Evaluate Company Culture and Build Into Your Team
Dear Friends,
We’ve recently published several issues of the Executive Report designed to help you evaluate key areas of your business:
- Know Your Numbers
- Lead Management
- Know Your Audience
- Evaluate Your Brand
- Systematize Your Sales Process Including The In-Home Presentation
In this issue, we look at your company culture and how much emphasis you put on building into your team.
One of the big challenges faced by companies recently is staffing, and company culture has a great deal to do with your ability to recruit and retain team members. Just as we talk about consumers buying from companies they know and trust through referrals, reviews, and their online presence, people want to work at places they know and trust through referrals, reviews, and their online presence.
Before we go further, there is no perfect company culture. Different workers seek different things regarding company culture, based largely on their interests, values, personalities, and their place in life.
As you think about your company’s culture, imagine what it would be like to work for your company.
Is your company somewhere your target workers want to be? While there are things that all companies value and want as part of their culture, like openness, honesty, and high integrity, is your overall culture attractive to the workers you need?
Is your company more suitable for introverts or extroverts? While you need both, the reality is that your company will likely skew one way or the other. How does your company lean, and is that the way you need it to lean?
Do you have an environment that finds fault with people or systems?
Is yours a “social” environment or more of a “work” environment?
How do you communicate best as an organization? Face to face? Email? Texting? Company meetings?
What sort of language does your company use? Professional or more casual?
How quick is your company to adopt and pursue new technologies or practices?
Is your company quick to take risks? What are your primary criteria for deciding when you do or don’t want to take a risk?
Is your worker environment competitive or more collegial and team-based?
Who/what comes first in your organization? What are your “sacred cows”?
Do people put in extra hours or just the required ones?
What does it take for new team members to be accepted by existing ones? Does acceptance come automatically, or does it have to be earned? Do your workers self-segregate based on experience, age, sex, or other demographics?
Again, keep in mind that there are no right or wrong answers for many of these things.
Identifying your company culture is simply a way of discovering what kind of team members will thrive in that environment. And, of course, as you identify your company culture, you may find certain things that you can address to be more competitive for job seekers.
Finally, how much does your company build into its team members? Do you encourage team members to gain extra education or be involved in your community? Do your leaders spend time talking with and mentoring newer team members? Do you spend money if it helps you develop a better workforce or improves morale and loyalty? These are all critical questions to answer, especially during these days of labor shortages.
I wish you the best on this journey. However, keep in mind that if you don’t focus on continual improvement, you will be on a slow but steady spiral toward irrelevancy to team members, customers, and suppliers.
Please feel free to reach out to me at todd.miller@isaiahindustries.com whenever I can be of help.
Todd Miller has spent his entire career in the metal building products manufacturing industry. He is president of Isaiah Industries, an organization recognized as one of the world’s leading metal roofing manufacturers. Todd is currently Vice President of the MRA (Metal Roofing Association) and a Past Chair of MCA (Metal Construction Association). Through his website, he strives to raise the bar on standards and practices to provide property owners with the best possible products for successful roofing projects.
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