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Cracking the Culture Code – Why You Should Care About Creating Culture

“There is no magical unicorn that craps out great culture”

Those are words of caution from Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of Hubspot and self-anointed introvert that captivated the audience during his Dreamforce 2013 talk on developing and implementing culture in an organization.

Tasked with documenting the Hubspot company culture a few years back, Dharmesh claims it was the “hardest thing I’ve taken on in my career.”

Shared beliefs, values and practices – that’s culture

Company culture used to be standard – rules and regulations handed down from executive-level folks were accepted by employees as long as the benefits and compensation were good.

No more, Dharmesh found. That model is broken and Hubspot set out to figure out how to tackle company culture.

But why? As a business leader you probably think of 100 things more pressing than something as seemingly trivial as company culture.

Here are Dharmesh’s top reasons why to spend calories in culture:

  1. Creating a culture is hard, killing it is easy – left alone most things degrade to crap without outside intervention
  2. Culture debt is insidious and often interminable – hiring the wrong people can be a really tough and lengthy thing to overcome
  3. Good culture makes the easy decisions unnecessary and makes difficult decisions easier!
  4. The team determines the destiny and the culture determines the team
  5. Don’t just hire to delegate – hire to elevate
  6. Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing – customers flock to great products, workers flock to great companies with good culture
  7. Helps the stars “shine”
  8. Whether you like it or not, you will have a culture – why not take the time to design?

We’ll have more from Dharmesh. Specifically – how do you actually go about documenting and creating the blueprint for culture code.

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Our Favorite Reads of the Week: Casinos, German, Company Campfires, & Startups

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking engaged employees are the same as satisfied employees. Engaged employees are significantly more dedicated and emotionally connected to their work, their coworkers, and the organization’s overall goals. This week, we found a plethora of content on employee engagement. and I’ve gathered some of the latest and greatest resources from industry top performers: Forbes, Inc, Rosetta Stone, and more.

Caesars Entertainment Uses Employee Engagement to Inspire Customer Loyalty

Caesars casino finds that customer loyalty and satisfaction is directly linked to Caesars employees’ level of participation in sustainable activities at work.

“Companies wishing to take their social and environmental efforts to the next level often view consumer engagement as the holy grail of corporate sustainability efforts. But the best way to engage our customers in our sustainability journey is by engaging our most valuable asset: our employees.”

How Communication Can Improve Employee Engagement

Language education giant Rosetta Stone provides some clear advice on employee engagement: Talk to your employees. Seemingly simple yet not as commonly followed.

“Employees need to know how the organization is doing. They need to know how they fit into the big picture. They need to know how their efforts influence the overall outcome in terms of business results…A culture of open and honest communication needs to start at the top. Only then can you foster employee engagement for years to come.”

How the Best Places to Work are Nailing Employee Engagement

7 spot on strategies for fostering a culture of engaged employees with examples from the industry’s most successful organizations.

“Having the right engagement practices powered by understanding the drivers most meaningful to employees can work towards creating a more motivated and high-performing workforce. Committing to an intentional culture that’s open, transparent, and enables employees to thrive is important for retaining top performers. Whether it’s participating in community events, celebrating coworkers or fostering more open communication, organizations that build a culture where employee involvement matters can nail employee engagement and create a great place to work.”

How to Hang Onto Your Best & Brightest

Think like a startup entrepreneur! You may be putting a lot of time and energy into recruiting top talent, but how about keeping them on board?

“Start by deciding exactly who you need to retain. Be honest. Some people are more valuable to your company than others, so focus on the things that are important to them. Employees won’t stay because of the size of the paycheck. They’ll stay because they feel they are recognized, engaged, challenged, and part of a team.”

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What Really Drives Employee Engagement? Getting a Handle on Causes And Effects, For Starters

Passion, commitment, job satisfaction, positivity, drive, connection to the company—all sentiments that explain or define employee engagement. When you start to look at employee engagement seriously*, you’ll find rather quickly that it’s easy to confuse cause and effect. Making the distinction between driver and outcome is instrumental in developing a strategy around engagement, especially when it comes to measuring it.

