If you are having trouble attracting or keeping talent or are struggling with a toxic workplace, keep reading to find out the top 2 things organizations do to create a culture where employees do their best work.

 

Employees are the secret to your organization’s success.

 

Harvard researcher, Jacob Morgan, showed that organizations that invested in their employee experience earned four times the average profit and two times the average revenue than companies who didn’t or simply undertook it in name only.

 

“48% of people joining a new organization are gone within 18 months, and 90% of those cite culture as the reason” says Nico Blier-Silvestri, founder of Platypus, a data-driven software that helps organizations understand cultural drivers and use that information to look at talent attraction, recruitment, management, retention, and more.

 

Putting these together, it’s clear that investing in your employees to create a people-first culture is worth it.

 

How well have you created an experience that helps your people do their best work?

 

 

If you are experiencing morale issues or staff retention issues, it’s likely you could benefit from taking note of what executives like Richard Branson, Brian Dunn of Best Buy, and Douglas Conant from Campbell’s Soup, protect their bottom line by creating cultures that empower their people to thrive.

 

They do this in two primary ways:

 

1. Create a culture of trust that starts at the top

 

 

“The person who runs the company is critical,” Branson says.  “If you choose somebody who genuinely loves people and looks for the best in people, that’s critical and if you bring someone in who isn’t good with people then you can destroy the company very quickly.”

 

 

In your leadership role, when a problem gets dumped in your lap, what is your first response? Even if you don’t say what’s in your mind, what is the feeling and thought that come up?

 

 

If it’s not curiosity and team spirit, then it’s worth taking a closer look at whether you are running a pattern of looking for the source of the problem.

 

 

Do you automatically assume that the reason a mistake was made is because someone is not competent, being lazy, etc.?

 

 

If so, I challenge you to consider when you erred or failed. In that moment, were you being lazy and not trying your best? Is it possible that you were trying hard, but needed to learn the lesson from that iteration?

 

 

How likely is it that the error meant you were overburdened either professionally or personally, rather than that you didn’t care or were purposefully sloppy or incompetent?

 

 

Could it be possible that you were doing your best despite the error? Did that error or failure inform what you did moving forward?

 

 

Can the same be true for your employees?

 

 

If the answer to any of those questions leads you to believe that you aren’t seeing the best in others or even yourself, take the time to reconnect with yourself and your staff.

 

 

Your profit and revenue are directly impacted by how well you trust yourself and your staff.

 

 

An environment where top managers are approachable, where they remember details about staff they work with, where staff are encouraged, rather than criticized, and where failures are repurposed as First Attempts In Learning (FAIL) ensure that staff stay motivated and productivity stays high.

 

So, in the words of Winston Churchill, “ask not what your [employees] can do for you, but what you can do for your [employees].”

 

 

The Take-away

 

 

A culture where people thrive starts with you, the leader.

 

Because you trust that people are doing their best, you respond differently when challenges arise. You are approachable and you for what to praise, rather than what to criticize.

 

 

If you aren’t doing this, you can learn how to. Your bottom line depends on it.

 

 

2. Create and fulfill an experience contract with your employees 

 

From the moment a potential hire engages with your organization, even if it’s indirectly, your contract with them starts.

 

This is your brand contract, and according to Matthew Wride, co-author of ‘The Employee Experience: How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results,” it’s one of three types you have throughout the employee experience lifecycle.

 

 

The brand contract

 

 

Unmet expectations is the biggest reason why culture fails. Your brand is what your organization presents that sets expectations, both explicitly and implicitly.

 

 

If your brand is embodied, meaning that it’s aligned to the values of your employees and their corresponding actions, then you walk the talk and it’s likely you will experience staff loyalty, rather than turnover.

 

 

Where you give lip service to values and don’t invest in employees, you are creating a gap between what your organization says and what it does.

 

 

If there’s a more than 50% difference in the gap between your employees’ expectations and their reality, you will struggle to engage employees and retain talent.

 

 

The transactional contract

 

 

This is the formal day-to-day material contract between the employer and employee such as an employment contract.

 

 

These contracts spell out the explicit expectations that employers set around compensation, benefits, safety, etc.

 

 

The psychological contract

 

 

This is the informal non-material contract that encases the implicit expectations of your employees.

 

 

It is the sum of their hope to develop their skills, their desire for recognition, and their wish to advance.

 

 

Certain expectations bridge all three contracts. Promotion, for example, could be demonstrated in your brand through spotlighting employee stories. It could also be explicitly stated in an interview. And/or it could also be implied in the employee’s aspirations.

 

 

Being aware of and managing all three type of contracts leads to committed and engaged employees.

 

 

The Takeaway

 

Expectations form the basis of an organization’s contractual obligations. These can be broken down into explicit and implicit expectations, which can be categorized into three types of contract.

 

 

An organization must successfully manage all three types of contract to create a culture that nourishes engaged, productive, and loyal employees.

 

 

Trust

 

 

Successful management of these three contracts requires an essential element: trust.

 

 

Situations arise that Wride calls MoTs – Moments of Truth – where an organization either reinforces or violates these contracts.

 

 

It doesn’t actually matter what action is associated with the situation, simply that the employee perceives the contract to be reinforced.

 

 

That perception arrives when the action is aligned with the values professed by the organization, thereby meeting the employee’s expectations.

 

 

Which brings us back to and reinforces the first point: employees thrive and do their best work within a culture of trust that starts at the top.

 

 

If you want to design a culture of trust without sacrificing results, schedule a free call with me to see what that would look like.

 

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With gratitude to Kazuya Washio for creating “blockpeople society.” Kazuya has created a set of toy building blocks that are shaped like abstract people and painted with a diverse range of skin tone colors. The racially inclusive set develops children’s imagination while providing an opportunity to learn about diversity from an early age. Find more here: https://www.washio-design.tokyo/%E8%A4%87%E8%A3%BD-ppff