Culture & Employee Experience: Explained
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What is culture inside an organization?
I know this topic can be so nebulous and elusive.
When I ask leaders to describe their culture, it’s always all over the map.
Ultimately, what I want to do is marry these two ideas:
Culture is employee experience.
Culture really, truly is what it feels like to work for your organization, on your team. Not just, “Describe in a few words,” like, “Fun!”
Culture are the spoken and unspoken rules of engagement that define what it means to be part of a team in terms of how people show up, treat other people on the team, and how they approach their work and do their actual jobs.
The way that you create exceptional culture inside an organization is to create very clearly defined rules of engagement that everybody universally understands and takes ownership for.
These are:
Clear and consistent across the map
Easily understandable
Everybody takes ownership for
Nobody is exempt from (it can’t apply to specific levels of employees, but not the leadership team, CEO, or tenured employees).
Our commitment level as an organization has to be so solidified that we approach it as “These are the ground rules for behavior here, this is what’s acceptable and what exceptional looks like. We will allow nothing to take place that is out of alignment with this culture.”
In a nutshell, that is what culture is. When we talk about employee experience, it really is culture.
If you’re struggling to identify key behaviors, ask yourself these questions:
What does it feel like to be there?
What is your relationship with feedback?
Do leaders treat employees well?
Do leaders ask for feedback?
How do you navigate conflict?
Do people badmouth each other?
Are people reluctant and resistant to change, or do they see change as a path to progress?
All of these are behaviors that exist inside an organization; those things all contribute to culture and they aren’t this, "I hope we get it right."
Those are things that you can set intentionally and create from the day that you start an organization as a startup, or even if you’ve existed for years, you can create it now. They don't have to already be in place. That's what culture is. It's employee experience. And there's a way to do it.
Alright. Get out of here. Go be awesome.
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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop