your employees to fulfill their purpose. Are there things keeping your employees from being successful in their work? If so, you have an engagement problem.
- Management autonomy: This is related to employee engagement. When your management team feels empowered and has the freedom to make decisions without having to run every one of them past the owner, good things happen. Managers not only gain clarity on their purpose, but the people that report to them feel connected to the mission and vision of the company on a daily basis. The other thing that happens is that you, the owner, will truly find the freedom to focus on the big picture, long-term vision for your company.
- Trust: This is a must-have in the workplace. We’ve all had jobs where we couldn’t necessarily count on co-workers to pull their weight. Sure, you can hire people who seem trustworthy, but making trust a company value – with zero exceptions – falls squarely to you as a business owner. Providing your team the procedure, methods and the tools to fulfill them (example – checklists) ensures your people can attain remarkable consistency and efficiency in all that they do. This is the hallmark of trust that runs both ways between staff and management.
- Continuous learning: Jim made it very clear that Spartan wouldn’t have achieved the success it has if his people didn’t continually improve themselves, both personally and professionally. This is further evidence that even when Spartan was in its early infancy stages, culture was already being established. As a United States Marine, Jim learned a long time ago that training is key to execution. To quote him, “The more we sweat in training, the less we bleed in battle”.Part three in our series will focus on the return-on-investment of a strong company culture, so stay tuned! And, as always, feel free to contact us here at More Floods if you’re looking for new and better ways to grow your water damage business!