Creating Company Culture | R&R Helps build on Existing Company Culture

By Ian Richardson, Managing Partner, Richardson & Richardson Consulting LLC

Inspired by Thursday Process with guest Paul Azad, Service Tree

Creating Company Culture

Creating company culture is an interesting topic, and one that I’ve found prompts strong and diverse results depending on who you ask about the topic. Company culture itself is a term that has varied definitions depending on who you ask. Indeed.com defines company culture as the “…set of shared core values and practices that define an organization” both internally and externally.  Over the years, I’ve come to enjoy an adjacent definition of the term: Company culture is the values, habits, and attitudes that exist today in your organization.

I emphasize the word “today” intentionally; culture is NOT an aspirational item. Whether you have intentionally defined company vision, core values, and communicated them to your team or not – there IS a vision people have of where your company is going. There ARE core values held by your team; they might not be the ones you want, but they’re there. The attitudes and actions your team takes routinely makes up how they experience your organization, as well as the experience your customers will have interacting with you. If your leadership is not careful, toxicity can run rampant in your organization.

I won’t say that there is only “one way” to create company culture – I’d encourage you to consume multiple points of view around the topic and forge your own path. Avoiding the pitfalls and frustration that come alongside poorly performing teams, as well as the anxiety client churn events due to customer experience issues, is a goal I’ve yet to meet an entrepreneur that wouldn’t be onboard with. Here are some of the lessons I’ve collected over the past two decades I’ve been in business around the topic.

Building Company Culture

Since we’ve established that your company has a culture, whether you created it intentionally or not, a bit of time focused on how to “build” company culture seems appropriate. Let’s look at that definition I shared again.

“Company culture is the values, habits, and attitudes that exist today in your organization.”

Building company culture then would be the installation of values, habits, and attitudes into your company. Overtime – those items will become your “new” culture.

Habits and attitudes require clear expectations being set, and a willingness on management’s part to hold people accountable to those expectations. You can’t expect to build Rome in a day – start small and focused. Choose a particular area or item and dive into what might be not ideal, confusing, or missing from your organization around that area. Involve some of your team members and other organizational leaders in the perspective gathering around the topic – your resulting insight will be richer from their take on the topic. Set some new guidelines around the resulting perspective and communicate them with your team. Highlight people publicly when they exemplify the “new” way of doing things, and have private discussions when they miss the mark, coaching and course correcting as needed. Over time, you’ll see that habit, and the corresponding attitude around the habit, become ingrained in your organization. Repeat the process on focus areas and watch your company culture start to shift and evolve as you build on previous successes.

Changing Company Culture

I had a great conversation with Paul Azad, CEO and founder of Service-Tree, a ConnectWise Manage plugin that assists Outsourced I.T. Providers (MSPs) better manage the task of triage and scheduling incident support requests, around the topic of changing company culture. You can see a clip of our conversation below, but I wanted to highlight one of the learnings Paul had shared during our chat on the Thursday Process web series.

Paraphrasing Paul, Culture is how people work together and produce results in an organization (values, habits, and attitudes). If people in your organization are coming into work and having particular parts of their experience be a drag or unenjoyable, you won’t get the best performance out of them, which in turn will drag down your organization as a whole. When you’re focused on changing company culture, try to examine parts of your team’s day and see how you can remove repetitive, low enjoyment tasks, either via automation, change in procedure, or some other tactic. The less “bad tasks” your team are having to do, the more they’ll enjoy their day-to-day work experience, which will translate into improved performance and a better customer experience.

https://youtu.be/Lc9ifcO6Dys

Final thoughts on Creating Company Culture

Creating company culture, changing company culture, or building a new company culture for the future is going to take focus, resources, and above all, consistency. The same as any other sort of behavioral change, time and communication will be key in your efforts. Making sure to plan what you want your company culture to become, and then to work on affecting that change through your plan can create forward positive momentum.

If you’re struggling with creating company culture, figuring out how to effectively change it, or getting alignment with your team on the need to invest in the effort, Richardson & Richardson can help. Check out our case studies for stories of organizations that we’ve assisted with similar issues and download our white papers for deep dives on tools you can use in your organization. If you’re wondering where to start, book a complimentary session with one of the Richardsons today to come up with a plan on how to move forward.