My old colleague Margaret used to say, "The more a company talks about 'Trust' in its recruiting materials, the less trust you will find there!" I agree with Margaret. I'm sick of companies trumpeting their Trust Level instead of living it.
If your company is a chill place, you won't have to talk about it. It will be obvious the minute you walk in the door.
I'm sick of getting deluged with mail from PR people who want me to speak to their CEO client so he can tell me how awesome the company culture is. I talk to thousands of working people every year. If your company's culture is awesome, I will hear about it -- just not from your CEO.
I don't want to hear about your whizbang employee programs, because programs come from the mindset that companies have to install programs to keep their employees happy. Employee Motivation Programs come from a place where employees have to be motivated by their employer. That's control. Humans are fueled by their own power sources, not yours.
People naturally come to work ready to be happy. They don't have to be cajoled into being happy and energized if your workplace is a human place.
Employee programs organized by HR can't and won't help your culture if the culture isn't already human. If your culture is warm and fast and alive, your HR people won't have a lot of time to organize programs. They'll be out in the departments mixing it up and making sure your people are heard and supported.
I am tired of the tedious conversation about Core Values. A lot of corporate and institutional weenies love to talk about Core Values, as though their organization's values were somehow fundamentally different from every other organization's values.
What good are your Core Values? I assume you trust your employees and show it every day. I assume they trust you too, to the degree that it's almost meaningless to use the terms "they" and "us" because there is no dividing line that separates management from everybody else.
In a human culture, anybody can talk to your CEO. Anybody can get a call back from anybody else. Titles don't matter all that much in your organization and you only have a few personnel policies about things like sexual harassment and physical safety.
You don't have a personnel manual full of medieval practices like making your employees bring in a funeral notice as proof that a loved one died in order to get a few days' bereavement leave.
You don't write people up and chart their infractions and fuss about on-the-dot arrival and departure times. You treat your team members like brilliant value creators, because they are.
I assume you lead your company with a human voice and choose trust over fear at every opportunity. If you do those things, you don't need to stop and plumb the depths of your Core Values.
We are too obsessed with nouns in the business world. OD and HR people love nouns, especially.
They are dying to tell you, "In our company we use MBTI and NLP, not to mention Values-Based Hiring and the Moxie-Coonscoggin Method of performance appraisal." Spare me. Do you treat people like human beings in your shop? That's the important question.
Do you tell the truth, especially when it's hard to do? If I dropped in on one of your staff meetings, would it be a fizzy conversation punctuated by impassioned debate, or a cold, get-me-out-of-here torture session where no one dares to question the emperor? That's what I want to know.
We have to give up our love affair with nouns and start to focus on verbs when we're talking about culture. Are your employees collaborating all the time? If not, why not? You can't force people to work together.
They have to see that it's safe to collaborate. That won't happen if you give everybody metrics to hit and then tell them to also collaborate a little on the side -- but without missing any of their marks!
That's foolish. When you tell people where their targets are, don't expect them to also focus on other things. They won't and can't. You're the one who set the targets!
Do your employees innovate -- which is another way of asking, "Is your environment safe for innovators?" Do their ideas get celebrated and brought to the people who can act on them, or do new ideas get squashed and silenced because somebody's nose would get out of joint if the wrong person came up with a smart idea?
We can give up the ridiculous discussion over Core Values and we can disband the Committee to Update the Mission Statement. People have their own missions that they carry around with them. Articulating the perfect mission for your organization is the booby prize.
What's important is the quality of the air in your office, warehouse, showroom or wherever you work. What's important is how your employees feel in your workplace. Are they comfortable and having fun, or on edge because they're at constant risk of getting in trouble for some infraction?
If you want to make your workplace more human, you won't do it by trumpeting your Core Values. You'll do it not by announcing anything but by asking your teammates, every day, every minute, "How are you doing? How can I help you?" You'll believe them when they say something.
You'll tell your managers, "Nobody gets in trouble here. Nobody gets written up or put on probation unless it's a huge, big deal and maybe not even then. We'll talk about it if that happens. Our presumption is that everybody is here for the same reason -- to do something cool and make a difference today."
