The Four Keys to a Successful Workplace Culture That Drives Business Results
Great workplace cultures don’t happen by accident. You can’t fake a great workplace and you can’t buy your culture at Costco. You need to focus intentionally on building your workplace culture.
As someone who has researched great workplaces around the world, I often get asked what areas a company needs to focus on to achieve success within their culture. Based on hundreds of interviews with CEOs, presidents, human resources managers, and senior culture leaders, these are the four areas they talk most often about when it comes to building sustained business success. They aren’t glamorous or sexy, but these are the four things leaders need to focus on to build a successful team or workplace culture. (And the fourth one is often the hardest for leaders to embrace!)
Transcript: Four Keys to a More Inspiring Workplace Culture
Michael Kerr here. Humor at Work. As somebody who travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplace cultures, about businesses that achieve outrageous results, I very often get asked, “What is my Reader’s Digest version of what it is a management team, leadership team, organization needs to do to drive success?”
Here it is. If you distill it down to its bare bone essence, here are the four things I think you need to do to drive success in your organization.
#1. Get your hiring right. Great organizations invest heavily, relentlessly in their hiring. There are no shotgun weddings in these organizations, and for good reason. The CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, suggests that if they bring in the wrong person, if they hire the wrong person who’s not a fit for their culture, for their business, it cost them upwards of a million dollars, so you need to get the hiring right.
I spoke to one HR manager who told me that it was like Fort Knox to get a job with them. She said, “It was a pain in the butt, frankly, to get a job with them, but what’s a bigger pain in the butt,” she said to me, “Trying to get rid of somebody who’s not a good fit.” Invest in your hiring, and what inspiring organizations do is they hire relentlessly for attitude. They hire people that are already motivated. You can train for so much of the rest. It’s really hard to train to readjust somebody’s attitude. You’re probably working with somebody right now who you wish you could give an attitude readjustment to. Hire for attitude and hire to make sure they are a fit for your culture. Great organizations, I’ve notice tend to spend as much time selling and talking about what their culture is as they do assessing the fit of their candidates to make sure it’s a match in both directions. Get your hiring right. That’s step number one. That’s everything. Bring people aboard who are a fit for your culture, who have a great attitude, who are already motivated.
#2. Invest in your employees. Every organization on the planet says, “Oh, we invest in our employees.” Well, do you really? Are you really investing in your employees and putting your money and your resources and your time where your words are because that’s what great organizations do. (Check out Sixteen Reasons to Invest in Employee Training.)
#3. Give your employees clear direction. Rally them around an inspiring common sense of purpose. They’re already motivated. You need to inspire them. You need to give them clear, crystal clear, direction as to what it is they need to do in their jobs, what are the milestones they need to achieve, your organization needs to achieve. Give them clear direction, and then…
#4. Get out of the way. Step number four becomes incredibly easy, but it’s also the one that most organizations, most leaders fall down on. It’s get out of the way. Get the heck out of their way and let your employees do the job that they were hired to do. Let’s see here. If you hired the right people, if you’ve given them the training and tools and the resources they need to do their job properly, if you’ve given them clear direction, then this shouldn’t be an issue. Get out of their way and let your employees achieve those outrageous results for you. The results that you deserve. The results that will help you laugh all the way to the bank.
Michael Kerr is an international business speaker and the author of eight books, including The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank.
