The 5 Dos & Don'ts of Workplace Culture

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A healthy, exceptional workplace culture is paramount to engaged, high performing, cohesive teams.

The way people feel about their jobs, coworkers, bosses, and work environments has a gigantic impact on their performance and longevity at any company. In order to attract and retain excellent people, and to get the most engagement, effort, and productivity out of the people you have, a great culture is the key.

Let’s look at 5 dos and don’ts to establish exceptional culture inside your organization and within your teams.

Five DOs of great culture??

#1: Get clear: What is your culture?

My absolute favorite topic, and my current life’s work is focused on helping companies understand and get culture right.

Most organizations have a list of company values like Trust, Integrity, Respect, Excellence, and Teamwork. And while those sound great, they do very little by themselves to impact anyone’s actual behavior or establish culture inside an organization. If I’m wrong about that, then why are dysfunctional and toxic teams, bosses, and work environments as common as a penny in the business world?

Employee disengagement, high turnover, poor performing teams, silos between departments, badly behaving employees, resistance to change, etc. Any of these sound familiar? All of the companies dealing with these issues have lists of obvious corporate values and I can confidently say from the front lines after 10+ years of doing this work with teams: those values ain’t it.

“Culture is how people show up, treat each other, and approach their work; it’s the rules of engagement that define what it means to be part of the team.”

Culture is not a list of broad, subjective concepts like “Teamwork” that are loosely understood and rarely talked about, or a mission statement that no one can recite. Culture is not perks like casual Fridays, a foosball table in the break room and catered lunches.

Culture is how people show up, treat each other, and approach their work; it’s the rules of engagement that define what it means to be part of a team. Exceptional culture is achieved through a set of clearly defined behaviors and mindsets that are universally understood, that everyone takes ownership and accountability for, and that no one is exempt from.

And in order for culture to be something tangible, that employees live and experience every day, it must also be reinforced and integrated into the processes, systems, and DNA of the organization like hiring, on-boarding, coaching & feedback, training & development, rewards & recognition, etc.

When I say define your culture, I mean move beyond lists of obvious values and start defining how people show up in your company, leaving no room for interpretation. “Trust” is ineffective; it means many different things to different people and as is, the ground rules of it are unclear.

However, “We actively and consistently seek out feedback from others, especially those we lead. We see feedback as an opportunity to improve together, not as a criticism, and we receive it with grace.” When you read that, you know exactly what it means and how to do it. And because it is so clear, it can be measured and employees and leaders can be held accountable to it.

That’s how you take culture from a buzzword to being something tangible that impacts how people show up every day.

#2: Become obsessed with employee experience.

You have to prioritize the experience of your people, front to back: Hiring, on-boarding, training, development, pay them well, treat them well, ask them for feedback, have great leaders and managers to support them.

The same way that you prioritize customer and client experience because your customers and clients can purchase elsewhere. Your great employees can work elsewhere, too. You have to prioritize your employees to attract and retain great ones. Your employees are the ones executing your business plan, they are interacting with customers every day, they are making your company successful.

If you treat employees like they’re just an expense, they’ll show up like it’s just a paycheck. Employees are not an expense, they are an asset. I dive deeper into this in this post about Servant Leadership & Giving Away The Farm.

#3: Build a culture of feedback.

“Asking for feedback, and wanting to hear it, is the easiest, least expensive way to make someone feel listened to and to prove to them that their experience matters to you.”

Feedback done well inside organizations is imperative to building trust, growth, and accelerating improvement. Feedback is the backbone to healthy relationships and communication, and essential to having great culture.

Asking for feedback, and wanting to hear it, is the easiest, least expensive way to make someone feel listened to and to prove to them that their experience matters to you.

Leaders need to be asking for feedback from their employees, and employees should be receiving feedback on a regular, consistent basis. As a company ask your employees, “How can we be better, what is our biggest area of opportunity to improve?”

Prioritize feedback. Train your people how to do it skillfully and effectively and be consistent. Once a year is not often enough to know where you stand with your colleagues, boss, coworkers, and how you are performing in your job. Every 3-4 months at most teams should be giving and asking for feedback. When these conversations happen more often there is less to say and you normalize addressing things on a regular basis.

#4: Great leaders only.

“Do not put people into leadership positions who are not great leaders, period.”

Do not put people into leadership positions who are not great leaders. Be committed to only promoting and hiring people into leadership positions who have high emotional intelligence, can communicate well, navigate conflict, partner with and build strong relationships with a variety of different personality types and communication styles.

I will die on this hill: Do not compromise on having exceptional leaders. Leaders are one of the most impactful, direct way that employees experience their jobs and your culture.

#5: Healthy, courageous communication.

Your people need to be able to have really honest, courageous conversations with each other. Healthy working relationships are not possible if people don’t have the skills and ability to resolve conflict, have difficult conversations, give and receive feedback well, etc. Your people need to have the tools and capacity to say what needs to be said to each other, when it needs to be said.

