Why Company Culture Can Make Or Break Your Strategic Plan
It’s everything.
Company culture is often one of those things that comes to mind a few times a year, as organizations check in on annual goals or strategic plans.
Are we doing enough to engage employees? Do employees understand our goals? What can we do to retain top talent?
It’s a goal post, a check point.
It’s less often viewed as an experience, an ongoing state of the company that has highs and lows and varies from person to person. And it’s wicked hard to describe your company culture, because it can feel ethereal.
A focus on company culture ebbs and flows as priorities shift, as employees come and go, as leadership changes, as outside factors come pushing in. It’s there underneath everything at work, but for this very reason it’s easy to push to the background.
Let’s face it — short and mid-term goals take a lot of focus and energy. Taking the time to think about company culture, let alone identify actionable ways to help shape it, is not time you often find.
However, in the meantime, when you are distracted by other things, your company culture is still there reacting to hundreds of influences, good and bad.
Being a good steward of company culture is not about engineering team building exercises for the sake of checking a box. (More on that later, though, when you are checking that box.)
Fully supporting company culture as an organizational priority means you are always thinking about the many ways the work you and your teams do, the actual way they go about getting the work done, and all of the little things in between influences how people feel about your organization.
If your company culture needs some TLC, your employees and the work are going to suffer, because there are so many ways big and small that culture shapes our experiences at work.
The point is to realize that your culture, like your brand identity, is formed by the way all of the many people at your company experience it.
So, company culture is the similar yet disparate experiences across your employee base at all levels and across all functions.
Your company culture is not an average, it’s not a composite, it’s not a top 2 box score on an engagement survey.
Your company culture is a mosaic of lots of different experiences.
Which means aligning your strategy and your culture is a super smart move. If you need to make a big shift in strategy, wouldn’t it be great if the initiative was compatible with a force that drives every person in your company?
Wouldn’t it be great if you took into account the fact that this force is not a composite, but instead a complicated thing that looks different to different people?
Imagine all of your employees feeling connected to your strategic plan, feeling like their work can influence it and move it forward in their own way.
So, all of the soft skills work on employee engagement throughout the year? Worth it!
But…when you do organize team building or employee engagement events for your staff, keep in mind the diverse personalities, backgrounds and even work hours of your staff. An obstacle course followed by dinner and karaoke may sound like a fun team building event to you if you’re an extrovert, but it probably sounds awful to an introvert.
Lesson: Get a wider range of feedback and unfiltered ideas around staff appreciation and team building events. And talk to more people across the organization about how they experience your company culture.
