Workplace Culture

Employee turnover is up. You work so hard to recruit the region’s best talent and competitors are happy to poach your superstars for a little more salary or benefit perks. The cost of replacing people runs between 75% and 150% of the annual salary of the traitor who jumped ship. How do you evolve your organizational culture into a magnet where no one wants to leave?

As a guiding light, most organizations name their core values and weave them into new employee orientation and professional development training sessions. Many workplaces even make them criteria for performance evaluation to ensure that everyone stays true to workplace culture. Usually, they find their way onto a poster or get painted on a wall for all to see. The real question is whether they exist as nouns or verbs.

The last time we delivered workplace culture assessment results to a leadership team, it was not the first time they had received this feedback. It was the first time they had decided to do something about it. We are often in the position of asking, “Does it hurt enough yet?” when weighing a team’s readiness to fix what’s broken. Most teams prefer the pain they know to whatever they’re about to feel if they attempt any change. It’s easier to stay the same.

Think about the team within the team. Move from outer circle to inner circle of the organizational chart. Each layer has its own culture. Board of Directors, executive leadership, senior management, supervisors, front line – culture adapts at each level. Decision authority is exerted from the outside in. Yet repair often occurs from the inside out. The more isolated the team, the greater their ability to define their own vibe. Where do you live within the nest?

Many workplaces struggle with the classic high performer who doesn’t play nice in the sandbox. His regularly committed sins are forgiven because his production exceeds his peers. While the leadership team is counting the money he brings in, he’s busy eroding the spirit of the workplace culture. It often starts with coworkers feeling sick to their stomachs after interactions with him and almost always ends with a recruitment/retention problem once word gets out that the team is broken.

The stereotype of a Tool & Die plant includes underpaid, burned-out workers and undesirable working conditions. Since the pandemic, many businesses in the manufacturing industry have been struggling to find and keep talent. It also doesn’t come as a surprise that supply chain issues and inflated material costs are cutting into operating margins. It’s easy to understand how these factors impact culture, let alone the complex series of interdependent work process that must happen in unison. Consider a typical day in the workplace.

The most common reason our phone rings is a problem with workplace culture. Every organization wants to have a positive, family-like vibe that attracts the best talent and retains them when the poachers come hunting. No brainer, right? Regardless of industry, the sustained achievement of this ideal is rare. There are so many ways things can go south. Even though there is a recipe, human frailty finds a way to mess with the ingredients. Unfortunately, the deeper the roots of the dysfunction, the deeper the fix.

Leaders are faced with both choices and decisions when building, strengthening, or repairing a workplace culture. Despite their interchangeability in casual conversation, choosing and deciding are not the same. Choice is a selection while deciding is an act of elimination. We choose a culture that embraces certain principles. Deciding, on the other hand, resolves conflict between options. The original Latin word for ‘decide’ is decidere, which means ‘to cut off.’ When we decide, we are slicing off less desirable alternatives. We are establishing a code of conduct by letting employees know what behaviors are not tolerated.

Deep below the iceberg of organizational culture lies the source of workplace politics. Hidden unless you look, it lurks without explanation and influences the day-to-day interactions between teammates. While unique to each team, its roots are common to the industry you have selected for your career path. Because our work is an expression of our history, the politics of the workplace are reflections of the reasons we choose that expression of our character. Allowing for mild stereotyping, consider these three questions:

Recognition as an employer-of-choice becomes a magnet for recruitment and retention. The nomination is the easy part. Ultimately, being named a top workplace comes down to the quality of the culture. The recognition opportunity becomes a snapshot of the organization through the lens of employees. While each competition is a little different, they all basically evaluate the same things. How does your workplace measure up?

We now have to challenge the assumption that team culture requires teammates to be in the same space. We have to question whether the Zoom screen barrier prevents true connection. We have to decide whether working from home means we have to wait until ‘things get back to normal’ before, well, things get back to normal. In the classic denial stage of grief, it somehow feels better to believe that conference rooms, auditoriums and shared workspaces will someday fill back up with teammates. When that miracle happens, we can get back to life as we knew it before the loss. Think again.

Even when all the coaching efforts and performance improvement plans have been exhausted, it seems impossible to move disengaged employees along. The HR wheels turn slowly and toxic teammates often find a way to stay an inch short of termination for cause. What would it take for them to leave on their own?