“It is death to culture in organizations if people are afraid to bring up the most important things that need to be addressed.”

It is death to culture in organizations if people are afraid to bring up the most important things that need to be addressed. Whatever you can’t talk about will ultimately sink your ship by causing people to be miserable, quit their jobs, or stay mired in dysfunction and office politics.

It’s critical. Just like in personal relationships and every relationship, healthy communication is key. There are a ton of great resources, training, books, etc on this. The book Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, or Radical Condor by Kim Scott are both excellent places to start.

Five DON’Ts of great culture??

#1: No talking shit (this is first for a reason).

No bad mouthing, no gossip, no trash talk. You have to establish, with intention, a culture where people do not bad mouth each other as a habit and way of life. Create an environment where people take 100% ownership and accountability that if they have a problem with somebody else, they go right to the source.

Use words to lift each other up and make others look good. That doesn’t mean to always pretend like nothing is wrong when it is, or to be fake, or that you have to become best friends with every person you work with. What it does mean is taking responsibility for the words that come out of your mouth and the way you treat others, whether they are in the same room or not.

“It’s simple. If you wouldn’t be proud of them overhearing you say it, keep it to yourself.”

It’s simple. If you wouldn’t be proud of them overhearing you say it, keep it to yourself.

This is the achilles heel of organizations; trash talk, negative rumor mills and badmouthing others. This type of behavior is always extremely rampant in toxic workplace cultures. Drop the hammer on it, zero tolerance policy.

#2: Do not spend all your time focused on low frequency behavior.

This is what I like to call “Leadership Frequency.”

Do not spend all of your time focused on policing the behavior of your poorest performing employees. Set a high bar and clear expectations to hold people accountable to. Do not have conversations with the same people multiple times about low level, bottom of the barrel stuff.

Be clear and intentional about keeping your team’s eyes and attention focused upward and onward. Hold people to high standards and require them to take ownership and accountability for how they’re showing up if they want to continue to be there.

“If you spend all your time focused on your worst employees, you’ll lose your great ones.”

Highly accountable and engaged employees are not motivated by leaders focusing on lowest common denominator behavior and bad apples. If you spend all your time focused on your worst employees, you’ll lose your great ones.

#3: Do not rely on the skill sets and capacity of your people as they are today.

Upgrade and invest in your people by training them and developing their skills. Especially their interpersonal and communication skills.

Level up their job skills, give them access to non-violent communication training so that they can resolve conflict and address feedback more effectively. Do not rely on their current skill sets. Most people don’t receive these types of trainings or skills throughout their lives or previous jobs so if you want your people to be good at something, invest in them and build their capacity.

Cultures thrive when people continue to learn and grow and they are able to communicate and interact in more healthy ways. If you recognize gaps in knowledge or skill in your people then do something about it. Plus, when employees feel like their company is investing in them, they feel more loyal, happier, and are likely to stay in their jobs longer.

If you’re worried about the cost to do this, consider that it will cost you the same or more to deal with lower productivity, higher turnover, personality conflicts, and all the fires leaders waste time having to put out because your people don’t have the skills to interact and communicate in healthier ways.

#4: Do not be precious about the way you've always done things.

Great cultures accept and embrace change as valuable to growth. Always be willing to adapt, learn, and evolve.

“Never say these words out of your mouth, “This is the way we’ve always done it,” as an excuse to not change, grow, or improve.”

Have the courage to challenge to the way you do things and ask, “If we started this organization today, is that the way that we would do this?”

If the answer to that question is “No,” then stop doing it that way.

Never say these words out of your mouth, “This is the way we've always done it,” as an excuse to not change, grow, or improve. If you want to grow or improve, you must change. If you don’t grow and you don’t improve then you will lose great people, and you will die as an organization.

#5: This requires a zero tolerance policy: No assholes.

“In order to have a great workplace culture, you cannot have toxic people.”

You cannot have people working inside your organization that other people dread coming to work with because they're toxic, stir up drama, are jaded and negative, and make things miserable for other people. Energy and attitudes are contagious.

You should be able to confidently promise to every new hire coming into your organization that they will never have to work with anybody here who's an asshole, and mean it.

In order to have a great workplace culture, you cannot have toxic people. You’ve got to do the work to either coach people into greatness, or get rid of bad apples. One of my favorite tests to determine if you need to take action about an employee is this simple question:

“If this person didn’t already work for you, and you knew everything that you know about them right now - in how they show up and how they perform in their job - would you hire them right now?”

If you can’t answer a hearty yes to that question, then you’ve got work to do. Here’s an article about some steps to take to turn someone around and hopefully avoid having to fire them.

So there we go, 5 dos and don’ts to create excellent culture. If you put everything from these two lists into practice, you will look back in six months and barely recognize the company you were before. Go get it.

Related Articles:

• The 5 Tenets of a Yes, And Culture (5 min)
• The 6 Dos & Don'ts of Culture (6 mins)
• Pros & Cons: Investing in Soft Skills (3 mins)

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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop