Why Does Culture Matter?
In the “Demographic Drought- Bridging the Gap in our Labor Force” they summarize the answer to this question; the Employee Centric environment is here to stay, with fewer people entering the workforce than leaving, and with immigration down. Therefore, talented workers will have their choice of where they work,
What makes culture unique however, is that culture exists in every company whether you create it intentionally or not.
A great culture can attract better talent, improve retention, drive performance, and create a positive workplace where people want to perform at their highest levels.
How Do You Build Culture?
Many companies struggle with intentionally building the culture they want to have. In many cases, culture is a holdover from previous leaders and it’s difficult to change. Even though many new leaders want to improve their overall culture, they may not know how to start or have the tools necessary to do so.
Creating a Talent Attracting Culture is a process that takes planning, time, and alignment between your departments. An easy way to get started is to understand what makes a great culture and evaluate how your company as it relates to each area.
Put People First
A people-first culture is created by prioritizing the relationships you have with employees and team members over profit or technology. Focus on understanding your employees and gaining clarity on the needs and goals of your team. Having a mutual respect and understanding among employees creates a very positive environment.
Openness to Diverse Perspectives
Being open to diversity is critical in improving company culture. Diversity is not just about hiring for race or gender. True diversity is achieved when a company hires people from a variety of backgrounds, educations, social classes, and more.
Having an openness to diverse perspective means tapping into your team’s varying work experiences and hearing everyone’s ideas out. An organization that has employees from differing backgrounds, both professionally and personally, can gain valuable perspective from a variety of viewpoints.
One method of understanding your team’s diversity and unique thinking would be to utilize a personality assessment, such as IMX to understand more about how each individual differs in their thought processes.
Team Analysis
Another way to achieve a talent attracting culture is to understand your team at a deeper level. Once you’ve administered an assessment of your team, you can further examine their various talents and perspectives to better understand which roles these people should be playing in your organization and how to have a higher performing team.
Right Metrics
Defining the metric that aligns all to achieve your vision and reinforces your values is key. For example, if attracting and retaining talent is key to your success, measuring retention, with enough detail to provide insight for improvement.
Celebrate Success
Taking the time to step back and acknowledge the work and results that have your team has achieved is a great way to encourage performance-driven culture within your organization. When your team sees that their success in meeting goals and metrics doesn’t go unnoticed but is actually celebrated, it will encourage them to continue to push for that success in the future.
Having those set metrics that we discussed previously will make this process much easier because your team knows what success looks like so that it can be achieved.
We’ve discussed several techniques that go into developing a Talent Attracting Culture, now it’s time to put these to work!
We first recommend initiating a personality assessment, such as IMX, with your team members to understand how they think differently from one another.