The last three years have been the hardest on staff culture in my lifetime. With a Great Resignation, a tightening job market, and a lot of uncertainty about the next year or two, having a strong staff culture is more difficult and more important than ever.
When Vanderbloemen started researching this topic in 2016, before we wrote the book Culture Wins, I had no idea just how critical workplace culture would become.
The new competitive advantage for employers is employee retention, which hinges on culture. In an age when a lot of people are looking for remote work, culture drives retention more than ever. If you’re going to ask somebody to physically come into a workplace, it better be a pretty special workplace.
Our Culture Tool has taken in thousands of thorough surveys detailing individual organizations’ staff culture to provide our insight for improvement. Each staff was measured according to nine cultural indexes to produce an all-encompassing staff cultural score. We measured the average staff cultural score and then looked at the scores of the top 1%. The results are staggering.
Here are a few insights I gained from this year’s Culture Report, studying all the staffs that have gone through our Culture Tool.
1. Trust is everything.
Of the Culture Tool’s nine cultural indexes, Trust in Leadership was the index where the top 1% had the highest raw score. Trust in Leadership is also the cultural index that has the widest variance between good staff cultures and great staff cultures.
More than the other eight cultural indexes – Stewardship of Life, Communication, Understanding Your Role, Innovation, Staff Support, Collaboration, Personal Job Satisfaction, and Mission, Vision & Values – Trust in Leadership will indicate your team’s strength.
Clearly, Trust in Leadership is the beginning and cornerstone of a good staff culture. What are you doing to increase trust in leadership on your team? Sometimes it can be as simple as a tweaking of pace. Even slowing down from rapid change engenders trust in leadership.
This year’s findings have me focused more than ever on how I can build trust in Vanderbloemen’s culture, particularly trust in our lead team and me. Every team has room for improvement, and investing time and thought in staff trustworthiness appears to be the game changer of all cultural indexes.
2.Where’s the Stewardship of Life?
It’s no surprise that the worst score of all indexes for both the average staff culture and the top 1% is Stewardship of Life. Churches have been busier than ever, pivoting over and over for the last three years. Everyone has been doing more work than usual.
There’s a cautionary tale here, though. Organizations can go for a while without work-life balance. If you don’t believe me, just think back to the last Christmas season.
But in the long run, there needs to be a rhythm of rest in every organization. As I read this year‘s report, I was reminded of how difficult rest can be to commit to. How could you make the step to commit a line item in your budget towards stewardship of life at your organization? There’s only so long your staff can sustain this pressure.
3.Innovation separates the best from the rest.
The other wide variance between the average and top 1% staff cultures next to Trust in Leadership was Innovation. The minute we quit innovating, we start atrophying. The minute we stop exploring and changing is the minute we start to calcify.
One of the best examples I’ve seen of combating company atrophy was at 3M. For years, executives were given a mandate of spending 15% of their workweek to simply innovate and come up with new ideas. That’s perhaps expected for a company known for innovation like 3M, but think about how you could implement something like that in your own workplace.
What new practice might increase the creativity and innovation factor for you and your colleagues? The pandemic forced us to change, and now a lot of people want to stop changing and get back to normal. The reality is, in the best of cultures, innovation never stops.
4.Aim to over-communicate (you won’t).
If you’ve ever been a parent, you know what a pain it can be to repeat the same message three or four different times. Those moments may test your patience, but the reality is that nobody grows out of needing clarity.
Communication is critical in leading a staff. Unfortunately, we see a rampant lack of communication among staff cultures. Even among our top 1%, clear communication ranked the low. I personally hate saying things over and over, but I have to do it anyway – it’s part of being a leader.
Your staff will reap benefits the more you embrace this inconvenience. Ask yourself where you can inject one more line of communication into your staff this year. It might feel redundant to you, but to your staff, it’s just good communication.
There’s a lot more to discover about staff culture, and we’re not done studying this issue. We will continue this study year after year, bringing you a new and improved report every 12 months.
Between now and then, I urge you to make an investment in your team’s culture. Building a positive workplace can unlock staff retention, meaningful staff relations, and energized productivity. You won’t be disappointed in the life your investment brings your staff and how it spurs them on toward your team’s purpose.
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