Create the Culture You Want – It Starts With You!
7 November 2016

Create the Culture You Want – It Starts With You!

Scott Pearson
Contributing Writer
Nexstar

Company culture begins with an organization’s leadership, and specifically, with the owner. Culture impacts the way everything is done in your company, so it’s important to create the culture you want. Culture is defined as the way people do things, or the way groups do things. Culture and customs go hand in hand.

To have the culture you want, you must exemplify the culture you want. The owner sets the tone, the pace, and the example. If you want to have fun, you must be fun. If you want to have accountability, you must be accountable. If you want an open communicative environment, you must be open in your communications.

Then, to nurture the culture you want, consider participating in some sort of employee engagement survey. The anonymous employee engagement survey is the best way to know how your team truly feels and is a powerful tool in shaping company culture. Among the top residential contractors in the industry, we find that communication often receives one of the lowest satisfaction ratings by their employees in that survey.

Using your survey results, compare employee satisfaction in the office versus in the field. Is satisfaction higher in the office? Why could that be? Or is satisfaction higher in the field? Why could that be? Dissect satisfaction by category and pay attention to the communication category.

What we know in today’s world is multi-class systems are bad. Office versus field. Management versus employees. Everyone has an important role, and we’re all part of the end result. We all have a common desired outcome: satisfied customers. This process begins with the incoming call, and follows all the way through to the completed service. All of your staff matters in this process.

Find opportunities to get everyone together as much as possible. Utilize both formal and informal communications. Care about what is going on in their lives–business or personal. The quickest way to lose employees is not to care, so never lose sight of the importance of communication. You can never communicate too much.