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It’s easy to be consumed by scaling challenges and forget about your company culture. But if your business is growing, your culture has already been a vital component in your organisation’s success. As you scale, stakeholders, investors, or external consultants may begin to get involved. There may be temptations to adapt or requirements to make changes to your business that can impact all those good cultural attributes that brought you here in the first place.
“I used to believe that culture was ‘soft,’ and had little bearing on our bottom line. What I believe today is that our culture has everything to do with our bottom line, now and into the future.”
– Vern Dosch, Wired Differently
Your culture will grow and develop throughout the business’s lifetime. It is “the way things are done” and often exists as an unseen presence, influencing every action, process, and attitude.
But whether that culture remains stable and asserts a positive or negative influence on the profitability, reputation, and longevity of the business as it grows, can be a bit hit and miss. You must take steps to monitor, manage, and steer the culture in a direction that supports the strategy and rapid growth. When scaling a business, the culture that has fuelled your success could be the thing holding back your growth ambitions.
Culture creates a sense of purpose. It transforms a group of people into a team. It sets the path and tone for the business and establishes a set of values and behaviours to achieve goals. It helps onboard, embed, and empower your team. It helps retain and attract new talent. It quashes staff churn and engenders brand advocacy.
A strong culture improves business performance by motivating employees, aligning them toward a shared vision, and helping them achieve performance goals that drive profitability.
“Corporate culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage that is completely within the control of the entrepreneur.”
– David Cummings, Co-Founder, Pardot
At this stage of business growth, it’s important to revisit your culture and understand what should stay the same, what needs to be tweaked or refined, and what needs to change. Your culture should grow up with your business, and this must start with consciously prioritising your culture as a key component of your top-level business strategy.
Once you’ve established a focus on your company culture, the first step is to assess it – to identify the positives and show you any hidden cracks, misalignments or bottlenecks. Using a model like the Culture Consultancy Organisation Culture Assessment™
Auditing your culture will allow you to understand how things are currently done, identify what is supporting your strategy and growth, and highlight potential cultural blockers.
Once you’ve assessed your culture and identified what you want to keep and what you might need to adjust as you grow, it’s about articulation.
You must design and communicate the culture that will mobilise your people to execute on the strategy and enable growth. It starts with vision, values, and behaviours and moves into leader and manager capability as well as generic working practices. Once clear on these things, you must embed them into every facet of your business.
Engaging your employees to live and breathe your clearly articulated culture is key to embedding it, and this happens partly through the mechanism of employee experience – the sensation your employees have as a result of working for you. A positive employee experience will ensure greater employee satisfaction, motivation, productivity, performance, and well-being. It will enhance your employer brand and help you attract and retain the best talent.
In the early days, it was relatively easy and implicit to hire new talent. There’s an unspoken understanding of the culture, and it’s easy to know the values and behaviours that fit. However, when teams grow quickly, companies can become less clear on the attributes they are hiring against unless the hiring process is fit for purpose.
Hiring the wrong people can not only result in lost time and recruitment costs; it can also impact the experience of current employees and their productivity, thus making attracting the right talent as you grow crucial for company culture.
An organisation needs strong, effective leadership with a defined sense of purpose to have a positive, aligned culture. Culture change may not always be driven by the CEO and the leadership team, and certainly, culture needs to be embedded right through an organisation. However, the behaviours and actions displayed by the people at the top are visible to all who work there, so they must match the desired culture. Walking the talk is necessary to keep the culture alive.
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