For example, would you say that one’s tendency to help others around them is a driver or an outcome of employee engagement? Is a commitment to customer service a driver or outcome? What about good communication among employees?

Cornell University’s Chris Collins explains the importance of making these distinctions and why they’re so important to identify.

Note: We pick up the discussion here at 2:05, so click to the beginning of the video for a better grasp on the ways that we’ve historically defined engagement.

*Here are 4 tips to increase engagement and set your team on a course for growth and prosperity.

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Employee Engagement: Four Tips for Team Growth

Sustaining high growth can take a lot out of your team. Without specific strategies to engage employees on an ongoing basis, you will not be able to achieve your long-term goals. At eCornell, we are committed to finding and supporting those ideas that work, and the proof is in our nearly ten years of double-digit revenue growth with low employee turnover.

1. Be Open

This one is simple; the more people know, the more they can contribute to results. We have no closed-door offices. We hold bi-weekly all-hands company meetings where information from across all functional areas is shared. I share company financials (good or bad) on a monthly basis at our company meetings.

2. Be Connected

About one-third of our company works from home, and many more travel or telecommute part time. This provides a lot of flexibility for people to balance work and life. We’ve turned this potential challenge into an opportunity by investing in keeping people connected. We probably hold dozens of desktop video meetings throughout the day. Everyone can share goals, accomplishments, news, customer complaints, testimonials, and resolutions on Chatter by Salesforce, our internal messaging system. And of course, we live and die by Google Chat. We’ve had employees comment that they sometimes feel more connected when traveling than when in the office.

3. Be Celebrating

I learned long ago two important things: (1) you can never over-celebrate team and individual accomplishments and (2) there are way better people in our company than me to figure out how to do that. We announce all sales wins on Chatter, we celebrate major project milestones, and find ways to accomplish major life events for employees. To make this happen, we have our B.E.E.R team (Building Employee Engagement and Recognition team) that plan major company events through the year so the employees from across the company are deciding when and how to launch an event to help us blow off some steam.

4. Always Be Learning

Dozens of our employees have earned a Cornell Certificate through our employee learning program; so yes, we use our own product! But sometimes, we need to go above and beyond. We encourage all of our managers to set learning goals for each team member so that we are bringing new ideas and skills into the company all the time.

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Telecommuting: Value Add or Risky Fluff?

Dialogue around telecommuting (or telework) captured a lot of attention in 2013 with some high profile companies, including Yahoo and Best Buy, sparking new debate over the value of these programs. While many organizations continue to experience the benefits of well-designed and administered telecommute programs, headlines about other organizations abandoning or restricting their programs sparked new debate over an old question;

Does a telecommute program add value, or is it a risky and inefficient means to provide employee flexibility?

Whichever side you take in this debate, you can find plenty of evidence to support your argument. Organizations that have implemented telecommute programs through carefully designed plans that are strategically aligned to support business goals are likely realizing the value of telework. On the other hand, well-intended organizations that allow employees to work remotely without a strategic plan risk feeling pain similar to those that have made recent headlines.

Let Business Strategy Lead the Way

While at times telecommuting may appear to be a solution in search of a problem, many organizations with successful programs have identified strategic business goals before considering it as part of their strategy. Some of these business goals include:

