When we absorb amazing companies such as Apple, Google, Walt Disney, Amazon and Facebook. The first thing that comes to mind is the excellence and success they deliver year after year.
The biggest factor to their success is their amazing culture within their company and it’s just part of the reason why these companies do so much, so well.
As a marketing consultant, I have sat down with my clients to help build their company values and culture. I believe that if you want to succeed as a business, you have to build and maintain a great company culture. Creating a culture can impact all that you do and how it is you do it.
To help build and shape your company culture, here are 6 ideas and tips you can utilize:
1. Set in place a vision & mission statement.
Having a vision & mission statement should be the foundation of your organizations performance. This should be a written manifest as to what your believes are and where you are headed to achieve those believes.
Bring together a team that is cross functional to create these important documents. This will increase the support from the rest of the company who will buy in to it.
2. Communication.
Once your vision and mission is clearly developed, it’s critically essential to have a great communication plan to roll it out to all team members. This can all be done through 1-on-1 arrangements, social meetings, emails or any other online communications.
3. Develop behavioural standards.
Next, you must develop behavioural standards that describe how everything will be executed on in terms of behaviours. If your company mission is to be a world class service provider, then how does that play out in terms of how your team is interacting with a customer in face to face or over the phone? Or in an email?
Many people assume others on the team know how to behave, but a lot times, they actually don’t. The only way to get consistency is through written behavioural standards. The standards must be either measurable,tangible or observable.
For instance you can say: Let’s greet all our customers with hello, welcome and a smile (observable). Or you can say: Our product will looks like this when it is done with our standards (tangible). Or you may also say: By the 3rd phone ring, we should answer your call (measurable).
I advise my clients to create a behavioural standards training within their team to develop the standards. Why? Aside from getting better buy-in, your team members are the ones on the front lines every day and know exactly what is going on first hand. They’re able to share valuable points to the group to help build a better company.
4. Behavioural standards training implementation.
As soon as those standards are written, the whole team should be trained on new expectations. These training sessions should be implemented regularly.
5. Rewards and consequences.
I hope your team follows if you have behavioural standards in place. Unfortunately, based on person experience, Most times, you will have to reinforce the standards by rewarding those who meet and exceed the expectations and to let the team know that there are consequences for not meeting it. When you acknowledge and reward people who accomplish and meet their standards, the news travels fast. Like a domino affect.
6. Conduct performance reviews.
If you conduct performance reviews on an annual basis, you will need to adjust them to include what is in your vision and mission standards. If you fail to include them in the review, then after one review, all the hard work you put in will fade away. Your team will only pay attention to what is evaluated and measured.
The bottom line is that you are the one who creates the culture. It is up to you as the leader of the team to build it; support it; foster it; and live it. When you do all this, you’ll have true quality to succeed, and you will get great results you are thriving for.
