What Determines the Fate of Your Business: Employer vs. Employee Culture

Many a time, we have established that a healthy organizational culture is the backbone of a successful organization. People, after all, are an organization’s most important asset. What this means is that there is a prioritized need for organizations to have a transparent, healthy, and diversity driven culture. Such a culture ensures that all the employees working together to take the organization forward feel welcome and respected, can express their true selves, find the environment and opportunity to be at their creative and productive best, and collectively work, helping their organization make strides toward its goals. 

While this is a known and often acknowledged fact, the pressures of the market we operate in, the fierce competition that is faced every day, the need to maximize ROI and grow top and bottom lines constantly push management to react, than act, with a tunnel vision to chase the dollars. After all, isn’t that how we measure our business success? Nothing wrong with that pursuit, except that there is more than one way of getting there.  As a result of this relentless pursuit, management often loses track of the fact that; it’s the entire workforce that has to pull in one direction in order to keep up the momentum to find success and not just those in the boardroom. The boardroom management, as a result of this tunnel vision, starts believing that they have control to direct the employees to constantly act in pursuit of these metrics. The result; over the mid to long term, stressed employees, from top to bottom chase the magic number. Individual principles, ideals of work-life balance, individual aspirations, values and contribution, and employee-specific ideas of individual growth take a backseat. In pursuit of a single goal, with no adequate respect for employees as individuals, the clash of individual and organizational culture starts to occur. Eventually, the organizational culture turns toxic for its own good. Some employees start compromising their personal values to pursue the goals handed to them by their leaders and in order to achieve them, start pushing on their employees to work more hours, produce more, and constantly push in pursuit of the top and bottom lines. There are organizations that, instead of being the experts advising their clients, allow their clients to drive them. They believe that by doing this, they will not lose their clients to the competition. This kind of attitude permeates a fear of loss, which drives organizations to deploy unhealthy work measures to keep clients. Some employees see a conflict in their personal and organizational values and either limit their own potential to keep their jobs, to lay low or even, look for other jobs while waiting their time out. All of this has a very detrimental effect on the organization and its clients. While, this culture of fear, overwork, and anxiety may allow to push hard and meet numbers once or twice; it adversely affects the organization, its employees and clients, in the long term. This eventually surfaces as lost business, burnt-out employees, low morale, poorly managed potential, and high attrition that ultimately results in low standards of future recruitment and a business that dwindles with time.

No organization needs to fear competition or slow down its pursuit of top and bottom lines while nurturing a healthy work culture. Organizations can achieve all that and more by respecting and honoring their most valuable asset, their employees, and creating a culture that allows them to grow and perform at their peak. It’s important that every manager take the time to learn about his or her individual employees. 

What are their hot buttons? What are their individual interests?

What makes them express themselves and act to the best of their abilities?

What are their strengths and what opportunities do they seek to learn and grow?

What do they expect from their work and the organization they work for? 

Are they in the right jobs? How does their individual caliber and how do their individual goals align with organizational goals so the best can be drawn from them in win-win roles?

How do they want to express themselves and how does that interplay with organizational goals?

These are some of the important questions that every manager needs to seek answers for. For with this knowledge, they can partner with their employees to provide them with the tools and opportunities to be successful at what they do, to grow and take that next step to embrace higher responsibilities and flourish as individuals, as teams and employees of the organization they are proud to represent. For, when employees thrive, so does the organization. 

Management needs to have the acumen to work with clients as true partners and not as just vendors or service providers, as consultants and advisors and not just order takers. When something that the client seeks is unrealistic, it’s important to be candid and let them know so while offering support to partner and work on alternatives; not just simply take the work on, knowing, it’s going to be a burden and hard on everyone in the team or organization. There are times and scopes of work when such things can be perhaps, managed however if it becomes a habit, it sets a wrong precedent. Competition being out there to take on business that you would like to keep is a constant, but why fear, if you have an all aligned work culture and a team that can pull through any challenge. And this is possible with the right work culture. Knowing this, if the management team can hold clients accountable to pragmatism while allowing for innovation to keep changing that picture of pragmatism, no client will ever leave an organization for a short term gain, for they know that they will lose out on quality, creativity, and an engaged workforce, if they decide to go somewhere else. 

