Employee engagement is a business’ Holy Grail: Every company wants their employees to be involved and to feel happy and fulfilled. 

The other side of the coin is that employee engagement can sometimes uncover some tarnished gems—the dissatisfied, toxic parts of your culture that can influence your otherwise happy and engaged employees.

With the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, organizations are being even more mindful of having loyal, hardworking team members on staff. Teams may be smaller now, so developing an engaged, positive culture is crucial to the success of your business. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you step up your employee engagement and transform your organization from the inside out: 

How do I assess my company culture?

Defining, assessing, and assuring the company culture is ultimately the responsibility of the owner and his/her executive team. They need to ensure that they have the “right people in the right seats” who understand, believe in, and live out the vision of that culture every day. 

Some leaders use the “management by walking around” approach to gauge the culture of the organization. Nothing beats this personal touch, but it’s often harder to accomplish within bigger organizations. In those cases, cross-functional teams can create surveys, interviews, and reviews as a way to learn how engaged their employees are in regards to the vision and culture. Exit interviews with voluntary termination is a great way to understand the perspective from someone who just left the organization as well.  Quantitative measures, including turnover, absenteeism, and productivity, can also be indicators. Reviews on social media, such as Glassdoor for instance, should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do help add to the bigger picture.

Conducting external research with customers, vendors, and other groups who interact with your organization is another effective way to assess your company culture.

How do I identify what aspects to keep, adapt, or eliminate?

An organization should be built around a shared purpose with a common set of values. Use employee surveys to contrast the values defined by leadership with the reality of the company. Ask your employees what is important to them, and then create a prioritization of what keeps them engaged. For example, do your employees actually enjoy hard work? Do they have an emotional connection to the organization’s values? These responses should help you increase employee engagement. 

Your research will give you clarity on who/what you need to keep, adapt, or eliminate. You might need to remove the people who don’t fit your organization’s values—or they might remove themselves.

You can also use strength-based development to minimize weaknesses and reinforce the strengths of the organization and its individuals.  For example, trying to bring better emotional intelligence into an organization that is performance-based may not be a wise move since they have already built their brand on excellence. Emotional intelligence is great, but it’s more important to be secure in your integrity and values and how you represent yourself in your organization. While that is morally and ethically positive, the focus should be on reinforcing those strengths rather than adjusting for weaknesses.

How do I determine how my employees fit within the culture and/or their current role?

The employee lifecycle has five stages: 

1. Recruitment

2. Onboarding

3. Retention

4. Development

5. Exit

You can determine pretty quickly from a resume if someone has the required skills to do a job. The bigger question is whether or not they will fit your culture. 

Many employers are now using psychometric assessments to benchmark a position and create parameters. It’s highly unlikely that the perfect candidate with the right skills and the right values will magically appear. It’s more realistic to hire based on the individual’s character and value alignment, and then offer a comprehensive training program that sets them up for success. You can’t always train skilled people to be motivated, but you can successfully train motivated people for a particular skill. 

How do I coach or fire my employees according to that assessment?

Employment is a two way street. Employees who have the right values and/or skills also need to have the desire to want to work for you. Situational leadership determines the extent of coaching for your employees based on their commitment and capability. You will need to adjust your leadership according to what they need. 

If an employee is highly committed to your organization but has low competence, you should focus your efforts on training that employee for capability.

On the other hand, if an employee has a low commitment but moderate competence, personal mentoring might bridge the gap and help him/her become a success.

Keep in mind that you can’t force mentoring or skill development on someone. They have to want it, and it must be a good fit for them, too. Each employee learns differently and has a life outside of work, so employers need to care about the whole person and not only what is best for their own environment and culture. 

Having a leadership team who is aligned with your culture is key. The old adage, “People leave managers, not companies” is true. Managers either support the culture or weaken it. Make sure you have the right managers in the right seats who will take care of your people, especially in the early stages. 

How do I make my transformation last?

Successful organizations have a strong culture, well-defined values, and a clearly stated purpose. Making accommodations and exceptions to that can be the “kiss of death” because it nullifies what you have attempted to create. 

Organizations often lose star players because they choose to keep a toxic individual or ignore a failing aspect of their culture. Making the environment meaningful, inspirational, and timeless keeps companies surviving through economic downturns. That’s really what people care about in the long run, and that’s what makes a difference. 

As we manage through a pandemic and an environment of racial injustice, businesses can’t be neutral. They are expected to be part of the community and be socially responsible. Organizations are huge players in everything we do, both at work and at home, and their responsibility extends beyond four walls. Future evaluations of your business relate to what you do and don’t do outside of profit margins and revenue goals. 

Is your organization going through a culture shift? Contact us to see how we can help.