Developing a great organizational culture doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t let you “set it and forget it” once you reach your ideal culture. It takes a lot of hard work and time to both build and maintain. To sustain great cultures, leaders must watch for signs of decay. Today, @lornerubis and I share some quick indicators to help you identify when you might have a problem.
When you’re evaluating your culture, look for these red flags that might bring trouble to you long-term:
- Do a visual appraisal of your offices – a facility’s physical appearance can give clues to its cultural well-being. Is your space clean? Orderly? Are employees cleaning up after themselves? Often, a tidy, organized office symbolizes the pride employees have in their organization.
- Listen to the language of your employees, paying attention to word choice as well as tone. If a suggestion gets a reply like, “That’s not how we do things” instead of “That sounds like an interesting topic of discussion” then you may be hearing the first stage of decay, stagnation.
- Look out for and make sure you don’t participate in office gossip or drama.
- Monitor your top talent, especially if they begin leaving. Just as great talent can attract other great talent, high-performing individuals can also cause other star employees to consider leaving.
- Review social media tools – if your scores on social review platforms like Glassdoor start to dip, you may have a cultural issue.
- Pay attention to methods of complaint – if employees resort to third parties, whistleblowing, or anonymous tips, your culture could be in jeopardy.
Organizations often realize they have culture problems too late. Many organizations wait until their annual employee surveys to gather feedback and make changes, but those surveys can take weeks to process and still don’t always reflect employees’ true feelings. It’s imperative to use more than one annual measurement to determine how your culture is faring.
Instead of waiting for your culture to rot from the inside, take a proactive approach to monitoring your workplace. An easy way to get started is by asking for employees to provide employee net promoter scores.
Companies typically survey customers for net promoter scores, asking whether the customers would recommend products or services to others. We can easily modify this tool for employees, as it is quick and easy, and it provides insight on a smaller, more consistent basis of how people feel about their work environment. To gather an employee net promoter score, ask these three questions:
- Would you recommend this organization as a place to work?
- Would you recommend our products or services to your friends or social groups?
- What would you tell leadership to stop doing, start doing, or continue to do?
This exercise doesn’t have to be for the entire organization – teams can even use it as a tool to determine what is most important for them to focus on. When you consistently gather and act positively on feedback, people will tell you how they really feel and provide you with actionable items that you can execute on quickly.
This week, we encourage you to disrupt sameness proactively and achieve #betterwork.
Lynette
