Corporate Culture: It's More Than Free Beer And Pizza

Go to any of the thousands of senior-executive planning meetings taking place this week and stand in the back of the room.

You'll hear a lot of discussion about next year's product plans and year-over-year sales  and profitability growth. These are essential topics, for sure.

You'll hear about rising costs and you'll watch executives brainstorm about ways to keep costs under control.  I will be very happy for you if you hear more than a word or two about culture, trust, employee morale or the state of the team.

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That's a shame, because nothing good can happen in any organization next year or any other year unless its culture is healthy!

I have spent time in far too many offices with ping pong tables and free snacks in them to be confused about the difference between those cheap and easy devices and a truly trusting culture.

You can have trust and warmth at work -- the things that get you tremendous products, loyal customers and happy shareholders -- without a drop of beer or a single slice of pepperoni pizza.

You can build trust in a buttoned-down, analytical environment or a freewheeling creative one. