Peter Done is Group CEO and founder of business services specialist Peninsula Group.
If you’re anything like me, you started your business with a strong sense of purpose.
A clear vision of the culture you wanted to create. Your own values and morals are hard-coded into your business.
But as you grow your enterprise, that vision becomes harder to hold onto. You recruit more leaders who have their own visions and opinions around managing staff. And when you branch into multiple workspaces, it’s difficult to stop your managers from also branching off.
If managers adopt their own toxic or harmful values, this will trickle down to all employees. This could soon mean you’re heading up a culture that’s a far cry from how you initially hoped your business would operate.
The Importance Of Consistent Values
Without enforcing your values from top to bottom, your business ends up with a weakened sense of identity. And make no mistake, this could be a recipe for chaos and confusion.
Imagine it.
You aspire to create a supportive environment where staff build each other up. Instead, your managers encourage a competitive and cut-throat culture to drive results. That might then lead to high turnover, awful morale, a poor reputation, and difficulties with recruitment.
Or, if your managers all pursue their own unique management style, it becomes difficult to pinpoint any company values at all.
This leads to issues with employee engagement and retention. According to a survey by Qualtrics, employees whose “company’s mission, vision and values align with their own are far more likely to recommend their employer as a great place to work (70% vs. 25%).” So you can imagine the impact unclear values would have on your recruitment and retention.
These days, workers are more ethically driven than ever before. In fact, 56% of people wouldn’t work at a company that didn’t share their values.
So, it’s clear you need to set strong cultural values. Now we’ve established that, here’s how you actually maintain those values within a large, growing, or multinational business.
Consistency Amongst Management
As your business grows, you delegate more. It’s a natural part of growth.
In order to venture into new areas, you will need to trust your managers to make decisions on their own. Micromanagement can be detrimental to the overall success of your business.
So you shouldn’t need to intervene and sign off every last decision. But it’s important that managers use your core values to influence their own decision-making process.
How do you achieve this?
First, it’s essential you have regular management meetings with your senior leadership team. For me, face-to-face meetings are always preferable to online—nothing beats meeting people in person—but the most important thing is to stick to a regular rotation. In these meetings, you should aim to reinforce your values. This could involve praising or highlighting recent achievements that reflect your company culture.
Plus, when discussing plans, try to weave your company values into these discussions. Say you’re planning an upcoming event—how will this uphold your values? If one of your core values is ‘innovation,’ how will that shape your event itinerary or marketing style?
When you regularly emphasize your values in discussion, your management team should soon naturally assimilate them.
Along with meetings, try to arrange soft-skill training sessions. This should give your management team hands-on direction to handle conduct issues or reward successes within the business.
Your values should also underpin your essential HR processes—like your disciplinary, performance, or appraisal procedures. This provides managers with a roadmap to tackle day-to-day staff issues, in line with the culture you want to create.
Sharing Values Across Different Workspaces
Whether your workspaces are scattered across the local area, country, or globe—it’s harder to monitor your culture when your employees aren’t all under the same roof.
This is why it’s essential you build a strong company identity. This could involve investing in marketing and branding, like creating a company motto, issuing branded items, and displaying your values in the physical realm—like wall murals.
When employees are surrounded by physical reminders of your company values, you can help them foster a connection to them.
Online tools also play a pivotal role in how you build an identity across multiple offices. An intranet is a good space to document shared values for all employees to access, no matter where they’re based. A company newsletter is another powerful way to communicate values—use it as a tool to celebrate employee wins that reinforce your culture.
You could even award staff who uphold your company values, like those who display acts of kindness or creativity. A regular competition incentivizes staff to strive towards your desired company culture. And with peer-to-peer nominations, you encourage employees to actively seek out and engage with your values on a regular basis.
Beyond this, it’s important to bring all teams together with events or team-building activities. This gives managers and employees the chance to network and celebrate their shared goals.
Lastly, shared documentation is crucial. Every staff member should have access to an employee handbook, which should ideally outline your company culture. Don’t be afraid to specify what that looks like in real life—how can employees show they’re upholding these values?
Lead By Example
“Do as I say, not as I do.” That’s an expression that can cause issues if you follow it.
In every offhand gesture or comment, you normalize a certain type of behavior. This naturally trickles down to your managers, who could pass this down to their employees. This could create a hotbed for other, less-desirable behaviors to flourish.
So, whether your employees work within one building, multiple offices, or spread across the world, it’s vital they recognize your company cultures within your actions.
Think: if your business had a personality, how would it act? Whatever your answer, be sure to manifest that in your day-to-day interactions.
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