Building a Strong Company Culture
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Your organisation’s core values underpin your company’s identity and should guide your decision making in all areas of operations.
This means you must always hire, fire, review, reward and recognise people with your core values at the forefront of your mind.
You can have all the strategic frameworks you like, but without a company culture that embodies your values, success will remain elusive. As leadership guru Peter Drucker puts it ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.
When everyone in your company acts, speaks, and lives by your core values, you have an influential culture that will ensure long-term organisational growth and prosperity.
Cultivating Your Company Culture
Once you have nailed down your company’s core values, these become the guiding principles in every business decision you make. This is how company culture is cultivated.
It starts in the hiring process and continues through the entire employee life cycle.
While a leadership team that models and rewards behaviours based on core values makes culture a top-down function, any new hires and how they embrace, cultivate and assimilate with your existing team are also fundamental in developing a strong company culture.
Every member of your team is responsible for building and reinforcing your culture.
Hiring For Cultural Fit
There are two primary ways to infuse your core values into your hiring process, ensuring you attract candidates that fit your company culture.
The first is to market your company in a way that promotes your core values. All your marketing collateral, from job advertisements to your website, should represent what your company stands for.
The second is to create a recruitment framework that evaluates candidates based on cultural ‘best fit’.
Anyone involved in the hiring process should be well versed in your company’s core values speech and be confident delivering it to potential candidates. This, along with creating values-based interview questions, will ensure you attract the right people and deter those who aren’t the best fit.
Creating an onboarding framework that embodies your culture will ensure your team understands your core values and always acts with them in mind.
Wrong Person, Right Seat
Building an organisation ‘with all of the right people in the right seats’ will guarantee performance, productivity and profitability.
However, when a member of your team doesn’t share your core values, it can begin to chip away at what you are working to achieve.
So, what can you do if you identify someone who isn’t embodying your company’s values?
You can start by clearly communicating with them around where you feel they are falling short. Get as specific as you can by offering examples of how their performance could be improved and re-iterate your core values speech.
Implementing a mentoring program and setting clear expectations around how they can better represent your values can often be enough to turn a situation like this around.
If, however, there continues to be a cultural clash, you may have no choice but to let to them go.
Creating a healthy culture sometimes means making tough decisions for the greater good.
Sometimes it may be challenging to determine who in your team is not truly acting with the company values in mind. . A powerful tool we use at Infinity Hr to do this is the Values Evaluator.
This involves listing your core values and evaluating whether your staff display these values all the time, some of the time or never.
The Values Evaluator is an excellent starting point when conducting performance reviews with your team.
Reviewing With Core Values in Mind
Performance reviews are often anticipated with dread by both management and employees alike. However, when you review your team based on your core values and cultural fit, you create a framework where real, actionable change can occur.
Creating an open dialogue where your employees can evaluate you, in turn, will further serve to strengthen your company’s ethos.
Recognising and Rewarding Your Team
Along with conducting regular performance reviews, create a business environment that recognises and rewards team members when they are embodying the corporate culture. While providing constructive criticism is crucial in developing a cohesive team, even more critical is the practice of acknowledging your team’s achievements. Studies have shown that one of the biggest motivators for employees is being respected and appreciated by their peers. Rewarding your employees can take many forms and can be as simple as thanking them for a job well done.
A strong culture of employee recognition breeds employee retention and engagement, leading to increased profitability and overall business success.
As an HR specialist with over 18 years’ experience, Iolanda Hazell works with SMEs to develop their values, vision and company culture. Contact Iolanda today to discuss how you can start using the Values Evaluator to build your best team. Call 0400489743 or email iolanda@infinityhr.com.au.
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