Company culture serves as the background for everything the company does. It incorporates philosophies around how the company treats its people, its customers and vendors and how they are perceived both in the marketplace and as an employer. Culture drives conversations around values, implementation of policies, development and growth of employees and how to both on-board and off-board individuals. In short, the culture will define how people behave within the company.
Often, a company culture has evolved into something that isn’t really aligned with the overall values and strategic direction of a company. Culture can actually work against the achievement of strategic objectives if it is not aligned properly.
One company client with whom I worked was frustrated. The owners’ wanted a flexible workforce, but the employees were timeclock driven, though all were salaried employees. In this company, everyone arrived at exactly 8am, at 12:00 everyone would get up and go to lunch and return to their desks at exactly 1pm. At 5pm, there was a steady stream of people walking out the door. No matter how much work was piling up, the employees were committed to an 8-hour day, and not a minute more.
This company had at one time in their past established expectations around the workday that encouraged this compliance with an exact number of hours. The new owners wanted a workforce that would focus on job completion within customer deadlines. They were willing to offer flex time, comp time and other arrangements that would allow their individuals to focus on getting the work done, and not minding the clock. If they stayed late one night, they could come in later the next day. Changing this culture took a significant amount of effort and conversation. Communicating to employees the fact that company values focused on serving the customer and meeting deadlines meant that some days, work would go late. However, when client projects were completed on time, employees could come later or leave earlier to compensate for the times they stayed late.
It was fairly difficult to change the mentality of the employees, as the timeclock culture was so prevalent and had been for decades. It took some incentives, a lot of encouragement and level of trust-building in order for the changes to gradually be made. Owners were up front with employees on the impact that on-time delivery had on their ability to be paid on time, which had a positive impact on company cash-flow, resulting in improvements for the employees. Part of the solution had been an increased level of transparency on the part of the owners: sharing their vision and goals with employees and drawing a straight line from employee contributions to company success to employee rewards.
Luckily, this company was able to shift their culture successfully. In fact, currently, approximately 80% of the employees are remote workers, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The key to this culture shift was the willingness of the owners to increase transparency, share expectations, and wildly increase communication. It worked!
