How I’ve built a team culture that’s a destination employer

Culture is one of those corporate buzzwords, often misused or misunderstood. It’s not ping-pong tables, beer fridges, and breakout spaces.

Team culture is true synergy connecting all departments, collectively working towards a shared mission. It’s reputation, employee satisfaction, personality, and confidence.

When I took over Nitschke we had no culture (or, at least, that’s what I thought). But culture exists, even if it’s not intentionally created.

We all worked in silos, operating as a team of individuals, like many real estate agencies do. It was a bunch of agents, out for themselves, with no shared mission, systems and workflows or cross-communication between departments.

Fast-forward to today, we have a vibrant culture, happy employees, and a growing, industry-defining business.

There’s no playbook for creating a culture, because it’s specific for every CEO and company. But I can tell you the key perspectives and concepts we used to turn Nitschke into a destination employer in the Adelaide Hills.

If you’re interested in joining Nitschke, we’d love to hear from you – check out our current openings.

Building a destination employer

Explore current problems

Be honest about your current culture and what needs to change to allow you to become a destination employer.

For example, with Nitschke, we needed to become an independent agency to have the freedom to build the culture we wanted. So, we prioritised a rebrand, refocus and refresh before doubling down on our culture-building plans.

Know where you’re going – your destination

To create an industry-defining company and culture, you need to know your end goal. It’s a moving target and likely to change, but it’s helpful to nail your mission because this will influence your culture.

We interrogate our mission once a year. For us, our mission is to deliver the most authentic real estate experience.

This means hiring good humans who get better each day, while also elevating their team in the process.

‘Right people, right seats.’

Hiring and personnel decisions are easier with a clear mission/vision. The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) ‘right people, right seats’ is a framework we’ve adopted.

It’s a two-part decision-making process when building your team;

• Right people: Are they a vision and values match?
• Right seats: Do they get the role? Do they want the role? Do they have capacity for the role?

Redefine your role as CEO

Your role and responsibilities as CEO will, most likely, change as your team grows. You’ll spend more time working on the business, not in it. My role continues to evolve, from technician to leader. This means spending more time mediating and mentoring my team, than selling homes.

3 Steps to Success

It’s helpful to have a framework, either created or discovered, to embed into your business. Run every decision, problem and idea through this lens. For us, it’s the 3 Steps to Success.

1. Elevate our state (mental, emotional, physical and spiritual states)
2. Raise our standards (establish and protect our values and vision)
3. Simplify our strategies (pull back and re-establish our baseline as a business)

Gamification

KPIs, goals and incentives are critical in sales industries like real estate. It’s not about prescribing shallow metrics without intrinsic motivation.

The best salespeople focus on the daily reps, not the big swings. 1% better every day is an underrated strategy in sales. Give your team ownership, responsibility, clear KPIs and a ‘destination’ (your mission). Mentor, support, celebrate, and connect wins to your mission.

For us, this looks like:

• Morning huddles: To discuss daily priorities and ‘pickles’ (problems)
• Afternoon loopbacks: Share wins & work-in-progress
• Quarterly priorities: Each department has a key quarterly focus
• Yearly goals: ‘Basecamps’ to reach our Everest Mission (to deliver the most authentic real estate experience).

All departments and teams are aligned on the #1 quarterly priority to move the company forward. We set tiers (red, yellow, and green) and attach a financial reward and team-wide celebration, depending on which level they get to.

We gamify performance in the business to make it fun, align all team members and departments, and reverse engineer our journey up our Everest.

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