Creating a Healthy Company Culture

For many years, I invested my professional life in helping companies consider and implement strategies that would improve the health of their people and also impact their bottom line through lowering their health care expenses.

The strategies changed through the years and as I look back, each of my clients or prospective clients were looking for a way to reduce the fastest rising, most unpredictable cost in their business. While I had some great solutions and we made some fantastic impacts, there was always something missing.

Prior to starting my executive coaching and leadership consulting business, I had been in the wellness incentives segment of the employee benefits industry.  As part of that industry, we always talked to prospective clients about the importance of senior leadership buy-in to the strategy. For the most part, for the companies that became my clients we had that buy-in.

But there was always something missing.

Something that was and is foundational to the long-term success of any wellness or well-being movement within a company regularly was missed. 

We always talked about creating a culture of wellness and well-being within the company and we attempted to help our clients through various programs and tools to help their people improve their health.

Yet that culture, in many cases, never took root. No one really knew what it took to get things to stick.  It’s why I’m so strongly invested in helping companies impact their culture today through a systematic approach. 

It’s my belief that the health of a company’s people can be impacted through an intentional culture system. 

By designing a culture that affects their physical and also their mental-emotional wellbeing is a key to having a cohesive team and company.

More than that, however, is the bigger picture of improved productivity, much higher employee engagement, lower turnover and the costs associated with all of these impacts.

The hard part about culture development, much like wellness programs, is that it’s a long-term process that takes discipline, leadership and vulnerability of the leaders who are driving it.

I recently had a CEO who said to his executive team, “we have to do this (intentionally drive their culture) … but it scares the <crap> out of me because I know that I need to work on some of these things myself.”  After admitting that they were all a bit nervous, they embarked on the journey of defining their fundamental success behaviors and the rituals that would help them sustain and internalize their success behaviors.

Making the decision that your culture is too important to let it just happen by chance can be a tough one because it means that you’re holding the standard for success higher.  I was preparing for a talk recently and did a word study on the word “decide”. 

When you look at the root of the word decide, it literally means “to kill off”.  Think of other words with the root “cide” like “homicide”, “genocide”, “pesticide”.  So to make a decision is to kill-off the old way of doing things and move in a different direction.

That point of departure is the hardest part.  Any time you as a leader decide to leave the status quo, there are a bunch of voices that are telling you reasons that you should leave well enough alone.

The difficult part in this is not necessarily that it needs to be done because nearly all CEOs readily recognize that the culture of their organization has an extraordinary impact on how their people do their work.

No, the difficult part is knowing how to do it because it’s much easier to do things that are tangible and directly impact the financial statements.  This designing culture involves people and human behavior.

But that’s where the simplicity of a system comes into play. For a human behavior to be internalized it needs repetition.  To get repetition, there needs to be a ritual.

Think about any ritual.  What happens before any sports event? The national anthem is played or sung.  It’s just what we do.  It’s a ritual.

That’s what is needed in organizations to intentionally create a designed culture rather than one that is created by default.  World class companies are ones that design their culture on purpose and they have clearly defined rituals around how they practice it.

If you’re thinking, “ok, I know that my culture is important to my company performance, what do I need to do?”

There are three things that can get you started in the right direction.

1. The first thing you need is to decide that you’re going to take action. Remember, that decision means killing off allowing the culture to be influenced by the person or people with the strongest personalities if they’re not supportive of the direction you want it to take. 

2. Secondly, define what your success behaviors look like. Think about the most productive, engaged member of your company that you have.  What do they do that makes them so successful?  When they are working, what do you see them doing? Clearly define your culture in terms of behaviors – the actions that lead to success.

3. Thirdly, think about what rituals you can perform to discuss and practice these behaviors. Often, our clients have a daily safety briefing or perhaps a team huddle where they take one of the behaviors and focus on it during the week.  These meetings allow for a short discussion about the behavior and some aspect of how it is practiced in daily life at your company.

Finally, commit to using these behaviors as not just something that’s on the wall in the office but something that is talked about every day, all day and in a variety of settings.  That commitment to be a company that has a world-class culture is the first step to leaving the status quo.

Creating a high performing and highly engaged culture is fairly simple. 

It’s straightforward and simple. 

Not easy!

Executing it means that you’re going to be departing the status quo and that isn’t easy.  But if you want a sustainable competitive advantage, lower turnover, improved productivity and higher employee engagement, it’s worth the effort.

And if you want to sustain this kind of culture, you must invest in your emerging leaders!

They are the key to your performance in this generation of business. 

That’s a subject for another article.