Company culture is the most important strategic pillar of growth for any company
Most organizations spend the majority of their time and focus on balance sheets, product innovation, leadership, hiring top talent, sales and marketing and technology in an effort to grow. These are all critical to growth, if any of these are broken there is little doubt your company will struggle. But the most overlooked and probably most important function from which everything else flows in a well oiled company is actually your cultural roadmap.
It can sound daunting, also sometimes too intangible to be that important and is often missed as a strategic pillar of growth for these reasons, but to do so would be a huge oversight. Here’s why…….
- Technology, marketing and innovation are all resource intensive, and a heavy drain on your companies P&L. You need to be able to trust your people to drive these to the best place possible without you having to micromanage and make every decision. Every wasted moment or dollar is very costly in these areas so ensuring you have the right people, operating in the right way should be your first priority. Talent is part of this, but culture enables you to attract the right talent and keep them motivated to give the best of themselves
- Turnover is deadly for any business at any level of maturity. The ROI on reducing turnover is huge and fundamental to reducing turnover is ensuring your people want to want their socks off for your company, regardless of small gaps in compensation, location or bandwidth
- Getting culture right makes training leadership easy – associates lead by example and exhibit all the leadership qualities you could otherwise spend years trying to train into your team.
Defining your culture well cascades into your leaders knowing what behaviors are expected of them, which in turn cascades into consistency across departments and all teams feeling a sense of trust, fairness, empowerment and showing up ready with solutions (technology, product, sales, etc) without anyone even needing to ask for them. Not only that, but employee LIFETIME VALUE is generated, avoiding knowledge drain, knowledge transfer to your competition, expense, time lost to retraining and time lost to missed opportunities that are all associated with having to rehire into a position that was already filled by an expert.
We have been collecting data on what has been driving elevated turnover in corporate america – check out out research below