Improve Corporate Culture by Improving the Employee Experience

The idea that corporate culture has a dramatic impact on the success of an organization has played prominently in discussions of how to increase competitive advantage in challenging economic times. The desire to improve employee engagement as a way of growing productivity often surfaces from these discussions.

Most professionals inherently know that employee engagement and culture are related. Unfortunately, they often miss a crucial element: culture represents the collective behavior of people in the organization and how employees experience conditions in the workplace environment drive those behaviors.

Culture Represents Collective Behavior

Unfortunately, some business leaders mistakenly believe that new rewards and recognition programs will engage employees sufficiently to boost productivity and profits. What is often missing from this calculation is the role the workplace environment plays in shaping worker behaviors.

Take, for instance, temperature. Assume two workers are performing the same task. Which one is going to be more safely and productively engaged? The one who is sweating and miserable in a 95° F ill-equipped shed or the one working in a climate-controlled 72° F warehouse?

What about a worker where the boss barks orders and berates performance, or the one where the manager teams up with her to provide the tools and training she needs to do the job she was hired to do?

When considering a strategy for improving corporate culture, the common practice of tasking a team to identify a set of shared values and directing all employees to adhere to them is icing for a cake that may not yet exist. Management can’t reasonably expect a different culture if the things that produce cultural change have not been implemented.

Our People Are Our Most Valued Asset

We’ve all seen banners at corporate facilities proclaiming Our People are Our Most Valued Asset! Really? Maybe there are some recognition ceremonies and social events. But essentially nothing has changed in how the workers experience the workplace environment. What would lead anyone to believe, under those conditions, that they are now a valued asset and, therefore, be inspired to alter their behavior? As a result, worker behavior doesn’t change, and the culture remains as it was.

All that is new is the proclamation of an “aspirational” corporate culture on a banner which in reality, is misaligned with the functional culture that demonstrates how we do business here. The old tongue-in-cheek admonition circulated among parents regarding the instruction of offspring, do as I say, not as I do, rings as ineffectively true in the workplace as it does in the home. The more aggravated the misalignment of an “aspirational” culture with the functional culture, the more potentially dysfunctional the organization.

What Drives Worker Behavior?

So, what mechanics drive improving corporate culture? Since a culture represents the collective behavior of people in the organization, and conditions in the workplace environment cause those behaviors, it makes sense that corporate culture changes when we change the behaviors of the majority of the workers. But what drives worker behavior?

Applying root cause analysis to consideration of the example of the temperature in the work area, attention shifts to management. What other elements of the workplace environment do management control that could reduce stress on workers??Who or what could allow workers to devote more attention and energy to safe and productive action? What about access to the necessary resources and tools?

Who would produce better results during a year-end closing of the corporate books, a clerk with a spreadsheet and a calculator or one with access to a modern accounting management system? And who approves funding for an accounting management system? Management, of course.

S*O*A*R Factors Guide Improvement of Employee Experience

When looking at making improvements to the workplace environment which will positively impact the employee experience, it is useful to consider the S*O*A*R Factors: support in performance of duties, opportunity for professional development, acceptance as a valued member of the team, and resources to perform duties.

The four S*O*A*R Factors address tangibly helping the employees be successful in performing the jobs for which they were hired. This in turn improves the employee experience. And, why any member of management not commit to supporting employees’ success in performing the work? The S*O*A*R Factors also leverage significant influence over decreasing levels of stress while increasing employee engagement, an essential element of any high-performance organization.

Numerous studies reveal that when stress increases past an optimum level, workers fall into a downward spiral of decreasing productivity and more mistakes leading to complete burnout. Temperature is one-factor influencing worker stress. Other factors include IT system reliability, inflexible production schedules, excessively long working hours, lack of clearly defined job responsibilities, inequitable accountability, and bosses who lack essential management and leadership skills amongst a host of other issues. Business leaders who are genuinely interested in improving the corporate culture will take a serious look at how management actions and behaviors introduce unnecessary stress into the workplace.

All Roads to Cultural Change Lead Through the Workplace Environment

So, when members of the C-suite set out to improve the corporate culture, it makes a critical difference where they focus their efforts. Does management only target altering worker behavior? Or do they direct steps toward improving how workers experience the workplace environment? A thriving cultural conversion will focus on the workplace environment and management actions and behaviors that shape that environment.

Management determines the work processes. They set policies and procedures and allocate resources. Management supplies equipment and tools. They schedule the work and assign workers. Management demonstrates the behaviors workers model. Ultimately, each action management takes either model or contradict management proclamations, increase or decrease worker stress, and thereby, impact employee engagement.

There is no direct path management can take to create a sustainable improvement in the corporate culture. All roads to cultural change lead through the workplace environment. When leadership changes their actions and behaviors, the management subculture begins to change, as does the workplace environment. When workers notice a change in the work environment, their behaviors will start to shift as a result of how they experience that environment, and, as a result, the organizational culture will begin to change. This process aligns the “aspirational” culture and the functional culture, representing how the organization conducts its business. It all starts with management creating an improved workplace environment.

Management Must Take the Lead

Management communications, both verbal and nonverbal, stemming from their actions and behaviors either support these efforts or thwart them. Consistently open and honest communications are essential if management expects workers to trust that the leadership is fully committed to a new way of doing business and not just another PR ploy to push a nice, public-pleasing message about the “aspirational” culture. Otherwise, workers will not risk employing behaviors that are inconsistent with the functional culture.

Workers want to see that the management subculture and the workplace environment is actually changing. Therefore, management must take the lead by first changing their actions and behaviors if they genuinely expect workers to follow. Not doing this is why so many otherwise well-intentioned efforts to improve corporate culture fall well short of expectations or fail all together.

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Fred Stawitz—an award-winning author, international speaker, and strategic advisor—is a leading proponent of business cultures that engage employees in safe, productive, and sustainably profitable operations in the Digital Age. He was recruited to develop the first technical training program for the American Space Shuttle Program flight design engineers in the wake of the Challenger explosion and created desktop simulations to train the astronauts. He also created programs for a Shell/Bechtel energy venture and large pipeline operations that maximize safety and productivity while ensuring regulatory compliance. He's an international speaker on human factors in the workplace and disruptive, emergent digital technologies; was featured on CNN Headline News, a PBS special, and quoted in a Special Congressional Quarterly Report; and is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Leadership 500 LEAD Award from HR.com and the A+ for Excellence in Education from NASA/NSTA. He is also author of several highly praised and award-winning books and is a successful publisher guiding a select group of writers through the process of creating marketable books with global distribution.

Read more about how employees can leverage more control over their careers in the book?"Don't Run Naked Through The Office." Available at all major booksellers around the world including Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Run-Naked-Through-Office/dp/0988807904.

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