Ducks In A Row: Culture Creation
by Miki Saxon
The best cultures satisfy the intangibles that people crave.
A Hollister poll of 1000 people, employed and unemployed, in Massachusetts last summer asked them what factors contributed the most to their job satisfaction; the majority of responses in order were
- Company Culture;
- Opportunities for Growth;
- Employee Appreciation;
- Work/Life Balance;
- A good Benefits Package; and
- Competitive salary/pay.
Notice that pay is dead last.
As I’ve always said, “The person who joins for money will leave for more money.”
The interesting thing about this is that numbers two through four are all parts of number one, good culture. Even benefits are a function of the culture, since they reflect the company’s attitude towards its people.
Still more interesting is that the top three are totally free—they cost the company no money—rather, they are a reflection of the corporate and/or manager’s MAP. Even number four is more about management attitude than dollars and any dollars that are spent typically offer substantial ROI.
There are tons of words that you’ll hear are important in creating a good culture, but I believe that it’s a function of two basics, one a belief and the other an action resulting from it.
Belief: People are intelligent, motivated, and they genuinely want to support their company in achieving its objectives. When people know more about their job, company, industry, and how they interact, they perform their own duties better and more productively because they understand the objectives and care about the results.
Action: People are most productive when they have all the information needed to do their job efficiently. This means that all managers, from CEO down, have both the ability and willingness to produce appropriately clear communications as to where the company is going, how it’s going to get there, what’s expected of them and how it all fits together and then disburse it accurately and completely so people can do their work in a timely manner.
If you believe that
- a key ingredient for success is a culture that recognizes employees as its most valuable (and least replaceable) asset and
- that people are required to act with initiative and their performance is directly impacted by the quality and quantity of the information they receive
- then you’ll understand that people seriously resent communication failures that cause them to perform unnecessary, incorrect or wasted work.
Technically, communications is an IBB (infrastructure building block) and we’ll be talking more about them later.
Your comments—priceless
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Image credit: flickr
January 13th, 2009 at 7:43 am
This is great. Thanks for the hollister poll. I love the idea. You’re so right the major things are free. It is so much about looking at how you communicate and how you organize not how much $$ you spend. Thanks for the great insight
January 13th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
You’re welcome, Jeff, I’m delighted that it’s of use to you. Stay tuned, there’s a lot more where that came from.
Most managers know in their gut that this is true, but it’s much better to have stats to back up the instinct.
January 13th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
[…] says about our view of ourselves and our ability to make progress, please see this piece on creating culture, by Miki Saxon, at Leadership […]