How to Build a Growth-Ready Workplace Culture

What happens when you want to grow your business, but your workplace culture is just not strong enough for the job? Hire an HR manager to fix things, right? Wrong.

I was reflecting today on a conversation I had with a CEO who’s been with their business for about nine months. The CEO wants to grow the business, but knows the culture is just not strong enough to support it.

I was told ‘We have a culture where people blame all our issues on outside forces. They blame it on the economy being weak, or the market being resistant to our innovative products. On top of all that, the staff are feeling completely surveyed out.’

The CEO explained to me how the organisation uses a platform that requests employees to fill out a survey every month. The team has been diligently completing these surveys for months, but they’ve reached a point where they feel like they have described the problems many times, but nothing ever changes. When this happens, people become even more disgruntled and workplace culture really starts to unravel.?

‘they feel like they have described the problems many times, but nothing ever changes’

Bad Solutions

Over the years I’ve been working in this space, I’ve come across this problem a number of times, so I thought it was time to address it directly in a post because there are actually a lot of things you can try to tackle this problem. There are also a lot of things that aren’t going to work. Let’s look at some common bad solutions first:

• Hire an HR person Sometimes people hire an HR person because they think, we don’t have HR in the building, we just need to hire someone to fix this.?
• Ignore the issues raised by staff Other times people think, we’ve done all these surveys but we can’t change the things that people are asking us to change. We’ll act when they raise something we can change.

Although these are common responses, here’s why they often don’t work.

Hiring an HR Person – Not Enough HR Experience

When we hire our first HR person, we generally want to save money, so we opt for someone who’s less experienced, and often inexperienced at working on their own.

And guess what? They’re going to default to process. They’re going to prioritise operational HR tasks, which absolutely need to be done. Things like:

• answering employee questions
• keeping records
• completing administrative tasks

But if someone is concentrating on these things, how are they going to dig into strategy? When will they find time to synthesise broader information, conceptualise issues and bring a strategic people and culture mindset to the table??

Hiring an HR Person – Too Much HR Experience

Conversely, if you hire a senior person who can think strategically, they’re not likely to want to do the HR operational tasks. Someone who’s great at managing culture, leadership and development across the organisation does not usually want to be talking to employees about their issues with work-from-home forms or why they can’t claim for travel, etc. These are two really different skill sets and they’re hard to find in one person.

If you want to address your workplace culture issues by hiring an HR manager, you need to be really clear on what exactly you want that HR person to do.

HR Burnout

Sometimes we hire a HR Manager, but then over time find they aren’t effective. There are a lot of components to HR and, in my experience, when you are a standalone HR manager in a business (which is the case in most businesses with under around 200 employees), you’re in a tough position. You’re the person everyone comes to with their problems: you hear the CEO’s problems, you hear the managers’ problems, and you hear the employees’ problems as well. In fact, as a standalone HR manager, you are the only person in the business who can’t talk to anyone else about your issues.?

‘when you are a standalone HR manager in a business, you’re in a tough position.’

There’s a really high level of burnout among standalone HR managers. If someone stays in an organisation for too long and gets burnout, they become disenfranchised and disengaged as well. It’s then hard for them to help shift the culture.?

Ignoring Feedback

Here’s a common scenario. A leadership team notices the employees are disengaged, so they send out a survey asking people for feedback. The staff says, ‘well, things aren’t that great’. And then the leaders do absolutely nothing with that information. And then the employees become even more disengaged, and we begin again. We need to break this cycle.

Good Solutions

So how do you fix this? The first thing to do is to get the whole leadership team in a room and ask, what’s the purpose of this organisation? Why do we exist? It’s not just about making money. That’s something that happens as part of a successful business. But it’s not the reason the organisation exists. Here are some examples of purpose in businesses:

• Nike: to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world (if you have a body, you’re an athlete)
• Starbucks: to inspire and nurture the human spirit.
• Netflix: to entertain the world.?
• TED: to spread ideas.?
• Spotify: to unlock the potential of human creativity

The purpose of your organisation is the reason you exist. It’s your why.

Getting Proactive

Once you’re clear on your purpose, you need to define your values, which have to fit into your purpose. Your values and the lens through which you make all of your business decisions. Next, you have to have a conversation about what kind of culture you want, and put words to it.?

Next comes the really hard bit. You have to ask yourselves, as individuals in the room, as leaders, what are you personally responsible for doing to:

• shift your culture
• demonstrate your values
• drive your business forward?
• live your purpose to make your business successful.

And once you’ve defined those things, you will need to commit to them.?

Talking to Your Team

Now you have an opportunity to go back to your employees, as a leadership group, and tell them what you’ve come up with. Explain what you want your culture to be, and the commitments that each member of the leadership team is personally making to support this culture.

It’s only then that you can ask for your employees’ input and enthusiasm to help you create the new workplace culture. Your purpose will hopefully be something that is transpersonal, that will make the world a better place, and if you want to make it happen, you need to scale your business. You need to grow. And you need a committed culture to get you there.

‘It’s only then that you can ask for your employees’ input and enthusiasm to help you create the new workplace culture.’

This is the first step on what I’m sure you can appreciate is not a swift journey. Changing culture does not happen quickly, but we need to make sure that from the top, we’ve got commitment and we’re really clear on what we’re trying to achieve.

Build Your Culture

Of course, this is just the start of this process. You also need to layer in:?

• leadership team meetings to talk about culture
• metrics to measure it?
• mechanisms to ensure you’re awarding, recognising, hiring and firing based on your values

All of these things are going to play a part, and this is when you can bring in strategic HR, whether that’s outsourced to a company like ours at Amplify HR, or whether you hire someone because you’ve reached a size where you can do that.

HR support is absolutely going to help to drive and shift your culture, but one person can’t do it alone. It’s got to come from the leadership team as a whole. You’ve got to engage everybody within the business.

For more, see my previous posts How to Change Your Workplace Culture and Six Tips for Hiring Your First HR Person , where I dive into the challenges and also what you need to be clear about before you make that critical first hire.

Have your say

Does your organisation need to shift its culture? We’d love your feedback on this series, just head on over to Amplify HR or connect with Karen on LinkedIn .