These 5 factors are the indicators of healthy company culture
A few weeks ago I published an article about how we’re establishing company culture at doopoll. That article was picked up by FT blogs etc and garnered a huge amount of interest from all kinds of people.
If you’re working in a modern organisation, it’s difficult to get away from the word ‘culture.’ People talk about it all the time. There are even conferences related to building healthy culture.
Think about the companies that you most admire. What is it that you admire about them? Rarely is it only their product. It’s usually the way that they’ve behaved or the ideas that they have put into the execution of some project.
A lot of people point to Patagonia as an example of a great company. What makes them great? Well, their products are certainly long lasting. But the most memorable thing about Patagonia is the culture that they have built in their organisation. They’ve even written books about it.
On Amazon’s best seller list of 2017 books, you’ll find the tome Principles by Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates. It’s a book about the culture of a capital management firm.
As an economy, we are totally obsessed with culture and how to improve it and what the improvements might bring.
But where do you start?
A quick ad: We’d love to help you measure, track and improve your organisation’s culture using the culture barometer we developed. It’s the same one we use at doopoll. You can express your interest in that by filling out this super quick form.
Let’s answer a basic but confusing question
For a lot of people, the idea of great culture comes from companies like Google or Apple. On face value that means that good culture should be about offering ball pools at work or giving people health insurance.
But that’s simply not accurate. Those are expressions of cultural values within both of those companies, but they don’t show what the culture is.
A much more accurate description of culture is:
Culture is the context for decision making in the business
Seems a bit narrow? I can try to convince you until the cows come home but instead, I’ll apply that description in a practical way.
We believe that there are 5 key areas that make up healthy companies and those form the basis of the questions that we ask in our culture barometer. If you would like to try out our culture barometer click here to register your interest.
Here are the 5 factors that make up good cultures.
1. Purpose
We have the philosophies for a rough map, the only kind that’s useful in a business world whose contours, unlike those of the mountains, change constantly and without much warning.
– Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia
Purpose is the foundational set of beliefs which explain why a company exists. There is often a mission statement or vision which can be recited as a replacement for the elevator pitch. Let me give you doopoll’s as an example:
Organisations thrive when they understand what’s important to the people they care about.
This helps with decisions about product development, sales, operations and HR. It’s easily repeatable and provides everyone in doopoll’s business the necessary framework for understanding the situation at hand.
We also provide a set of principles for our employees in order to help them make more granular decisions about day to day life. You can read about those here.
But in businesses where there is no clearly visible set of beliefs or principles, people don’t have a context for decision making.
Think about your own experience: when you’ve been in organisations where there is only a loose sense of purpose, have the management structures been healthy? Or have you been micromanaged?
This is why clearly articulated purpose is important. And ensuring that people are actually using it — rather than just looking at those dusty ‘principles’ posters you hung in your reception — is really key.
2. People
Until automation makes humanity obsolete, we can safely say that people make up all organisations and businesses.
There’s a huge HR marketplace who are looking for the best employee satisfaction surveys. Zenefits, a HR startup, was valued at $4.5B a few years ago.
Although it differs for every company, ACAS shares this horrifying stat:
The analysis from Oxford Economics found that by far the greatest expense, more than £25,000, comes from loss of productivity caused by the time it takes — 28 weeks on average — for a new recruit to get up to speed.
Keeping team members happy and engaged is really tricky. Humans are temperamental, often lacking absolute control over our emotional states. This impacts our mood and fulfilment in the business that we work in.
Losing key employees can have a huge impact on your business. And if your company culture is poor in this area, you could be losing people unnecessarily.
Beyond the financial cost of losing an employee, there can be significant impact on morale and other areas of company culture too.
3. Progression
As well as collecting a pay cheque, one of the rewards that organisations can offer is self development and ownership of parts of the business.
We’ve all had at least some experience of boring continuous professional development days — but the fact that there are so many choices of workshops or courses to go on demonstrates that there is a thirst for that development.
But there are other areas of progression that matter to company cultures.
Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between 1977–1997) expect to stay in a job for less than three years, according to the Future Workplace “Multiple Generations @ Work” survey of 1,189 employees and 150 managers. That means they would have 15–20 jobs over the course of their working lives!
Tenure in businesses appears to be decreasing. We are switching jobs more frequently. And so it makes very little sense to develop skillsets that only apply in a narrow set of circumstances.
Rather than that, we can increase the sense of ownership in the organisation in low impact ways.
At doopoll, we recently responded to this need by setting an entrepreneurial task for our team members. We gave a brief to them and asked them to come up with ideas. They each pitched their idea and as a team we decided on the winner (of course, using our own platform).
This develops a feeling of entrepreneurialism. The skills that are required on project based development training like this are invaluable in whatever role our team members will take on next.
For us, it is important that anyone who leaves doopoll is able to create a job for themselves as quickly as possible after their last day at our company.
4. Pleasure
Increasingly, it is important to foster a sense of wellbeing in individuals in your team. In an age where it’s easy to continue working after you’ve left work for the day, it is especially important to help staff find a healthy work life balance.
We’ve all done it. It’s bath time for the kids. But as the water’s running, we’re checking our e-mails. We get back from holiday and see what the work chat app of choice has been up to. 1M messages.
It’s difficult to separate your work life and your personal life and in recent months, there has been a lot of talk about whether that’s even a useful distinction anymore.
Public service announcement: it is always going to be a useful distinction. You might know that it’s OK to switch off, but if you e-mail one of your employees at 10pm, it’s hard for them not to reply right away.
That in mind, a key element of a healthy culture is establishing a work life balance as well as a sense of enjoyment about going to work.
But what if you disagree with me about blurring the work life balance?
I’m not offended. Our culture barometer offers employees the chance to set their own preferences. Here’s the framing of one of the questions:
“Over the last month, I’ve been able to balance my professional and personal interests to the extent that I would like to”
This is non-dogmatic and will allow every team member to indicate their sentiment of the health of the culture from their personal pleasure perspective.
5. Promotion
A simple measure of health is: do you value your company’s culture enough to recommend it to a friend or family.
The last area that we measure in our culture barometer is whether or not a team member would recommend that someone they value apply for a job at their company.
Why?
Well, this area cuts through and essentially asks: “Is the culture the kind of place that you’d like your best friend to work in?”
If you’ve got a poor company culture, they’re going to tell you with this. If I’m working in a bad company, I’m definitely not going to recommend that my partner also works here.
And that’s it.
Those are the 5 metrics that we track to ensure healthy company cultures. Are you interested in using the same tool that we do? If you are, here are the answers to a few questions you might have and then a link to express your interest in our prototype trial.
How does it work?
- We send out the same poll we designed to measure cultural satisfaction at doopoll to your people
- We measure their response and report that directly back to you monthly
- We recommend small but effective changes that you can make to improve your company culture and engagement
What do I get?
- 1 x doopoll company culture poll per month — the same one that we use to ensure our company culture is of a high standard
- 3 x monthly reports showing simple metrics and comments from your team
- 3 x sets of small changes that you can make to improve the culture
How much is it?
The trial is a flat rate of £85 per month for a period of 3 months. We can also provide a 6 month trial for the same price.
How do I sign up?
You can do that by filling out this super quick form. Or if you have any other questions, you can message me here or send me a mail at marc@doopoll.co
