Most organizational leaders know they need to change their culture, because the right culture can help you attract the best talent and boost company revenue, profit and organic growth.
But how do you find out what your workforce really wants from your culture?
Listen to Jim Harter, It's the Manager coauthor and Gallup Chief Workplace Scientist, discuss how to change your culture by repositioning your managers as coaches.
From the Video:
Organizational cultural matters because employees need to know what their company stands for and what their company is about and wants to represent. And when they do, when they have clarity about what their organization is about and what it represents; which many employees nowadays don't, but when they do, they're more productive. They put in the kind of effort that organizations expect of them when they hire them, because they see that what they're contributing is to something bigger than themselves. And so anymore, work isn't just about following orders. We're living in a time that continues to evolve into more fluid workplaces where people are coming and going in many environments, where there's more flextime, where there's more remote working than before, more matrixed kind of environments.
Knowing what your organization is about means you're going to make decisions, which most employees have to nowadays, make decisions that are consistent with what that purpose of the organization is and what the strategy is about in a reliable and accurate way. And so, as we expect people to make more decisions and not just follow orders, they have to know what that sort of true north is. You know, what they're connecting that work back to is. And it has to be a purpose they can get behind and a strategy that they can get behind. And a brand that they can get behind and represent.
Changing a culture, one of the more difficult things that I think any organization can try to do, but very possible to do, really begins and ends with having great managers at all levels. And the reason for that is how information flows in an organization happens through those managers. Where they set the stage for what their teams believe about the organization in general. They set the stage for what's offered to the employees from a development standpoint and they set the stage for what high performance is and what accountability looks for.
It's important to reposition all of your managers as coaches to help them move developmentally from the job of boss to coach. That means changing what you expect of them. It also means providing them the right resources, education, ongoing, so that they can be continuously a more effective coach that leverages their own strengths and the strengths of their employees.
One discussion point about culture for a CHRO, his or her team, think about the programs you currently have in place and this can range anywhere from your hiring processes, how you onboard people, how you attract new employees, how you go about developing your managers and leaders, how you manage performance, what your performance management system looks like. Think about your entire life cycle all the way through to how you exit people. How do those programs you currently have in place work with or against your organization's intended purpose and brand? Is your purpose and brand intentionally represented in each of those stages or not? That's the first sign about whether you have a culture that's going to be lived out in terms of what you intend it to be.
