2) How Important is Culture?

What impact will your organisational culture have on your bottom line? How crucial is it that your people’s behaviour is harmonised, that they hold the same values and instincts?

In my first post, I made the case for performance being the only real measure of success for any action on brand, culture or engagement. And I hypothesised that without customer and employee expectations being aligned, you can’t improve performance. Sticking to my principle of keeping it simple, I think bringing those expectations together is about two things:

1.     Purpose - what we do

2.     Culture - how we do it

It’s self-evident that if the customer gets what they want, how they want it, success should follow. And if right along the chain of delivering the product/service, everyone knows what they’re aiming for too, that must grease the gears.

So assuming that Purpose is known inside and outside the company; how well understood is culture? What are the values and behaviours of the business? If they’re “got” by customers, do employees get them? Do they still get them when the pressure’s on? Are they coached on what they mean? Are they measured against how well they deliver them? Here’s my hypothesis number two: most organisations don’t do nearly enough to ensure cultural understanding.

Which isn’t to say that some cultures aren’t organically strong. And it isn’t to say that all action is limited to an “Our Values” page tucked away on the corporate website. But there’s more to be done –and the importance of doing so is nicely illustrated here, in words and numbers. Two key points: “a healthy, high-performance culture impacts financial performance and increases employee engagement” and “companies with a strong culture perform better, are more resilient and last longer.” One of my self-imposed rules (Rule 7, to be precise, the Trendy Vicar Tenet) prohibits me from drawing parallels with current events, but we can all see some businesses that might be in better shape with better cultures.

So once your culture has spread through the company – a topic I’ll return to – why should anyone choose to act or behave in the prescribed way? It’s unlikely you want them to always do things the easiest way. This is where engagement holds the key. Now, ideally, you’ve selected the people that will naturally respond within your culture, but hypothesis three says: you can’t just recruit an engaged workforce. There’s not enough of ‘em, other people like to hang onto ‘em, and besides, you don’t get engagement right in one go. And in fact, “you” don’t get engagement right, it’s in the hands of your employees. You can only create the right environment.

And in the following posts, I’ll expand on the importance of an environment for engagement, and what it might look like.