Culture Creates Value For Employees

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” Richard Branson

While other cultures are a means to an end, the Truly Human Culture is an end in itself. Through it, organizations get to constantly create value for their employees. To build your business, you have to first focus on creating value for your people.

Creating value for employees means providing them with leadership, hope, inspiration, and an environment that allows them to aspire to be all they can be, be as creative and innovative that they can be, find all the meaning they can find at work, work with people they care for and who care for them and earn as much as they can earn. The right value will be considered worthy of their commitment and investment. This is what engagement is.

Companies are not used to the concept of creating value for their employees. But that is exactly what culture is. What you do for the customer through the business model, you do for the employee via your company's culture. When you create value for the employees, they become altruistic and create value for the customer.

People are not tools to be used or resources to be manipulated to satisfy the customer's needs. It is manipulative to pretend to treat your people well simply because you want them to treat the customer well. People will get to know you when you are pretending to care for them.

“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person- not just an employee- are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.” Anne M. Mulcahy

The Truly Human Culture starts with creating value for the employee. To create value for the employee, organizations need to understand the personae of the employees they want to attract. They have to segment the employees. That way they get to know what the people they are attracting want out of work.

When you attract just about anyone to your workplace, you will have a challenge understanding what value means to them. What value means to each one of them will vary. When designing the Truly Human Culture, we take organizations through the employee discovery protocol where they determine the employee or talent segment, they want to create the culture to serve.

Once you identify the kind of employee you want to have, you get to understand what they are looking for at work. And if it aligns with what you can give, then you design an Employee Value Proposition. This is a promise of value to the employee. This is the bait organizations use to entice and attract the kind of employees you are looking for. When you become what employees want, the kind of people who want such a place of work will be attracted.

You don’t have to worry about culture fit because you are attracting the kind of people who want what you are offering. Everything you do is to aid you to deliver the promise that you made to them. When you deliver the promise, you have created for them, you will be able to capture value from them.

There are people you have no business recruiting because they won’t fit the soul and heart of your business. The mindset of the people you are attracting to your workplace matters. When you are building an entrepreneurial business but then recruit an employee who desires to be part of the status quo to your leadership, your culture will soon be influenced to support status rather than innovation.

That’s the reason why you have to start with the employee experience. You have to discover the kind of employees you can work with and then create value for them. Value is in the heart of the receiver. Get to know their needs and wants and what they want out of work and design the culture that delivers all that to them, makes them feel human and fulfilled, and self-actualize.