  • Business Expense Reduction – Real estate expense reduction can be significant when owned or rented space is replaced by home or other remote work arrangements. But the existing space needs to be disposed of, or the remote work arrangements become an additional expense.
  • Business Continuity – While bad weather, building emergencies, even flu and other communicable diseases have regular and significant impact on productivity, an effective telework program can markedly reduce the risks and impact by decentralizing portions of the workforce.
  • Employee Engagement and Retention – In 2012, Cornell Assistant Professor Brad Bell surveyed employees of a 30,000+ employee company where 40% of employees work from home on a full-time basis. About 5,000 office-based and remote employees were asked to rank a list of potential advantages offered by telecommuting. Schedule flexibility and care of family members were identified as advantages, but savings in money and time were ranked at the top by a significant margin. The same company experiences consistently higher rates of retention and engagement among its telecommuters, with the same or better performance, and has realized opportunities to retain valuable talent who would otherwise be forced to leave due to spouse transfers, family illness or other family/personal issues.
  • Talent Acquisition – Let’s face it, some talent is hard to find. The ability to recruit for essential skill sets wherever they are, avoiding the need for relocation, can offer a huge competitive advantage; as can the ability to place stakeholder-facing employees where you need them without the need for local office space or extensive travel.

Aligning the Business and Telecommute Strategies

A well-designed telecommute strategy includes the establishment of criteria for when and how it will be used. The business goals and strategy form the basis upon which these criteria are designed. Some strategic organizations have established criteria that focus on a combination of three factors:

  • The Work Itself – Jobs in which employees work independently, and typically communicate with customers and coworkers electronically, are likely to be better suited than those that rely on regular face-to-face interaction and collaboration. In any case, it may be appropriate to limit eligibility to those jobs that serve the needs of the business strategy.
  • The Employee – Telecommuting does not work for everyone. Some selection criteria are in order to ensure that only employees with the skills, behaviors, and performance to succeed are moved to a remote environment.
  • The Work Environment – You want to be at least as disciplined with telework as you are in the office when it comes to protecting your data, property, products, services, customers, and employees by ensuring a safe and secure workplace. Policies and procedures should be reviewed and updated to ensure they accommodate new work arrangements, and expectations around these should be clearly communicated.

Training and Change Management Are Important

As telework arrangements are deployed, training and change management programs will increase the odds for success. While some of this may be dismissed as “common sense,” it can contribute significantly to institutional learning about new workplace models, and help to shape the culture change that’s about to take place. Consider focusing on:

  • deliberate additional communication with and among telecommuters to account for the lack formal and informal face time;
  • clear communication of expectations for managers and employees;
  • tips and guidance for managing work and time in the absence of normal workplace queues;
  • methods that ensure privacy and potential interruptions are managed appropriately (no working/daycare arrangements);
  • planning face-to-face meetings as often as possible. When time, distance and budgets present challenges, use technology to pull the team together virtually and include team-building activities similar to those you would include locally.

A couple more thoughts:

When implementing a new program consider doing so through a series of pilots measuring results and adjusting along the way. I’ve seen real success with the creation of a Telework Employee Resource Group/Affinity Group. Like other ERGs, they allow employees with like interests and challenges to share ideas and best practices, participate in supplemental training, provide feedback and ideas to management, and support employee engagement.

I’ve seen its challenges, but it’s been my experience that telecommuting is a great workforce solution when it is designed and implemented as a strategic initiative aligned to support identified business goals. What has your experience been? Have you seen it succeed; seen it struggle or fail? What are some unique ways in which you’ve seen it used, and what were the outcomes?

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Effectively Navigating Employee Issues and Employment Laws

As an HR practitioner, you are often asked to determine whether an employee issue is heading into legal territory. To do this, you need guidance and a utilitarian method for assessing complex issues. Read today’s post, then download the free HR Law Navigator tool as your resource and “check in” for assessing employee concerns.

Most HR practitioners aren’t lawyers, yet they’re on the front lines of handling employee situations that have the potential for raising legal concerns. Navigating the ins and outs of ever-changing Equal Opportunity Employment (EEO) laws—at the federal, regional and even country level—isn’t an easy job. Even though you may have a centralized HR department that handles employee relations issues, HR generalists and consultants are still usually responsible for gathering information about potentially problematic situations. HR practitioners are also often asked to seek advice from legal experts and to partner with them to determine how to manage and respond to such situations.

