This post is a sneak preview of the newly-released fifth chapter of my free eBook, “How to Cultivate Success in Real-Time.” Click here to download the full thing.
Realizing the Difference
Companies that have allowed organizational culture to evolve without guidance often suffer from many of the same problems and issues. They start out as fun places to work where everyone is goal-driven and focused on the same objective, but degrade to become places of despondence and conflict. Often, each department, division or team has a different culture. Power struggles are a constant factor and internal politics drive many decisions.
The more conflicted your organizational culture is now, the more effort it will take to turn it around. A quick comparison of common characteristics found in companies with poor cultures versus those with high-performance cultures will have you itching to get started soon.
When Culture Drags You Down
Some of the challenges that companies with damaged cultures may face include:
Unpleasant Work Environments – This can present itself in a number of ways, including personnel conflicts, power struggles, interdepartmental disagreements, increasingly negative attitudes, a continuous increase in the volume of customer complaints, and having employees who are despondent or “sluggish.”
Output Chaos – With output chaos, production suffers and customers can’t be managed. Symptoms often include erratic scheduling, inconsistent order timing, a dearth of projects or customers on the horizon, an unexplained decrease in the overall number of clients, cash flow problems, rampant indecision, and inconsistent and/or deteriorating output quality.
These are just a few examples of the problems that companies with negative cultures face on a daily basis. These companies wrestle with a constant disconnect between what the leadership wants and what actually happens. No matter how hard managers push, nothing changes in the long run. Although companies with poor cultures may have periods of great financial success and growth, success cannot be sustained.
Winning with Exceptional Culture
There’s no such thing as an organizational utopia, but businesses that have committed the time and resources to cultivate an exceptional culture reap the rewards of their efforts. Many companies have turned themselves around, avoided bankruptcy, and found prosperity instead. Some companies have become the stars of their industries. While not an iron-clad guarantee of permanent success, building a high-performance culture has proven to be one of the most sustainable and profitable long-term business strategies for countless organizations.
Some of the hallmarks of a company operating with an exceptional culture are:
Excellent Retention – Employees tend to stick with a company that recognizes their talents. Celebrating champions and encouraging employees to excel in every avenue of life (both personal and professional) can be clearly measured internally and externally. Companies with an exceptional culture typically have extremely low turnover, and competition among outsiders for new jobs is intense.
Solid Growth – Although even companies with poor cultures can experience growth, they usually can’t sustain it. Exceptional cultures breed success, and the best indicator of this is above-average year-over-year growth, even in volatile markets.
It’s hard to assign a direct return-on-investment for how exceptional cultures help organizations as a whole. Suffice to say, when you look at healthy well-rounded businesses, culture is the difference-maker.
2012 was a busy year for HR technology. From acquisitions and controversies to IPOs and innovations, businesses the world over saw human resources software in the spotlight.
With a busy 2013 already underway, it can be easy to forget how significant 2012 truly was. If you’re going to remember just ten key events, let these be them:January
All photos by Masakazu Matsumoto.
After an unremarkable few years in the wake of 2008’s economic collapse, SAP finally hit the big one late in 2011, announcing the acquisition of SuccessFactors for $3.4B (the deal would go on to close in February 2012), and relaying that
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Many books have been written about creating a culture of success. But there is very little information circulating about how to merge traditional management theory with the very untraditional (and even virtual) environments we find ourselves working in today.
My free eBook How to Cultivate Success in Real-Time offers a path of convergence between experience-based best practices and the “learn as you go” demands of real-time execution that managers and leaders now face. Here is a special preview of part 4, called 5 Steps to Creating a Real-Time Culture of Success:Step 1: Build on Shared Values
A lackluster corporate culture often develops
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A preview of Chapter 3 of "How to Cultivate Success in Real Time":
Carl Gustav Jung said “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
Practitioners wielding a variety of recognized HR management tools and techniques often say that they will contribute to the development of a positive culture. Typically, they are passionate about creating a supportive environment for employees, and operate with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, intent and reality often do not align.
This is not to say that HR best practices, which have evolved as a result of extensive performance management research and hands-on
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As you grow your business, expanding staff resources becomes more and more important, to the point where the need to hire employees may outshine all of your other human resources needs. When hiring in large quantities becomes your top priority, company leadership should devise an HR plan which includes a standardized new employee checklist, in order to streamline the onboarding process.
Once you’ve begun hiring and have selected the top candidates, all new staff should be prepared to start their positions in a similar manner. When your hiring and onboarding process is consistent, employees can leverage one another’s
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The business environment is more competitive than ever, and any organization that ignores complacency in the workplace is beckoning its own death. For that reason, every company should take HR time tracking seriously.
In most cases, when employees waste time it’s the company that ends up paying for it. That’s why leading managers consider an investment in employee time tracking and management software vital.
Basic employee time tracking software captures and stores the time employees spend on any given. This feature is especially important for workers who are paid hourly. Different programs have other additional features, such as
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The economy is still struggling. Many organizations are trying to decide if they need to cut the number of employees on the payroll, or if they should wait the situation out.
Yet even in times of uncertainty, valuable, productive employees may be thinking about changing employers. Businesses that want to keep top talent must constantly work to retain their top talent. Forward-thinking employers keep their staff engaged, so that they can meet current and future needs, stay competitive, and respond quickly to changing market demands.
Organizations that invest in their employees are able to maintain higher levels of employee engagement,
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There are plenty of things that influence corporate culture, but none is more important than keeping your employees. Culture lives in your team: if your team is constantly changing, your culture will too.
Too busy or too cheap to go out for lunch? Pull together some
ingredients and have a taco buffet in the office!
Many businesses would like to work on their employee relations, but often management and HR feel like they’re so busy that there simply isn’t time. But building good employer-employee relationships doesn’t have to be difficult or time
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Did you know that many managers spend nearly half their time at work mediating employee conflict?
Imagine the things you could do if you weren’t constantly playing referee to a couple of warring co-workers. Economic difficulties have only increased workplace turbulance, with employee conflict increasing by as much as 40% since 2008.
Even if some people are stressed about their job security, your workplace should never be a war zone. It’s supposed to be a friendly place where people collaborate to create the best product they can, whether it’s service-related or material goods.
Employees who constantly clash are major
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The 2012 Summer Olympic Games are exactly 5 months away. How will your business prepare?
The Olympic Games are one of the world’s largest stages of sportsmanship and the spirit of humanity. But they’re not just a premiere athletics event; they’re also a prime business opportunity. The International Olympic Committee reports that during the last quadrennial (2005-2008), Olympic marketing groups generated over 5 billion dollars in revenue.
The downside to Olympic marketing initiatives is that nearly everything associated with them are licensed or trademarked. In fact, the London Olympic Games Organizing Committee (LOCOG), like most host
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The more conflicted your organizational culture is now, the more effort it will take to turn it around. A quick comparison of common characteristics found in companies with poor cultures versus those with high-performance cultures will have you itching to get started soon.