Cultured Or Culty? Which Is Your Business?

When it comes to business, we all know that there’s a vast difference between those that have amazing cultures and those whose cultures are down in the dumps. Take Google, for instance. The company has long been held up as a shining example of what can be achieved when you have the right management practices in place. Over time, networks get established and companies become places of excellence and value-added, without any of the usual corporate chaff.

But then there are other companies, like Enron or others where conditions for employees on the ground are bad and the workplace takes on an almost culty environment. These companies usually wind up going up in flames, simply because they aren’t able to hold together an honest, purpose-driven workforce.

The type of company your business choose to be – culty or cultured – depends a lot on the decisions of the people in senior management positions. Here’s how to engage on a fundamental level.

Obsess Over Values

At the center of a healthy brand and great employee engagement is the corporate culture. Take MVF, for instance, a marketing firm that got started back at the height of the financial crisis in London in 2009. At that time, the company only employed five people, but it managed to grow itself into a company of more than 300, thanks to the fact that they prioritized culture.

According to one of the founders, a man called Titus Sharp, the company was committed to its culture and values right from the start. The found that the way in which the founders spoke to each other did a lot to determine the direction of the company from that point onwards, and filtered down to the lower ranks. Employees reflected the founders in the way that they interacted with customers and this slowly disseminated throughout the whole of the business.

Titus says that, as companies grow, it becomes more and more difficult to change values. But when everyone is working together in a single room at the start, it’s easy to codify them.

Trust Your Staff

Culty businesses tend to be those that don’t offer their staff independence and flexibility. This is fundamentally because the people running these businesses don’t trust their staff to do the right thing (usually because they wouldn’t if the roles were reversed).

Training staff to deal with medical emergencies is one way to show your staff that you trust them and that they don’t need to go through you for everything. Find a defibrillator for sale online as well as a first aid kit, and make sure that employees are able to take the lead in the case of a medical emergency. Given that there are more than 3 million medical incidents in US companies every year, they’ll undoubtedly get their time to shine.

Another way of trusting your staff is to allow them to use their existing expertise. For instance, Titus had a member of staff with a background in artificial intelligence. This particular employee said that he could develop a system that could help the company’s recruitment process and help them to make better hiring decisions. Titus gave the go ahead, and they’ve seen positive returns ever since.

• Tags:

COMMENTS.

comments