As an HR practitioner, your job is not just to minimize your organization’s risk of legal exposure and make sure people “play by the rules”; it’s to ensure all employees have a safe, productive working environment within which to thrive and create the most value for your organization and its stakeholders. HR practitioners need to feel confident making the call to send an employee concern up the chain, or to launch a full-scale legal investigation. But what kinds of questions should you ask to make sure you’re assessing a situation fully? How do you make sure you recognize whether an employee situation has the potential for legal concerns? The answer is, it often depends.

“The toughest part about dealing with EEO issues in HR is the nuance involved. Every situation is unique and requires empathy, rationality, and understanding. The reasonable person standard that exists when determining disparate treatment in many cases creates a lot of grey area to work within, but good faith efforts go a long way,” said Beth Livingston, assistant professor of Human Resources at Cornell University’s ILR School.

That grey area is one reason Livingston argues that empathy is perhaps the most important skill for an HR practitioner when it comes to figuring out which HR issues require legal advice.

“Most employees want to be treated fairly and want to avoid litigation; HR practitioners want likewise. If we look at it from this perspective, the incentives are already aligned,” said Livingston. “The same situation can affect different people in very different ways, and the more HR practitioners can attempt to understand the employees they work with and what their values are, the better they can address issues before they become legal liabilities.”

Download the free HR Law Navigator, a resource included in eCornell’s Human Resources program, to help you recognize potential legal issues involving employee situations, gather sufficient information for seeking advice from legal experts, and chart a safe course when making decisions that impact your employees and your organization.

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7 Essential Strategies of Highly Effective Communicators

Humans are born communicators. Before we become verbal, we’re very effective at sending nonverbal messages and cues. Inside organizations, we still communicate with words and gestures — in person, via video, online, or over the phone. Regardless of its form, effective communication is the grease that lubricates our business relationships, employee interactions, and performance management efforts. After you read the article, download our free e-book 7 Essential Strategies of Highly Effective Communicators to get the strategies for effective, powerful communication.Read More

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Best Practices for Virtual Communication and Meetings

Did you know that almost 10% of the present-day workforce telecommutes from home? The likes of AT&T, Accenture and P&G have opted for a remote working system by partially eliminating their traditional offices. While there are obvious benefits associated with this system, a big drawback is the lack of communication between remote workers/teleworkers and their organization.

Teleworkers are far removed from the face-to-face interactions occurring in their organization. This automatically makes proactive communication an important facet of a remote working arrangement. And while it is best when initiated from both the remote workers and their supervisors/contact points, the onus fall on the latter. After all, communication is a key mechanism through which remote managers cultivate relationships with their reports. Here is a look at some best practices of virtual communication that can be very useful in any remote working arrangement.Read More

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CAHRS Top 10 List for June 2013

Each month, the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) publishes this list of the top 10 resources and articles that we have found in the HR world. Read through and let me know if you find them useful or if you found other links we should take a look at in the comments section below.

1. When Pay is Kept Secret, the Implications on Performance Are Revealing
Summary: Researchers set out to draw from expectance theory notions to explain how the effects of pay secrecy on perceived performance-pay instrumentalities are likely cause a generally adverse effect on individual task performance.

2. The New Employer-Employee Compact
Summary: The authors propose a new employer-employee compact to make organizations more agile and entrepreneurial. The article outlines 3 key components with action items to make the compact workable: (1) Hire employees for a defined period of time (2) Encourage and even subsidize employees to build networks outside of the organization (3) Establish employee alumni networks to build career-long relationships with employees after they have moved on.

3. An HR Icon Reflects on Retirement
Summary: Effective June 1 Randy MacDonald, senior vice president of human resources for CAHRS Partner IBM, will be retiring after 42 years in HR, the last 13 of which were with IBM. In this interview he shares about the succession planning leading up to the selection of Diane Gherson, what HR needs to do to be even more successful in business, and the key attributes of an extraordinary HR leader.

