When your employees don't want to work for you
Yesterday as I was talking to a friend who is the CEO of a big firm and the topic of alienation in the workplace came up. He had a very curious problem happening with one of the teams working for him. It turs out that the employees of a department don't want to work for his business any longer. All of them want to go to other jobs, look for new opportunities or even retire. I couldn't believe what my ears were hearing! I've never seen something like that. I began to wonder what was going on there, what could make 20 or 30 people want to quit a job that pays well at the same time. The answer was simple: Culture.
Culture is the product of the interactions between individuals in their social life. Corporate cultre is therefore created by the interactions of people working for a corporation. The characteristics of the corporate culture are very important and they are not created during a board meeting by 13 to 35 board members writing down a mission statement. Culture is not created by employees in a company retire either. Culture is created by the people who work everyday and culture is created everyday and from that we can elaborate a mission statement, values and all the documents we need to make it "official".
You might already be wondering about what might be wrong with all the people working in this department. I'm afraid there might only be one answer and it probably isn't the most academic answer in the world.
The culture sucks. The business is so big that every department has it's own culture and it's own mission statement. So you have a boat and every area is trying to row in the direction they think is right which ends up in a very frustrating battle inside the company.
How can you spread a positive culture in a big business? That's a tough question to answer. One of my friends told us his experience.
To ensure a positive culture the CEO should be fully committed to the culture and so all the Vice Presidents and area managers. This is important because whether the culture comes from the top positions or the bottom positions (and there shouldn't be so many levels between them anyway) the CEO and the VPs are the ones that ensure that every department follow suit. The top management has to establish a hiring policy where only people who fit the culture will be hired and trained to work at the company.
Empower the champions. You'll find some champions who are perfect culture fits and live it everyday. These champions are the ones that will embody the culture and set the example to most of the employees. It's far more motivating to have someone other than the board members and this will make the right attitude expand across the employees faster.
Finally, what will spread the positive culture is to ensure that every interaction that every employee has with another person inside the company follows certain values and guidelines that are small in number and easy to remember. To make them easy to remember you need to relate these values to human actions such as humility and pursuit of learning and improvement.
If you do this you'll make sure you have a well oriented and committed team. Change has to be total and made fast. Slow change will probably won't lead to the desired results in the needed time because many big organizations are well behind in this matter.
