Culture is back in the spotlight.
Leading, retaining, and motivating talented team members is one of the toughest jobs on the planet. It’s difficult to get results and achieve goals when you only see your team on a screen and your team members are changing all the time. Virtual work has leaders swimming in deep water as they wrestle with how to repair or replace the foundations of their organizations’ cultures without the familiar rhythms of a physical office.
Returning to in-office work is meeting with resistance1, and it’s taking longer than expected. Even hybrid work creates its own challenges as leaders wrestle with how to forge a team that’s both on Zoom and in the room. Compounding the problem, the Great Resignation2 has leaders feeling like they’re constantly changing tires on a moving bus. And the companies suffering the greatest attrition are those with dysfunctional cultures.3
Here’s a hard truth. Virtual/hybrid work and rapidly changing team members don’t create bad culture. They reveal it.
There is an answer to the challenges we face: build a working environment – regardless of the venue – where people want to come to work, enjoy working together, and are motivated to get things done. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a successful company culture won’t happen unless leaders intentionally make it happen.
When leaders work with team members to create a great place to work, teams thrive and get outstanding results. People flourish when working in roles that feed their souls and make a real difference in the world, regardless of where they are located.
Virtual and hybrid work and rapidly changing team members don’t create bad culture. They reveal it.
Vision is easy. Making it a reality is hard. We live in a world where leaders often feel they must choose between people and results. If they’re good leaders, they don’t want to make that choice. They may say, “If I focus on people, we’ll miss our revenue goal,” or “If I push hard for results, I’m going to lose people.” I’ve found that you don’t have to choose; you can have both.
The Organizational Effectiveness Survey (OES) is an anonymous all-employee survey developed by Dr. Cappy Leland, PhD and validated by two independent university studies. According to Dr. Leland, any score above 4.5 is considered very good.
The following short video shows a set of sample results alongside WSRB’s recent results. Take a close look at the metrics measured for the four categories – leadership, people, strategy, and performance:
Click fullscreen to enlarge.
Our across-the-board results were initially surprising. We expected to fall short in some areas, but we didn’t. Along with our overall positive results, it was particularly interesting to find that team members hired in our now three-year-old, virtual-only environment scored us the highest.
In retrospect, the results shouldn’t have been unexpected. It wasn’t until late 2021 that we learned about the OES and discovered we could measure our progress. However, since 2016, we have intentionally focused on every one of the measured elements.
We built a strong positive culture in an office environment by implementing processes, parameters, and practices that value people and get results. With today’s video technology, our culture transferred nearly seamlessly to a virtual environment, and our ongoing results show that creating and maintaining a great place to work gets results no matter where you work.
Where you work is not your culture. Company culture is rooted in the people you work with, why you work, and how you work together. All these things are portable.
A strong, positive culture allows your team to thrive in any environment, whether virtual, hybrid, or in an office. With commitment, focus, and effort, you can build or retool any organization to make it a place where you and your team want to work – a place where you share a clear and compelling vision and achieve big goals together.
I hear and read a lot these days about “the new normal,” as if there’s no going home again. Normal can be defined as your team’s shared values, vision and mission, and relationships. When you define “normal” that way and put it into practice, teams thrive and the organizations they serve achieve their goals with ethics, excellence, and profitability.
People stay with an organization and give their best effort when they believe in the vision, mission, and values, and when they understand how they and their work are valued, valuable and meaningful.
And that is worthy of a focused, long-term investment.
I had the privilege to be part of a recent AAIS webinar on this topic. Check it out here.
[1] Entrepreneur, https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/apple-and-twitters-return-to-office-struggles-reveal/448915
[2] Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/great-resignation-linkedin-us-workers-considering-quitting-2023-1
[3] MIT, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/