John Morgan is President of Career Transition & Mobility and Leadership Development at LHH, an integrated talent solutions provider.
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Strong company culture has always been critical to the success of a business. It increases employee satisfaction and plays a major role in propelling performance, recruiting and retention efforts. However, culture is often overlooked for flashier business priorities—until, that is, it starts to deteriorate on a large scale with dire consequences. Percolating discontent can rapidly become corrosive. Turnovers can become contagious. Errors in company leadership decision-making or poorly managed layoffs can spiral into viral social media posts.
The past four years have especially demonstrated the delicate, yet crucial, nature of organizational culture in the volatile, ever-changing world of work. From the impact of the pandemic and remote work to technological advances and economic shocks, employees are relying on positive workplace cultures to navigate uncertain times. Companies are thus tasked with the difficult challenge of cultivating stable and secure environments amid the same unpredictability.
As organizations continue to navigate an increasingly complex business landscape, there's never been a more crucial time to address the issue of culture in a way that's flexible and sustainable to changing tides. Ideally, most organizations would choose to examine their cultures when things are going well. In reality, many of the most effective cultural transformations happen in response to something that offers an opportunity to reevaluate and steer the organization in a better direction.
While there's no one-size-fits-all solution to fostering stronger cultures, there are several steps that business leaders across the board can take to ensure they’re meaningfully setting up their organizational strategy for success.
1. Institute company-wide pulse checks and feedback mechanisms.
Before embarking on any type of exercise to strengthen or reimagine your company culture, it’s crucial to step back and assess its existing form. There’s no better way to do so than by hearing directly from your people. Conducting regular surveys, interviews and feedback sessions are all effective ways to gain insight into your current workplace and engage your employees.
These exercises can help gauge strengths and weaknesses, identify important values to your employees and decide what aspects of your culture to lean into or improve upon. What’s more, putting people at the heart of your culture is a great way to create an environment that encourages risk-taking, idea generation and heightened levels of respect across the workplace. This, in turn, is found to increase employee productivity, morale and loyalty—other key aspects of a resilient company culture.
To get an accurate cross-section of the organization, these conversations need to take place across departments and at varying levels. The different experiences of the C-suite, managers, junior employees and entry-level staff all play a role in informing organizational goals and values.
2. Model culture from the top down, even amid uncertainty.
While culture building should be grounded in employee feedback, if you want a new or changed culture to truly permeate an organization, leadership—starting at the CEO—must model these goals and values. This is especially important as leaders struggle to adjust to workforce changes. Recent LHH executive research found that 65% of American C-suite executives report feeling burned out and 60% want a broader range of career support options.
In transitional moments, employees look to senior management as pillars of support, so anchoring behavior in organizational values is a good way to keep the workplace stable while navigating leadership challenges. In fact, the Adecco Group’s Global Workforce of the Future research found that the majority of workers hold their managers and leaders responsible for ensuring the workplace is diverse and inclusive.
For leaders to remain entrenched in and accountable to their workplace culture, they must be a crucial part of its development and implementation process. These discussions shouldn’t be relegated to CHROs or other HR team members. The approach needs buy-in from department heads across functions to enable more meaningful transformation. Additionally, you should offer leadership training on how to exhibit behaviors aligned with your organization's culture, as well as how to manage in a way that reflects these principles.
3. Take an agile, goal-oriented approach to culture building.
Culture is incredibly dynamic. As employees, leaders and business priorities transition and change, so do the inner workings of an organization. With this in mind, the most successful culture strategies are not static. They're agile, flexible and, most importantly, play the long game because the journey from cultural diagnosis and design to complete transformation is a multi-year effort. By embracing a test-and-learn mindset to bounce back from mistakes easily, organizations can remain iterative with their cultures.
The most successful culture strategies also set measurable goals to regularly track against. Doing so allows leaders to consistently consider how their organization's culture is progressing and identify any roadblocks that need to be addressed. It can also help strengthen senior management's accountability to continue to make culture a priority not just for themselves, but for the entire organization.
Global workplaces look very different than they did four years ago, but culture has remained integral to their health. By prioritizing employee feedback, modeling values from the top down and staying agile and iterative, organizations of all sizes can set up their unique approach for successful culture building in the changing world of today and the unknown of tomorrow. Don’t wait for moments of crisis or major organizational change. It is always the right time to prioritize crafting a unique and resilient culture.
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