What’s a Direct Route to Distinguishing Your Culture?

September 9, 2024
Richard Finnegan
Articles

Everything written in this Targeting Turnover blog is about improving employee retention, all in the shadow of our continually-decreasing number of workers relative to our projected economic growth.

Connecting Preferences to Culture

Making the connection between culture and people management is every company’s objective, stated or implied. But corporate culture remains a fuzzy term with no agreed-upon definition and zero spot-on metrics. Every company wants a good one, whatever a good one is. And there is general belief that companies that create good cultures make more money.

And what do we want our cultures to be? Harvard Business Review published a study where organizations selected from eight culture descriptions to prioritize their own cultural preferences. The overwhelming choices were:

(1) results and goal achievement named by 89% percent of participating companies, and

(2) a caring, warm, and collaborative culture chosen by 63%.

The remaining culture descriptions such as learning, safety, and authority garnered no more than 15% of organizations’ self-preference votes.^[i] So we have all agreed we want to achieve company goals while playing nice. And I would want to work for that company, too.

If productivity and collaboration are what we want, the question becomes how do we distinguish ourselves from other organizations when hiring, engaging, and retaining the very best talent. How do we really make ourselves different?

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Further Reading: Correlation Between Culture, Turnover, and First-Line Supervisors

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The Culture Hole Is at the Bottom

There is a grand-canyon-sized hole in the way corporations execute their cultures…and that hole is at the bottom. It is customary for organizations to hire McKinsey or other gold-standard consulting firms to guide their executives through the culture identification process, then survey and focus-group employees to develop a plan to fill those culture gaps. That plan is then presented to the corporation’s board of directors with upscale graphics, and all ultimately believe the implementation trail from top to bottom is totally within view.

But that execution, along with each projected profit improvement, reaches fruition only if the employees who sell and deliver your services buy in. And their buy-in is 100%-contingent upon the quality of their direct supervisors. Here’s what Gallup has to say about our supervisors’ impact on our carefully articulated corporate cultures:

Companies choose the wrong managers 82% of the time.^[ii]
And you’ll remember this one, those same managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement.^[iii]

Gallup goes on to share how these data drive the lack of top-to-bottom culture-building success:

“A major challenge for leaders of large organizations is that there is no common culture – – often even in prominent, highly regarded companies. This is true regardless of those organizations’ lofty mission statements that are written to bind all employees toward a common purpose.”^[iv]

Making things darker, Bain tells us that “culture clash” is the number one reason mergers and acquisitions fail.^[v] Harvard Business Review says failure to manage and motivate employees is one reason why 70% to 90% of acquisitions fail.^[vi]

Or said more plainly, your culture goes nowhere if your employees…and especially your top performers…don’t buy-in, fully engage, and stay. These top performers need great supervisors, tens on ten-point scales, recalling as said previously that top performers do their jobs four times better than the rest. But your top performers are scattered across many supervisors, including your best and your worst. How effectively the so-stated corporate culture impacts you as an employee depends on which supervisor you get…which for many is based on whether you figuratively draw a long straw or a short straw on your first day of work.

Culture requires consistency regarding the application of processes and policies, and more importantly the messages that supervisors say and that first-line employees hear. And even if those messages are delivered accurately, the degree to which they are put into action hinge on the single variable of how much that employee trusts his or her supervisor.

Culture Red Zone: What We Say About It is What it Really Is

Our teams need more guidance, and they want more, too. Employees join the workforce at young ages, chronologically and developmentally. Few parents or teachers instruct them on how to identify the right employer, how to manage boss relationships, how to develop a learning plan for themselves, or how to handle the intricacies of pay, work relationships, and the rest. Employees are then left to manage their work lives by instinct first and by trial and error second, which requires lost years of errors to learn the right lessons…if they learn the right lessons at all.

Here then is one more reminder of what employees talk about over dinner: Bosses, colleagues, and duties. And not pet insurance nor any event with food…and they hardly ever discuss their pay or their benefits unless someone is sick. What your employees talk about over dinner is your corporate culture’s red zone. Whatever you say your corporate culture is, this is what it really is.

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Further Reading: Who Talks About Their Boss Over Dinner? Everyone!

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Which is a good time to recall Peter Drucker’s quote that culture eats strategy for breakfast.^[vii]

Today’s times are unprecedented in that we are flat running out of workers, and there remain questions as to what percentage of those workers available to us will be good ones, the ones we want to keep. Company cultures represent our operating styles, that organization in the mirror that we really are. From today forward, trustworthy one-on-one supervisor/employee relationships top to bottom must form the chassis upon which your culture is placed.

Think of the messages of this weekly blog as the culture-building flatcar on the express train to better everything. Whether your goals are about revenue, productivity, sales, safety, or whatever, the direct pathway to achieving them must begin with keeping the people you need to keep. Some will be the four-times-as-productive top players while others will be just truly adequate at their jobs…and it’s likely these can-do employees will become harder and harder to find.

Stay Interviews Are the Direct Route to a Distinguishable Culture

Stay Interviews build the pathway to the caring, warm, collaborative cultures that most companies want…and by doing so increase goal achievement which is the other most-wanted company culture piece.

Direct supervisors are the person employees discuss over dinner each night, good or bad, and this is the person they report to each day. And how they feel about that person, drives how they feel about your company. By asking, listening, probing, and taking notes, supervisors can then collaborate with employees to identify addressable needs or actions. This is how we build trusting relationships that retains them longer.

And their guardrail metrics of achieving retention goals and forecasting how long each employee will stay keep your leaders focused on the most important measurements for their teams.