Be Intentional About Your Culture

Posted on March 9, 2021

By Megan Patton
Principal and People Practice Leader

Company culture serves as the background for everything the company does. It incorporates philosophies around how the company treats its people, customers and vendors and how it is perceived both in the marketplace and as an employer. Culture drives conversations around values, implementation of policies, development and growth of employees and how to both on-board and off-board individuals. In short, culture defines how people behave within a company.

A company’s culture can evolve and fall out of alignment with the overall values and strategic direction of a company. When this happens, culture can work against the success of strategic objectives.  Below is one example of how this happened to one of our clients.  

The owners of an engineering firm in the Midwest wanted a flexible workforce, but the previous owners of the company had encouraged compliance to an exact number of hours. The employees were timeclock-driven, even though all were salaried employees. Everyone arrived at exactly 8am, at 12:00 they would all go to lunch, returning to their desks at exactly 1pm. At 5pm, there was a steady stream of people walking out the door. No matter how much work was piling up, the employees were committed to an 8-hour day and not a minute more.

New company values focused on serving the customer. That meant working late some days in order to meet deadlines. Likewise, when client projects were completed on time, employees could come later or leave earlier to compensate for the times they stayed late.

It was fairly difficult to change the mentality of the employees, as the timeclock culture was so prevalent and had been so for decades. It took some incentives, a lot of encouragement and trust-building for changes to be made. Part of the solution had been an increased level of transparency on the part of the owners: sharing their vision and goals with employees and drawing a straight line from employee contributions to company success to employee rewards. The owners explained the impact that on-time delivery had on their ability to be paid on time, which led to a positive impact on company cash flow and, ultimately, improvements for the employees.

The company was able to shift their culture successfully. Currently, approximately 80% of the employees are remote workers, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The key to this culture shift was the willingness of the owners to increase transparency, share expectations and wildly increase communication. It worked!