Marcus Deiss
Marcus Deiss posted an updateover 3 years ago
over 3 years ago
The Book "Great Corporate Culture" Should the Human Resource (HR) Department be Responsible for Building a Great Corporate Culture? For too long, corporate culture has been viewed as the responsibility of the human resource (HR) department rather than an integral part of business strategy. While HR is certainly part of the bigger picture, your first choice to build a happy workplace should not be your HR team.  A CEO (or leader) sets the corporate culture, and they will always play a key role in deciding what the organisation's core values are. Their behaviour and communication style at the leadership level has the most significant impact for better or worse. This is why communication, along with responsibility and trust, is crucial for a happy workplace and why leadership is even more pivotal than HR.  An organisations corporate culture is more than just hiring the right people and retaining them. It's also about learning their individual influencing characters, which determine how they act on a day-to-day basis. An unproductive corporate culture (or toxic workplace) does not only arise simply from the absence of a code of conduct. Instead, it grows out of specific misconceptions and leadership dysfunction. It is often exasperated by a blurry realm of doublespeak and can lead to a high employee turnover rate. The working environment has a tense and hopeless atmosphere in which leaders are not held accountable, and power struggles result in an extremely counterproductive situation. Despite an organisation's best efforts to build a productive corporate culture (or a happy workplace), too often, leaders end up creating a toxic workplace for their employees, and these employees have no possibility or are afraid to speak up. Therefore, when leaders get the job done, the top executives don't see a problem or the need to promote ways for employees to address issues to the attention of executives. On the contrary, in a happy workplace, departments create joint relationships for a smooth engagement process during the entire sales cycle, making the organisation productive and sales-ready. Each department can be defined, if you will, as a subunit culture in itself, with different priorities, a different set of key performance indicators (KPIs), norms, values, and beliefs. This is also true of each individual within the organisation. Each subunit wants to take charge of a situation; it works with its own culture and focuses on attaining its own annual KPI goals. However, when a weak subunit limits corporate culture's performance, strengthening another subunit won't make the intertwined system stronger.  Corporate culture is an interconnected construction, a living entity, influenced by coordinated actions. The moment you try to optimise any one part of an organisation without optimising the others, that optimisation may pose challenges for those other subunits. Most of the work in corporate culture design is figuring out these interactions or trade-offs. A corporate culture that is agilely designed will remain critical in the ever-changing business environment. Consider that millennials are projected to make up 75% of the workforce by 2030. Therefore, as Gen-Xers and millennials take on leadership roles, replacing their baby boomer predecessors, organisations will be forced to reshape how they approach employee morale and culture. This new generation is challenging conventional thinking about the modern workplace. Rather than working in a well-paid job from 9-5, many are willing to sacrifice a higher salary to work in cultures aligned to their values, and when they don't feel emotionally attached to the culture, they probably won't stick around for too long.  To note, however, is that working professionals' response to salary growth and opportunity advancement are considered top factors in employee retention. Meanwhile, negative work-life balance and toxic workplaces heavily contribute to decreased satisfaction levels at work. Research shows that through a supportive management approach, leaders can make an enormous difference in the overall experience employees have within an organisation – and to how likely they are to stay with the organisation. This necessary change is also a way to improve the company's position. Employee skills and a happy workplace are worth more than an organisation's tangible assets. Unlike financial and physical ones, intangible assets are hard for competitors to imitate, which makes corporate culture a robust and sustainable competitive advantage that can be measured as a strategic asset. Therefore, in drawing these new employees and retaining existing ones, a happy workplace offers an advantage over competitors. Organisations with a happy workplace culture don't tolerate leaders who achieve their business objectives at the cost of others. In fact, organisations that want to construct and uphold a happy workplace don't tolerate anyone who works towards achieving outcomes that are not aligned with that desired corporate culture. The fundamental ingredient in a corporate culture's design is a conclusion about the thoughts and behaviour of others. People make decisions based on their principles, values, morals, beliefs, and what they know or believe to be true. To take control of their culture, organisations should delegate responsibilities appropriately and emphasise the creation of a unified, transparent, and engaging workplace. This requires the right combination of senior leadership, team leaders, and general staff from different parts of the organisation to do their due diligence. As the employees present when running the business, general staff members understand how it works in practice. These employees have better oversight and understanding of what other employees will or will not respond to than any leader ever could. Meanwhile, it's often said that a happy workplace is a choice, not a decision – great leaders foster environments where all employees, regardless of age, race, or gender, feel valued. Organisations may have diversity programs that focus more on creating a diverse workforce than on the harder job of fostering inclusion. When businesses fail to make those outside the dominant zone feel welcome actively, they lose the insight that people with different experiences and backgrounds can bring to the table. Additionally, when employees don't have basic guidelines (e.g. a code of conduct) around what is standard or relevant behaviour, the result is often confusion, redundancy, and impaired or even abnormal functioning. It has become increasingly common for large corporations to create a new role for the Chief Culture Officer (CCO), but a full-time position is not necessary for most businesses. What are some strategies you have learned or implemented to build a happy workplace in your organisation?

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