corporate culture

I recently read a Recruiterbox article that stated: “Culture can either immunize or infect a company. Good culture can revitalize and motivate. Negative culture increases employee absences and turnover while decreasing their overall productivity while at work. All of which can lead to a loss of income. Employee turnover alone can cost a company anywhere from 30-50 percent of an entry-level employee’s annual salary.”

Do employees believe in the core values? Do they even know their company's core values?

Core values are the fundamental beliefs of an organization; they  guide executives and employees in identifying which behaviors and actions are right and which are wrong.

Everything you do must be aligned with your core values, and core values should be integrated into everything you do. When in doubt, ask: "Is this the right thing to do? Does it fit with our core values?"

I originally wrote today's post for CMSWire. It appeared on their blog on May 8, 2018.

While customer experience strategies and transformations must include a priority focus on the employee experience, they often don’t. Many companies believe they can improve the customer experience without improving the employee experience.

Big mistake. The correlation is real. Happy employees lead to happy customers.

Is your company culture best described as a culture of excuses?

If so, then you need to think about why that's happening. Why are people making excuses? Why do they feel they need to? Why is that OK?

And then consider making "no excuses" one of your core values. Seriously.

Leaders of great organizations have tremendous clarity about the brand identity they aspire to embody and about how to cultivate an organizational culture that enables them to achieve it.

Does your company put profits before people?

I bring this up because I've seen a particular phenomenon many times: executives decide to put their employee experience and customer experience improvement efforts on pause because sales figures are down. Clearly the blame is that the people focus has derailed them from business development and closing deals; there can be no other reason for this (she said with all the sarcasm in the world).

While the importance of workplace culture is well-understood, how to build a great culture is less established.  In the research and work I did leading to my upcoming book, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies (published by Nicholas Brealey, an imprint of Hachette Book Group on March 13, 2018), I identified five common myths  about culture-building — as well as five strategies for cultivating a unique, healthy, sustainable organizational cultu

Culture is best defined as "values plus behavior" and is often described as "how employees act when no one is looking."

Culture is such an important part of your business. It's really the foundation of the organization.

I've previously defined culture as the set of values and norms that guides how the business operates; culture happens when we operationalize the values.

Herb Kelleher's definition of culture is still my favorite: Culture is what people do when no one is looking.

Today I'm pleased to share a guest post by Rae Steinbach.

Good internal communication can make a big difference for any company. A failure of communication can cause projects to fail, increase costs, and can contribute to an atmosphere of discontent among your staff.