Company culture is the foundation of your business.
Your business, large or small, must be built around solid decisions. The choices made when establishing a company will have long-term effects in many areas. The repercussions of poor initial choices will affect all levels of an organization.
Depending on the organization’s size, these effects can go unrecognized for quite a while. When a business grows, a parallel investment in employee-centric activity is required to maintain forward momentum.
A company that fails to review its corporate culture regularly as part of its overall development will develop into a stressful, tension-filled workplace. This will lead to employee burnout and fatigue. Ultimately, your best, however, now overworked and stressed out, employees will leave and put management in a bad spot.
As each business has its ecosystem, the foundation they start with will be unique. If thorough planning and due diligence are done initially, there is a good chance of success and sustained growth. Failure will eventually result if the initial setup is not well thought through. A Well-Grounded Plan is Essential to Success.
After learning to identify areas of weakness, positive goals and a plan to develop and implement them must be established. This plan must include all levels of an organization, or the resulting culture will suffer.
Business models and corporate planning must be ongoing processes. If these processes stagnate, so will the best employees' desire to go beyond the minimal effort necessary.
Every business, large or small, is a living organization. If they want to remain competitive and move forward, their activity and plans must target constant improvement and future growth. This detail is easily overlooked when daily activity ramps up and today’s economy takes over the corporate world’s responsibilities.
The business that relies on the established routine, since it “just works, no need to change it,” will find themselves watching other organizations moving forward as they stagnate.
Regular reviews of corporate goals and the working environment are critical. This becomes, too often, a back-burner issue in the business environment today. The hottest fire will get the most resources thrown at it. Meeting a project deadline is a management priority over employee concerns, as a rule.
Reviewing corporate environmental and organizational standards must be done in an organized and well-planned manner. Identifying and examining areas of required organizational change must start at the root level.
This often brings up unpopular issues that many people will not like discussing. The effort will be wasted if the corporate mindset mutes these potentially divisive concerns.
Central to any future-facing plans must be supporting the core asset of the organization, the employees. The skills and experience that your employees bring make or break your business. How the future will go depends on how you treat people today.
The inclusion of employees at all levels of an organization is frequently overlooked. Non-management personnel are typically excluded from policy-making decisions. These individuals are commonly considered less of a resource than the recent grad who attended that prestigious school. Their extensive work history often goes unacknowledged, that is, until they retire or move on. Now that shiny new college grad has no mentor to learn from.
Managing company culture must begin with knowing what resources are available and working with them in a way that includes long-term goals and future corporate growth. Many companies have implemented an aggressive short-term growth plan, only to see it fail down the road.
The culture that a company is built around must be a living entity. Burning out or devaluing your best resources quickly will lead to inevitable failure despite your best intentions. The alienation of seasoned employees will not be an overnight event. Usually, management, while trying to put out the latest fire, will ignore the people who are the best fix for the problem at hand.
Remember- employees respected for their time and skills will exceed the minimum effort. Employers that do not see this point will soon see their best people working elsewhere. Quality employees stick together. Losing one today often means losing more in the future……….
