By: Thomas Schlick
If you are like most leaders, you probably answered this question with a crisp, firm “yes!”
But do you really? Lately, has it been hard to recruit, hire, and retain talented people? Have any of your star employees left the company for a better job? And when you wander through your company’s hallways, do you see your employees smiling, happy, and with a spring in their step?
Are you wavering a bit now, in terms of your confidence in your company’s thriving culture? If so, here are four (4) sure-fire ways to improve your company’s culture:
- Positional Alignment: Make sure people are in positions that are aligned with what they do best;
- Growth Opportunities: Offer employees real opportunities to learn and grow;
- Employee Engagement: Engage employees so that they are motivated to bring their very best to work each day;
- Mission Critical: Craft, revise, refine, or emphasize your mission so that it helps create unity of purpose for your organization.
Positional Alignment
When your people are in jobs that they are naturally good at – and for which they were hired – their performance and productivity can be “off the charts”. However, if things start to drift and your employees find themselves doing things unrelated to their job description and their core talents, their energy diminishes, and they start focusing on “not failing” vs. “playing to win”.
Growth Opportunities
Today’s millennials want to make a difference. They also expect career growth. How can your company create a learning environment, personalized for each of your employees, which helps them gain new relationships, new job experiences, develop new skills, and tackle different kinds of projects? This isn’t easy when you have a company to run! But when you give your workers the opportunities to grow and advance, you will see them reward you with their discretionary time and effort; they will achieve results greater than your expectations.
Employee Engagement
High employee engagement is crucial to your organization’s health. Just about everything critical to your company hinges on having high employee engagement: retention, safety, productivity, customer satisfaction, revenue and profit growth. And I am sure you can think of a few more!
Mission Critical
How does your mission really “come to life” when you are building this culture that enables your employees to do their best, grow their skills, and bring enthusiasm and a sense of purpose to work every day? If your mission is blurry, uninspiring, no longer fully accurate, or nonexistent, start there. Engage the whole organization in a review or crafting of the mission. Culture starts with a shared understanding and appreciation of purpose.
By: Thomas Schlick