Managing your company’s most important asset: 6 steps to strong, healthy & sustainable cultures

"If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff will just take care of itself." Tony Hseih, ex-CEO, Zappos

People are 10.4 x more likely to leave a job because of the culture than the money they're paid. In today's employee-focused market, companies simply cannot afford to nurture a toxic culture. It takes time and effort, but with a proactive approach, organisations can create and manage healthy, sustainable work cultures.

Step 1 – Identify culture cracks

Culture doesn't just break - it starts with a tiny crack. Find where these cracks are expanding and you can set about building healthier and stronger cultures. Reviewing engagement survey data, exit interviews, Glassdoor reviews and any information gathered through employee listening initiatives can help pinpoint where these might be. From my work partnering with companies to improve people processes and experiences, I believe there are 10 early warning signs a culture is under strain and could crack. Complete the culture cracks quiz to help identify where these might be and help target action around existing issues.

Step 2 – Have leaders collectively commit to the culture they can role-model

Leaders play a pivotal role in shaping, or undermining, culture. Every grand gesture – organisational mission, values, standards, commitments – is instantly undermined if a leader fails to adopt the agreed way of working. To earn respect, trust and belief, leaders must be prepared to personally engage in the culture they proclaim. Get Leadership teams together to openly discuss and debate the reality of cultural commitments and hold each other to account (what does this look like in reality? What will be most challenging to uphold? What will the broader organisation see?).

Step 3 – Objectively understand people, create psychological safety, and strengthen social skills

Regular use of objective assessment tools can prove a powerful gift to both individual and company. Understand what motivates teams, their capabilities, and their potential to grow, and you can optimise experience and contribution. Personalise psychological contracts, career paths, and work experiences, particularly at key transition points, e.g., onboarding, life-events, promotion, etc. Consciously consider areas where there could be imbalances or divides within your organisation - regions, demographics, those in an office, those working remotely. Set up inclusive practices now - for example, ways to host virtual / in person meetings / events and talent initiatives to enable identification of potential - to ensure a fair and equitable playing field and that discrepancies do not fester and lead to organisational gaps and limitations in years to come. Focusing on building psychological safety is a great way to sow the seeds for collaborative and inclusive cultures and regular investment in social skills such as emotional intelligence, will build understanding and enable future transformation.

Step 4 – Empower managers as culture ambassadors

Managers can become great drivers of positive organisational culture, or feel buried, unable to make an impact under layers of bureaucracy. Empowering managers to make decisions, guided by strong values and principles, could have a ripple effect on your culture. In today’s hybrid workplaces where employees value trust, inclusion and belonging, equipping managers with the skills and behaviours to humanise work for their teams will certainly pay dividends. It is time to transform the role of managers into empathy-led people leaders focused on coaching, collaborating, facilitating and enabling the achievement of broader outcomes and enabling culture-add, not just culture-fit, decisions.

Step 5 – Build talent intelligence to enable agility

We are firmly in the era of employee data. Now it is imperative for HR to build a central database of employee data, including skills, behavioural capabilities, and potential.?Access to this information, through a scientifically valid and technologically agile platform, will enable predictive and dynamic models to be built, matching individuals - their capabilities and potential - to emerging opportunities (e.g., new skills, new roles) as the market and organisation continuously evolves. Organisations who fail to invest in capturing and dynamically viewing employee data now will struggle to compete, as people-focused, agile organisations become the standard in expectation.?

Step 6 – Constantly monitor culture health and re-align actions

Culture is never completed or achieved. It is a living, breathing organism in every business which requires constant monitoring, evaluating, and re-calibrating to effectively maintain. Whilst there may be periods when there is greater focus on organisational culture, e.g. when a company moves through a key period of transformation or growth, even in seemingly steady state times, you can’t afford to take your eyes off it. Establishing, revising, and examining key metrics linked to your culture is critical to understand where progress is made and where focus needs to be placed. Make the cultural health of your organisation a key strategic priority and treat it as one. It underpins everything else you wish to achieve, so invest in it as you would your most valuable asset.