4. Balancing the Pay Scale: Fair vs. Unfair
Summary: Reward system designs need to balance incentive effects and equity concerns, and increased transparency around compensation and benefits can help employees understand their level of compensation.

For more on Compensation, take a look at Kevin Hallock’s Business Insider article “Why Pretty Much Everyone Thinks They’re Underpaid.”

5. Fixing the Disconnect in Talent Decision Making
Summary: Trying to make decisions without integrated data—or the wrong kinds of data—can send a company off course. HR analytics illuminate patterns that are difficult to observe with the human eye.

For more on HR Analytics, take a look at the January Working Group Summary.

6. Hitting the Intergenerational Sweet Spot 
Summary: HR should target maximum engagement for all employees by not taking    characteristics of  millennials out of context and understanding that both millennials and Baby Boomers value challenging, meaningful work and opportunities for development.

7. Research Backs the Benefits of Flex Work for Workers – and Companies
Summary: There is a large quantity of academic research on flexible work arrangements that provide valuable insights into the debate, for example the positive effects of telecommuting are maximized at 15 hours per week and flexibility around work hours is more effective than flexibility around workplace.

For more information on Remote Workers, take a look at the Remote Workers Working Group Summary.

8. Incentivizing Creative Employees Towards Increased Competitiveness
Summary: The author argues that compensating and acknowledging employed inventors can incentivize creativity, innovation, and profitability.

9. The HR-Risk Connection
Summary: HR and risk management have begun working closer together to improve their bottom lines, streamline processes and ensure risks are addressed and/or countered before they take on any significance.

For more reading on Talent Management, visit the CAHRS Talent Management Center of Excellence.

10. Your Assumptions About Cultural Adaptation Are Probably Wrong
Summary: The workforce has never been more global, yet when working internationally most people focus on more concrete pressing tasks than the global element of their work. As a result, they often follow “gut” instincts about cultural adaption, which tend to be wrong.

For more reading on Globalization, take a look at the Singapore Human Capital Challenges for the Emerging Market and Talent Management Challenges for the India Market.

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Baselining Social Media Use in Your Organization

This article dives deeper into the second step of the ABCs of Creating an Effective Social Media Policy: baselining the current state of your social media policy and the way its being interpreted by employees. Read the article, then download our sample social media use survey as a jumping off point for your own baselining efforts.

Whether your organization already has a social media policy, or is working to develop one, baselining the current state of its social media use is critical to success. You can’t craft a solid new policy, or address failings of an existing one, if you don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening on the ground in your workplace.

Making these assessments can, and should, be done before a new policy is even issued. It’s as simple as surveying employees to find out how much they know about existing policies and how those policies are being interpreted daily. Conducting an organization-wide survey to assess social media use provides a baseline level of intelligence that’s essential for successful, beneficial policy making.

Different questions for different roles

One way to increase survey participation and ensure more robust results it to create different versions of your questionnaire targeted to different employee roles. For example, consider making one questionnaire designed for individual contributors and another designed for managers.

For individual contributors, be sure to ask questions covering all aspects of social media policy and use. This may include asking employees to describe your company’s social media policy as it relates to specific areas such as blogs or tweets, or asking them whether they’ve received any formal instruction on these policies. You also want to know whether employees are following policies. But don’t ask this question directly; few employees will admit their transgressions. Instead, ask employees specific questions about use, such as “Do you ever use mobile devices to engage in personal social media use at work?”

For managers, be sure to ask questions to uncover whether they’ve reviewed current laws relevant to business records, monitoring, and electronic data. You also want to know if managers are finding that their employees’ use of social media is impacting productivity, or creating legal problems.

Remember the goal

The goal of this process is to accurately baseline how your employees are using social media at work, not to catch specific wrongdoers. To get honest answers, assure employees of your survey’s confidentiality before it’s administered and that you will make no effort to identify individual respondents.

Conducting an employee survey of your organization’s social media use is the first step in assessing the high-risk issues a new policy should address; the effectiveness of your current policy; or areas in need of change.