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Maintaining company culture

Strengthening values and norms

“Set It And Forget It” is a great motto for a rotisserie oven, not for your culture. Many factors impact a culture, including changes in leadership, company acquisitions, and even day-to-day decisions. It’s up to you and all employees to help maintain the culture you want. This requires you to check on it often.

Communication is key to maintaining your culture. Let your organization know the cultural values everyone should be striving for and why it actually matters in relation to your business. Without clear expectations, how will employees know what actions align with the culture? Leverage existing communication mediums to promote these values. If your organization has company-wide meetings, use the start of each meeting to highlight a recent example of someone exhibiting desired values

It’s nice to say you have a team-oriented culture–or whatever type you desire–but you also need to make sure you practice what you preach. Cultural values that compete with one another can send mixed signals to employees and hinder performance.

Define processes in your organization that foster a team concept, such as how people are evaluated and how assignments are delegated to avoid your culture working against itself.

Consider culture when you’re creating objectives for your team. Using tools like PI Team Discovery, you can map your team’s current objectives, which should match your company culture. If you find gaps, take time to decide if these objectives are what’s best for the company at this time. Sometimes they might be. Sometimes you might have a team with roles that need to be a certain style because of the nature of the job. For example, an innovative culture might still need a legal team that’s more aligned with a process based strategy.

Next, the tool will allow you to see the team’s behavioral tendencies as they apply to those objectives. If you find gaps in their behaviors and objectives, define goals to align with cultural behaviors before issues arise. For example, if your company values stability for the current objective, but some employees have more venturesome drives, consider training strategies around processes and procedures to help them during this objective.

Remember, sometimes team objectives might be outside the normal culture of your organization—and that’s okay. What’s important is that you’re aware of these differences to determine solutions that are best for the team and organization.

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