What happens when a group of open-minded trust, ethics and compliance experts meet for lunch to discuss the intersection of the three disciplines and their respective roles in organizations?
One of the tasks at hand was to create a visual representation of the functional interaction between compliance, ethics and trust in an organization.
Without a thriving workplace culture, organizations may suffer from employee disengagement, stagnant business practices, uninspired products and services, and decreased financial performance. An important component of building a thriving culture – and improving the bottom line – is creating the conditions in which employee wellbeing can also thrive.
If you are reading this post we can assume you think culture is important. But investment in culture lags behind some of the other key contributors to performance: Brand, people, technology, process. So perhaps culture’s impact on performance is not universally believed. Executives have to focus first and foremost on those elements which will deliver the best return to their shareholders. There is a community of investment professionals who spend their lives considering company valuations and whose opinion holds considerable sway on share price.
At Officevibe, we make employee survey software for companies and the most common theme in the questions we get asked about how our product works is about trust. There is such a huge problem with trust inside most organizations.
When companies contact us, their intentions are usually good, they want to create an environment where they can collect feedback from employees to improve the company culture, but they go about it the wrong way. Companies often spend lots of time and energy on creating employee surveys, but there is usually very low participation. From the research I’ve seen, 30% is the average response rate for employee surveys.
There are plenty of articles that define culture, explain what a high performance culture looks like and gives angles on creating culture. The purpose of this article is to provide direction for anyone tasked with creating culture change. It is assumed that you understand what culture is, you have decided to make a change, and you want to know how to successfully implement a culture change.
Whenever we hear “knowledge is power,” we readily nod our heads. In organizations that thrive on a culture of learning, the theorem and its corollary are seemingly undeniable.
Because of what I do, I read countless articles on the topics of wellbeing, happiness, engagement, and other buzzwords, all of which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Most of these articles are highly repetitive, and I cringe when I see yet another on “The 5 Ways to _______” or another about the “Best Place to Work”. Many of these pieces are missing the point, and fail to actually identify the meaningful aspects of a positive workplace, i.e., people relationships.
We’ve had amazing weather in the US this spring. The middle of the country is inundated with too much rain while California suffers the worst drought in recorded history. Europe is experiencing warmer storms than normal while the eastern Mediterranean is dealing with snow.
An organization’s culture is more like the weather than you might think. It’s tangible and real. You can look out the window to gauge the weather. You’ll get a better idea of the weather if you go outside to feel how warm or cold or humid it is.
One of the greatest business challenges is effectively changing a workplace culture. What if it’s an extremely large, global corporation? Some might view it as an unsurmountable challenge. Not Larry Senn. He has arguably been a part of more large-scale culture transformations than any other individual in the world. He’s the founder and chairman of the culture-shaping firm Senn Delaney, a Heidrick & Struggles company.
I had the pleasure of interviewing him as part of his gracious support of CultureUniversity.com, where he provides regular insights on best practices in culture change as one of our esteemed faculty members (see the full video interview – link). The insights he shared, and his regular columns, should help us all more effectively manage culture change.
Distrust is the new normal. There has been a dramatic decline over at least the past 15 years in almost every sector of our society—distrust of the police, government, financial institutions, ethnic groups, and even each other. “Distrust” is the headline every night on the news.
Most organizations are striving to help their employees improve their health and well-being. While intuitively, this makes sense – healthier employees are certainly happier and more productive – it’s also a sound strategy from a business perspective.
Culture is a hot topic. It was the Merriam-Webster “word of the year” for 2014. Leaders and experts across the world are talking about how to develop an agile culture, implement a lean culture, overcome the culture clash in acquisitions, and many other areas of culture change. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of these leaders and experts are actually focusing their efforts on climate and not dealing with the deeper, more powerful subject of culture. I didn’t understand the difference until the past few years.
Many modern organizations are locked into a mindset – an organizational culture – that began with the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain and was fully developed during the Second Industrial Revolution in the US. The great success of these revolutions – creating modern business and generating huge wealth – makes it easy to believe that what worked as a way of managing great corporations in the early 1900s is still the best way to run an organization in the twenty-first century. But times have changed.
As the strategic planning consultant to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame I get some inside looks at the high performance culture of the sports world. A couple years ago I was sitting next to a very sweaty and happy Chris Perry, who minutes earlier had won an NCAA championship title. I asked Chris when he started wrestling and he said in 4th grade. It takes that kind of proactive plan to become a NCAA Champion. His dad was sitting behind us weeping tears of joy and relief having invested heavily in the sustainable approach to success over the past 12-15 years.
Let’s demystify the art and practice of leadership. There are many parallels to the aspects of riding a bicycle and leading the team.
First of all, the purpose or usefulness of the bicycle is to get from point A to point B. Clearly, leadership is focused on forward movement toward a vision of a future desired state.
The bicycle has a framework or structure that allows it to transfer energy to serve a positive purpose. Leadership, truly is about energy management and how to focus the individual and collective energy on meaningful goals of the organization.