Mark Hicks is an adjunct professor of management at the University of La Verne School of Business and Public Management. Professor Hicks also teaches a class as part of practicum where the students form a business, sell a product and donate the profits at the end of the term.
Mark is also a business consultant at the University of La Verne SBDC, where he helps clients looking to start a business with business planning, licensing, permitting, and small business loans.
What is Company Culture?
Company culture is the environment that is created within a business or organization. Culture affects how you think, what you do, and how you feel at work. When you look at organizations like Apple, you would understand that Apple is a culture of innovation and technology. Along with that culture, the employees enjoy perks and benefits from the company.
Culture is driven by the leadership at the top or the business owner, just as Steve Jobs or Tim Cook drives the Culture at Apple. Culture encompasses the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the business, and those at the top set the tone in the organization.
Changes in leadership and styles may change how the business is run but the impact on the company culture remains basically the same. Different leadership in different organizations still have a positive impact on that organization. Consider this quote from Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic:
Shaping Culture in Your Business
If you are looking to shape the culture in your business you have to know your people and communicate with them.
Know Your People
"I worked at a business and the Vice President at the time would gather people. I was a Vice President of a region and we go out to regional offices. He says we are going to go on a listening campaign." A listening campaign is where you go out and meet people in the organization and set the tone of the organization by explaining the mission, vision, and values of the company.
You have to Communicate
If we go back to what is heard in the organization and if there was an indiscretion in the company you would stop it right there. It would be culture to not tolerate these actions, and suspend employees until a proper investigation was completed. "This needs to be done when an executive or a business owner sees shenanigans going and that needs to be stopped right there. That really sets a tone with people because everybody talks, everybody talks, and everybody gets on the phone and says 'you won't believe what happened today."
Everyone understands how people are dealt with. They want to be dealt with fairly, understand the culture, and workers want to believe the culture is a great place to work. We all want to work at a place like Disney than some hard-driving sales-focused organization.
Telling Stories
One of the classic things is to tell stories. When we get a chance we tell people stories to give them an idea our they should react to things, how they respond to things and how the bar is set. One of the classic stories you hear is about a bellman in a large hotel chain. The bellman who worked that day greeted and hailed a cab for an executive who stayed at the hotel. As the executive leaves for the airport, they left their briefcase.
The bellman has another employee hold his post as he goes to the airport to return the briefcase and that is how it is done in this particular hotel chain and what is expected of you as a potential employee. These need to be stories of your organization and how people have handled things in your business as they should.
Improving Corporate Culture
to improve corporate culture really requires a change. However, change is perceived as something to lose and leads to fear for many people. This fear of change leads to resistance to the change and you have to explain why the change is required. There's an old saying: "Culture eats strategy for lunch."
This means that as you implement new strategies the old culture will eat it up and when the new strategy doesn't work, the old culture will jump on this "The way we've done it before was right. The way we've always done it worked and that's the way we've always done things." So they go back to the old, back to the comfortable and it's difficult to move forward with the change.
What we suggest is to institute a small change related to some value, artifact, or belief. This will require positive reinforcement to encourage the new change and realize that this change isn't bad. You also need to communicate what's in it for them and this change will make things better or more productive. If the change in the culture does require that you take something away from employees, this will require twice as much work and twice as much reinforcement to encourage people to do the right thing.
The last thing you can do is when hiring new people to ensure they are consistent with the values you have, understand the culture, and are appreciative of that culture. Implement diversity when you hire but don't just hire a single type of person simply because they understand your company culture.
Conclusion
We want to make sure small business owners understand that there is a culture within their environment. They at the top run that, everyone is looking toward them and that's what creates that culture. So, not only can you create a positive culture, you can create a negative culture that does damage to your organization as well. It depends on your actions, what you reinforce, and depending on if you listen to people or not. Those are the things we need to work on and create a good culture and change it if it's not going the way we want it to.
Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.
Comments
Post a Comment