What does it mean, culture of a company?

Culture is like personality. In a person, the personality is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, interests, experiences, upbringing, and habits that create a person’s behavior. Culture is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors shared by a group of people.

The feeling of unity is one reason why creating a company culture is an important aspect of your business. Unity positively impacts the company by solidifying values and goals among employees, and also increases company morale. … It embodies the core values of your company that each team member emulates. The importance of a strong organizational culture… When an organization has a strong culture, it keeps their employees actively and passionately engaged. A strong culture impacts the values and norms of an organization. It creates and supports the mission, vision and values.

As a company matures, its cultural values are refined and strengthened. The early values of a company’s culture exert influence over its future values. It is possible to think of organizational culture as an organism that protects itself from external forces. Organizational culture determines what types of people are hired by an organization and what types of people are left out. Moreover, once new employees are hired, the company assimilates new employees and teaches them the way things are done in the organization.

Company Culture Metrics

Communication

In companies with strong communication, employees are able to communicate their thoughts and suggestions to leadership, while leadership effectively communicates necessary information to employees. Assess if your current channels of communication are effective at helping everyone in the company send, receive and understand information.

2. Innovation

As an entrepreneur, innovation is one of my favorite subjects. It is closely related to communication, because it comes down to whether employees have the ability to move ideas through the organization and how much your company is open to new ideas. When measuring innovation, remember that it comes in many forms, such as resources, processes, behaviors and the product itself.

Agility is key to staying competitive in the market. While leadership might feel that they are adapting well to internal and external changes, other employees will be the ones to feel the effects of whatever falls through the cracks. Therefore, keep tabs on your company’s agility by regularly soliciting feedback from employees at all levels.

4. Wellness

Workplace wellness encompasses the mental and physical health of employees. Not only does wellness lead to happier and more productive employees but this metric also has an important ripple effect. According to a study in Health Affairs, medical costs and absentee costs fall about $3.27 and $2.73 respectively for every dollar spent on wellness programs.

5. Environment

While it’s certainly exciting, you don’t need to have a trendy or themed office to have an effective work environment. What is most important is that the workplace provides for comfortable, productive employees. For instance, small details, such as the temperature of the office, could be resulting in big losses in productivity. Focus on employee comments related to the workplace, and you will find some of the easiest and fastest ways to improve their performance.

6. Collaboration

Collaboration has many layers, and once again, employee feedback is the key to getting to the bottom of them. Your marketing team might work splendidly together but struggle working with other departments. To fully measure your company’s collaboration, look for collaboration within teams, as well as collaboration between teams.

Employees should feel supported by the overall company, their manager and peers. According to a study in Harvard Business Review, middle managers are the most disgruntled group in the workforce, possibly because they are lacking the support they need to be successful. By digging into this metric on an individual and group level, you are able to expose important trends in engagement.

8. Performance focus

Everyone should understand what determines success in their role, and they should be rewarded or recognized accordingly. Larger rewards do not necessarily make for a stronger culture. Instead, take time to understand if employees feel they are appreciated and how they would like to be recognized.

9. Responsibility

Responsibility encompasses employee accountability for actions and results, as well as the ability to make decisions regarding their work. While it seems like an individual metric, these behaviors should be promoted and assessed on a company-wide level. And believe me, you’ll find that employees are eager to report back on their experience in this area.

10. Mission and value alignment

The first step is having a mission statement and company values, and that’s the easy part. You should also keep regular tabs on if employees know your mission and values, understand them, and live by them. This process starts during recruitment, so don’t let this metric fall to the wayside during periods of high growth.

So there you have it; finally, culture and metrics can live happily ever after. The unique way in which you approach these qualities is what I like to call the “personality” of your company. These metrics won’t capture the specifics of your personality, but they will measure if it is working for your employees. They will help you understand if your culture is contributing to a happy, engaged, and effective workforce.

All of these metrics are essential to a strong culture. I found the hardest was getting no. 8 performance focus. This requires a measuring system that can be trusted. I found we make it harder then it has to be. In construction we use phase and cost codes to determine a jobs cost performance but I see to many companies missing out on a key element of their accounting systems. Besides estimating hours to accomplish the goals we need to include a unit of measure and the quantity of that unit. Establishing this practice on every job will allow you to identify performance and build historical data that can be trusted. I realized this back in the early 90’s with my company and the results produced above average profits and gave me an incredible competitive edge. Feel free to email me, lee@paycrew.com if you are interested in learning more or you can explore more on our website. I have previous blogs that outline the process of data collection and production measuring. Thank you for reading!

Lee Clark

As the CEO and co-founder of PayCrew, Lee Clark is passionate about the people in the field, because he understands the importance of trust between a company and its people. As a construction business owner, he saw first-hand how attracting and retaining skilled people form the foundation of a company’s success.

Lee has a passion for measuring daily performance in the construction industry and is also a regular contributor at Concrete Construction.

15 Mins. to Successful Production Measuring!