The Importance Of Organizational Culture

Today on hero TV, we’re going to be talking about the importance of organizational culture we’re here with Sydney Jacques who is definitely the expert in this realm so keep watching we’ll be right back. Hi everybody, it’s Sydney Jacques and I’m

excited to be here today to talk to you about organizational culture. There’s two things that we’re going to talk about in our video today the first one is why is it important to us? and the second one is if I convinced it is important, how do

we go about building that? So let’s start with the why. Why is it important? If we have a strong positive company culture, our employees are going to be more engaged. So sometimes we have Domino effects that are kind of negative this

is a domino effect that i’m going to show you that’s positive. So, if we start with a strong positive company culture, that results in more engaged employees. When our employees come to work and they’re more excited to be there and

they’re more engaged and productive while they’re there you know what that results in? that results in more sales. and as we have more sales you know what that results in? that gives us more profits. in a company, as we are able to build

more profits then we’re able to stay in business longer, we’re able to increase the revenue for our shareholders, and across the board it is just a better place to work. That in turn, as we share that with our employees goes back to

adding to the culture and the engagement of the employees and we can start the stair step all over again. So all of that starts with the company culture. People need to be satisfied and happy where they’re at. Another great benefit of

having a strong company culture is that a strong culture results in less turnover. Have you ever done the numbers on what it costs you to replace and retain an employee? It’s not a small figure I can promise you. If we have a

culture where people are happy and they want to stay there, then we retain our employees longer. That saves us money, the employees are happy, and one of the benefits that comes from that is that as we are seeking to expand like we are in

the construction industry right now, we’re having a crisis trying to find more workers to come into construction if we build the kind of cultures as where our people are happy the best way to recruit new people

to our company is word of mouth. If we have people that are happy and productive and they’re doing well for us let’s bring in their friends. They’ll be even happier to work there because they have their friends there. So that’s

another great benefit of building that strong positive company culture. So now that we know it’s important why we want a strong company culture now we have to talk about well, how are we going to do it. So I’ve created a model and as you

can see in my model there are seven different steps that we’re going to focus on. Step number one is that you have to put the structure in place. I think sometimes we’re not as intentional about creating cultures we should be, we

just kind of think well if I’m a good leader and I have good employees then it just happens right? No that’s not the case you have to be intentional and understand the elements that go together to create that culture. So, that’s the

first step is to have the desire and have the intention to put a structure in place and maybe that’s through your meetings, through your employee activities, through your customer service interviews, figure out what the structure

is and include in that a way to maintain a pulse with your people. How are you going to find out how your people are feeling about the culture? Maybe it’s one-on-one, maybe you have hundreds of employees so you want to use an online

survey. There’s different ways that we can do that but all of that has to be built into step number one of this pyramid which is being intentional and establishing the structure. The second step is we need to have a vision for

what the culture is that we’re trying to create. I have two girls that are 18 months apart and when they were little the younger one named brooke you still love to work jigsaw puzzles she would be busily working on a puzzle and it was

hundred pieces at least and her older sister who didn’t like puzzles in much would sometimes come and take the box and run away. Do you know what happened? Brooke was sitting there with all of these

puzzle pieces but she didn’t have the picture of what it was she was trying to create with those pieces. That’s what happens to us in our culture’s if we don’t establish the vision as the leader we need to establish that vision so the

picture is crystal clear of this is what it’s going to be like. This is what employees are going to feel like. This is how we’re going to treat them, this is how we’re going to treat each other. Make that vision crystal clear. Make it

compelling. Make it exciting. Be passionate about it so as you share it with your people they can share it with their people and everybody has the same vision and while you’re creating that vision for your culture, you also need a

vision for your company. What is the vision for your company that will excite your people? The name of my company is jacques and associates. Our vision statement is, clients love working with Jacques and associates! They know we are

competent, responsive, and always go the extra mile. Okay, that’s our vision. No matter what position you are in in our company, I expect you to understand that vision and when you’re working with clients to do everything that you can to

make that vision come to life. Because we want clients to love working with Jacques and associates, and they do. Third step is we have to build trust. Nothing will build until we have trust. Have a really great friend named David horse haggar

who’s done 25 years of research on trust he’s taught me a lot of things but one of the things that really always rings in my ears as he said, “people will trust what’s clear and mistrust the ambiguous”. So as you think of your organization

there are probably areas that aren’t as clear as they need to be. What about individual roles and responsibilities does every individual note exactly clear this is my role this is my responsibility this is what I produce

this is who I serve and this is how I do that. We need to ask questions and make sure that we’re clear on roles and responsibilities. Another one we work with a lot of organizations on is meetings. Are your meetings a place that build trust?

