The DNA of high-performing cultures
Engagement and Productivity Certification
How to increase productivity through engagement
Maintaining engagement during change
Taking action on employee feedback
How to improve employee performance
The DNA of high-performing cultures
Building a high-performance culture
Just because you have a clear vision doesn’t always lead to a high-performing culture, although it does help. Before building your culture, you first need to take into account the current culture. Do you already promote strong leadership principles, employee development, etc.? If so, what areas need the most improvement? Don’t try to tackle all of them at once! Focus on what matters the most to your organization or what is the biggest concern in the way of achieving your goals.
Changing a culture isn’t a small task and it certainly can’t be something just willed into existence. You’ll have to change a whole mindset of people and motivate them to work by modified principles. Make sure you’re being transparent about the culture you want to see from your organization. This eliminates the chance of misinterpreted values. Leaders can purposefully do this by modeling desired behaviors. Does your company have internal newsletters? Are your managers speaking up in meetings to provide employees recognition? These are all examples of opportunities where an organization can demonstrate the values and actions it wants to support.
You can also align organizational goals to the values that make up a high-performing culture. One of the characteristics we mentioned was continuous employee development. Let’s say you’re working on the rollout of a new product. To promote a culture of employee growth, implement opportunities for coaching and training sessions during this time. Have your high performers coach others not just in areas around the new product, but also in other soft skills to expand their roles within the company.
Just having goals isn’t enough though. Build metrics that will accurately measure your culture performance. In order to identify whether your organization has a successful culture, you first need to define what that success looks like. Surveys like The Predictive Index’s Employee Experience Survey™ will allow you to see how your employees feel about the job itself, their managers, the people they work with, and the organization as a whole. Just make sure you’re focusing on the metrics that matter to your organization, as well as the goals you’re trying to achieve.
Once you have those metrics, hold yourself accountable. A high-performance culture can’t thrive if it’s not continuously being evaluated and pushed to the next level. Make sure you focus on an initiative to improve an aspect of your culture. From there, assess your organization to see if things are improving, and if not, find out why. These surveys allow you to take a pulse on the culture and engagement of your organization. Once finished, jump to the next important value you wish to change and repeat these steps to make sure you instill a high-performance culture throughout the organization.