You see, strategy and execution are joint at the hip. Just as all strategy and no execution don’t take an organization forward; execution with no strategy also does not ensure results.  The equation is simple, folks. Happy, satisfied, and fulfilled employees mean great path-breaking work. Such work means satisfied, long-term clients, and further evolution of new products and services meaning more clients. All this translates to a growing top and bottom line, a healthy business.

Now, I know you may think that this is another idealistic pitch and we all know how difficult it is to get to and sustain the ideal state, not just difficult but perhaps improbable for the long term. I don’t disagree but one thing’s for sure when you are in pursuit of ideal state, you are always somewhere around it on the map. And isn’t that something to strive for, knowing you have benefits to look forward to, that otherwise, you wouldn’t have access to? One way to get close to, and ensure the thread of ideal state lasts is that managers at every level work to build a culture of empathy and trust within their immediate team. Always seek and nurture people that imbibe the principles we discussed and continue to build that trust with them so that you are interdependent on each other. You all can then, ensure that the work at hand progresses under the cultural and work ethics umbrella that you stand for. When this is established, there is always a thread of that common culture from top to bottom within the organization and no matter the challenges thrown, the organization will thrive in executing its vision and mission, period.

Every person in an organization has a role, from leading and overseeing the organization to innovating and creating to selling more of what is produced to executing flawlessly. Every role, big or small is equally crucial in turning the wheel of the organization. What better way to excel at the organizational mission than having all employees be crystal clear in the understanding of their own strengths, challenges, opportunities and ambitions, their understanding of each other, and ensure they all pull in the same direction for a thumping organization performance, each time, every time.

NOTE – For insightful and actionable content, check out Plan B Success podcast on your fav podcasting platform or subscribe @ www.planb.live

Frontline Employees — The Crucial Link to Customer Loyalty and Retention!

An organization & its performance is dependent on the day-to-day functioning of its frontline employees who generally make up the bulk of its workforce. The frontline staff is the first line of customer interaction & is responsible for creating that crucial first impression of the organization, its products, and services. Yet, they are the ones that are affected by several challenges. Let’s understand frontline performance management & what it means to the top-line, bottom-line, and organizational ethos!

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Testing Leadership Mettle…

I am sure you have heard, more than once, that every individual is unique. The hot buttons of each one of us are different. However, we all aspire for and come together as teams and organizations, in pursuit of the achievement of objectives much larger than our individual selves. Some tend to do it better than the others. While we work together toward common objectives, there are multiple threads and hot buttons that need to be managed at the team and individual levels. This ultimately constitutes leadership and its varying degrees of efficiency that determines the health of the organization.

The premise of leadership is founded on the universal notion that a leader can motivate individuals and energize them to go from their current state to a desired state of optimal productivity. However, to do that, a capable leader needs to understand individual motivational needs and be able to work on them. Without intervening at the individual level, optimal productivity and more importantly, a willing pursuit of common objectives of the team or organization at the highest levels, is not possible. It should be a prerogative of every manager to understand their individual team member motivational needs and to be able to act on them, to bring common objectives achievement into focus.

While we all have finite time and energy to do a multitude of tasks, an important aspect of management is the ability to interact with teams and its individual constituents. Many a time individuals themselves do not have a clear understanding of their own motivational needs. This is where the need for a mentor becomes clear, in order to help the individual grow. Mind you, I say a mentor who can help individuals identify their own needs and help them focus on fulfilling those. External motivation has limitations and the focus should be on awakening internal factors of motivation for the individual and igniting the spark within to have them act on their own needs.

The best form of motivation however, is inspiration. If the leaders embrace the principles they spout and act in ways to show that they embrace what they preach, it goes a long way in inspiring others, that look up to them and respect them, to follow and reflect better selves.  Do note that a leader cannot actively try and inspire someone; it is for the others to get inspired. Hence, leaders can do themselves a favor by not always focusing on external motivation for their teams, but embracing ideals they would like to propagate within the cultural fabric of the organization. These will find ways of spreading through the organization as inspiration. And inspiration allows willing changes that individuals make in how they act and behave, purely because they believe and also out of respect and the need to see themselves in the same frame as those they look up to.

