Time to Focus on the Glue That's Holding Everything Together

Welcome to a new issue of The Future of Strategy. A newsletter tailored for C-Suite leaders growing their business.

Over the past two months, we've published several in-depth features on VALUWIT's business blog discussing the impact of the health of your company's internal communication and overall office culture on your business.

Before going into details we'd like to point out some eye-opening stats we discovered during our research phase:

• Employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the world $8.8 trillion in lost productivity. That’s equal to 9% of global GDP.
• Creating a healthy company culture that attracts star talent can boost revenues by 33%.
• Roughly 38% of employees believe they’d preemptively reject potential employers based on public reviews of those companies.
• 81% of employees said they typically consider company culture when applying for a job.
• A survey of 1,005 employees showed that 94% of senior management and 88% of junior to middle-management employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success.
• C-Suite executives tend to have an inflated sense of their work culture compared to their employees. The survey of over 1,000 employees found a “disconnect” between how executives and employees define their company’s culture.

The numbers are too many to fit in one newsletter, but for this one, we'd like to highlight how you can audit and ensure a productive work environment.

Did you know that VALUWIT can help you audit your corporate culture? Checkout our Performance Management service breakdown

6 Pillars of a Healthy Corporate Culture

VALUWIT's content team looked into how five global giants managed to fuel their success with their corporate culture. Here are the seven common keys to their success.

Check out VALUWIT's Can a Healthy Culture Boost Your Bottom Line? for all five global examples.

1- A unified set of goals

Whether you're on a quest to change humanity or your goal is a much smaller one, like helping healthcare startups stand on solid ground. Your ultimate objectives need to be well communicated to your team and everyone needs to fully understand the impact of their job on achieving the unifying objective everyone has.

It’s senior management’s duty to remind and link all activity towards the company’s primary goals. More importantly, ensure all teams are aligned in this regard.

2- Employee engagement

There are many misconceptions about what employee engagement is and isn’t. It’s not about making employees happy all the time. It’s about creating a joint work experience where all team members are excited about the work they do.

Quiet quitting—the global trend of doing the bare minimum—is an expensive side-effect of lack of engagement.

3- Operations and decisions are guided by the company’s core values

An essential pillar for top-performing companies. A business’ core values are a set of deeply-integrated principles that guide every action. More importantly, it tends to have a larger impact on the internal relationship between employees as well as the public perception of the brand.

4- People and perks

A primary sign of a healthy and successful corporate culture is that of employees who not only feel secure, but also appreciated, valued, engaged, and above all have strong incentives to stay.

Incentives can vary from learning and growth opportunities; to adequate attention to employees' mental health; personal-time policies; childcare; and flexible working hours and conditions, among others.

5- A clear growth path

This is a crucial ingredient for employees seeking stability and a long-term view of their role in the company.

6- 360-degree feedback

Whether it’s feedback from managers to team members or vice versa; from top management to senior and middle managers or vice versa; from department managers to other department managers; from different team members to one another, or any combination of the above.

Feedback needs to be not only encouraged but also properly addressed.

communication and trust, often viewed as the other face of the feedback coin, are also core pillars in building a healthy corporate culture.

No business can grow without trust and the security of expressing one’s thoughts among other team members and senior management. To build trust, companies must constantly improve their internal communications.

How Do You Ensure a Healthy Corporate Culture for Work-From-Home Teams?

The relatively new-age question is still not simple to answer. Let's face it hybrid or work-from-home (WFH) settings contribute strongly towards the disengagement of employees.

That said, globally, the movement is strongly pro WFH, with the average attendance across all industries standing around 26%, according to a study by the Advance Workplace Association of 77,410 employees across 13 countries.

Of course, tech companies stand on the lowest end of the spectrum, at only 15% office attendance, while banks hold the other end, standing at an office attendance of 47% of employees.

We delve deeper into this topic in our feature Empowering the Anywhere Team: 5 Keys to a Strong Hybrid Culture

For now, here's a summary of the 5 keys to unlocking a strong remote team:

1- Invest in technology that facilitates communication and project collaborations.

2- A clear list of expectations and guidelines that clarify what remote work is and isn't, and the exact KPIs being tracked.

For example, are they expected to deliver tasks, work from 9-to-5, or a mixture of both?

3- Promoting inclusivity and team building through cross-departmental interactions can keep the staff more connected.

Employers have to create virtual team-building activities to foster engagement among employees while creating opportunities for people to spend time online and offline at company events.

4- Recognizing the achievements of both in-office and remote employees can also prevent hybrid work from breaking your company culture.

5- A hybrid transformation process is crucial. Businesses need to garner a deeper understanding of their team’s needs and preferences by answering questions such as:

• How do employees want to work?
• What do they need to better work?
• What must be done to improve employees’ mental and physical health
• What technology is needed to facilitate communication among team members?

Need help achieving your vision? Book a free strategy consultation today

Mind Mint

As always we close our newsletter with valuable advice from a successful figure entrepreneur.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, once said, "In a perfect world, everyone would be objective in their business decisions. However, emotions tend to get in the way. The key is to acknowledge your emotions and use them to your advantage."