Because they always start on time, they always have a clear agenda, there’s always a list of action items, there’s always a roll call at the end asking everyone for their opinion and their ideas and anything that they want to

share as a team before you leave these kind of things will make a difference as you build trust within your team. Another thing we love to do in meetings and as we work with organizations, is we have what we call a question of the day. Now I

can give you a list of questions but you can make up your own. It can be anything as simple as what did you do for fun this weekend to, what’s your favorite place to go out to eat? to, if money or no object and you could go on vacation

anywhere in the world where would you go? just come up with a question and each time you sit down and have a team meeting, let people answer that question. You will be amazed at what that does to build relationships and build trust

within your team. I was doing this on one of my project teams and it happened to be Valentine’s Day so I’m working with these construction workers and we’re sitting around the table talking about communication and we start with the

question of the day so my question of the day for this group of 25 construction workers was, “it’s Valentine’s Day what are you going to do for your sweetheart?” So we got stopped at the grocery store on the way home and

buy some flowers or I bought a box of chocolates then we get to one of the workers on the project and he says well, I’ve been working for three months to train my dog to go in the other room and bring in a bouquet of flowers in his

mouth and give it to my wife and then he’s going to go back and he’s going to bring in a package of chocolates and give it to my wife. We were like floored! now do you think those construction workers would have ever known that about

their co-worker if I wasn’t there? to make sure they did a question of the day? There’s so many things that we can learn and as we do that we’re building trust in our relationships which helps us have a

stronger organization. After trust, the next to start with C from trust we move on to commitment. Commitment is important because we can’t just have it it to kick off but we have to continue to have it as we go along. So, one of the things that

we do to maintain commitment and to continue to get people’s ideas is we have a tool that we use called start, stop, and continue. So, occasionally sometimes, we do it once a month sometimes once a quarter what we do when

we’re gathered in our team meetings as we just ask for input from the team and we say, are there certain things that we need to stop doing? They just don’t make any sense anymore. It’s not adding value to us, or to our clients, are there some

things that we should start doing? We started doing a monthly newsletter about three years ago and that came out of one of our team meetings where we said, “what are we missing the boat on? what should we start doing?”. So we started a

newsletter called the third Thursday tips and every third Thursday, anybody that’s on our mailing list gets a awesome newsletter with valuable content. And then, there’s the continued, “what’s working well? Let’s identify that and

keep doing that. That’s one way you can build commitment. The next one is, consistency. We have to have consistency as we continue to build our team and build our culture. One of the tools that we like to use for this is when we’re

having our team meetings, we hand out a piece of paper and it has two simple questions on it. The first question is, what is working well? second question is, What do we need to do differently? As we hand out that piece of paper and people

have the opportunity to fill that out, it can be anonymous. They just write the answers to those questions and then we gather that up in the next meeting we share that back. So everybody has that information and we act on the ideas that

people gave us and we celebrate the things that people say are working well. After we get this part up in the pyramid, This is where we get to the opportunity section. Every team, every culture, is going to have challenges you might call

them problems. I call them opportunities. If there’s a conflict, if things aren’t going well, that’s an opportunity to come up with a new solution. Get your people involved, ask them for their ideas and create

opportunities. When we get to the point, or we can put all of these six levels together, we get to step number seven. That’s what I call the breakthrough. When we break through, we’re breaking through the norms. We can do things different. We

can do things better. We can have happier employees than people thought was possible. When we’re able to do that, our employees are happy. They feel empowered. They’re happy to be there. They want to do the work. They want to be engaged, and

everybody wins. So going back to the Domino’s at the beginning, as we build a positive culture our employees are happy and more engaged which leads to better customer service which leads to higher sales, which leads to higher profits,

which leads to happy shareholders. Well, thanks for watching this episode of hero TV today and thank you so much Sydney for taking the time. That was a lot of, a lot of amazing info. Be sure to subscribe down the description you’ll find a lot of

helpful information. Remember to live on purpose, make a difference, and… be the hero.