A leader’s effectiveness is determined by the inspiration they can invoke within their team. A key aspect that leaders need to take note of is that not all individuals are made equal. Some are motivated to do the minimum for a paycheck and others, to do just enough to hold on to the job. Inspiration may not awaken in them due to multiple personal complexities and it becomes important to recognize and understand, that a team is made of individuals with varying levels of motivation and it’s the leader’s job to ensure that this mix doesn’t affect the team objectives in a detrimental way at any time. The key is to work on individuals feeling engaged in their roles, for that is when they have the freedom to be creative and express themselves through their work in the best possible ways.

While setting an example and inspiring the individuals is the highest tenet that a leader should hold themselves to, communication is a two way street, where they should be willing to listen to the feedback and act on it, for the benefit of everyone involved. Transparency and empowering individuals to unleash their creative freedom in their roles goes a long way in bolstering their attitudes and getting the best out of them. Caring for each other, is finally the one aspect that cements a great relationship between everyone where no matter the challenge, they will all rise up together to take it on.

Who do you work for?

When asked the question, some of the common answers are – myself, my family & my company. There are those that refuse to acknowledge they are working for anyone, be it a person or an organization and use the word “with”, I work “with” xyz. Semantics, I guess. And then, there are those that state they work for their boss.

We all work to provide for our dependents and ourselves. The question is not what do you work for, but who.

If you are an entrepreneur and pride yourself in working for yourself, there is some truth to that, but ultimately, the superior power that determines your actions lies with your customers, suppliers & investors. They can dictate the terms of your work. If you work for an organization, ideally your work and its attributes should be focused at fulfilling your organization’s obligations toward its customers and shareholders. Each of us that works in the corporate world falls somewhere on an organizational ladder with a “boss” that we report into. The boss has the power to determine your paycheck, your upward mobility within the organization and responsibilities you’ll handle. Some bosses are company focused which means your expectations fall in line as well. In such situations, there is more transparency built-in between levels i.e. employee reach extends beyond the immediate boss and through a couple of levels above. This is healthy as hierarchical stress is not as much and opportunities open up for those truly talented and doing the right thing. Others are self-serving and that’s when conflict may arise. That’s when one may end up working for a boss. Corporate politics can dictate where ones’ loyalties lie. Much depends on the employee-boss relationship & the personalities involved therein. Many employees are in the process of pleasing their bosses than in the actual performance of their job to meet the objectives they signed up for. And, these employees cannot be blamed altogether for it since they are acting in defense of their position and in many a case, they themselves are the only defense they may have.

There have been arguments that state flat organizational structures may be the answer to curb such influences, where employees work in teams and natural leaders emerge as a part of the execution strategy. The emphasis is on actually getting things done to meet common objectives sans a hierarchy within the organization. Well, it may work to an extent in smaller organizations but flat structures are not scalable for growth. As organizations grow, flexibility & controls need to be established using the hierarchy model. And, in every mid to large organization, there are numerous rungs on the corporate ladders. Then, what is the optimal strategy for ensuring that the focus of every employee is truly on corporate goals and not hijacked by personal corporate politics? A strong HR policy propagated by a strong HR team with the support of top management can achieve this to an extent but in a complex business environment, it is difficult to altogether do away with it. Again, having an HR team that functions independently is a difficult thing to achieve in an organization. The HR team too falls on the corporate ladder. There will always be employees serving bosses for various reasons. Although, not completely healthy, this is a true fact in the corporate world and should be managed to optimize it.

When faced with such a predicament, employees who find it detrimental to their principles & career might look for other opportunities so as not to sacrifice their potential & aspirations catering to the whims of an overbearing, self-serving boss. There are also employees who do the boss’s bidding and focus on keeping the boss happy in order to safeguard their jobs. In both cases, it’s detrimental to the corporation, whether through the loss of productive employees for the wrong reasons or by having unproductive employees stay just managing their supervisors. But, at the same time, such bosses are a more serious predicament since their influence and its effect tends to be on a larger scale. It’s the prerogative of every organization to take this issue seriously and work through its channels to monitor and minimize such situations, if not totally eradicate them to ensure optimal productivity of the employee base. Much of it comes from encouraging true transparency throughout the organization irrespective of reporting relationships. And such transparency can be propagated through frequent top-down-top communication, more objective 360 degree performance appraisals, employee reviews as well as supervisor reviews, career pathing, ensuring employees with the right skills are not in wrong jobs etc.

That’s a starter list of ways to nurture healthy employee-work dynamics within organizations. I look forward to see you add to it.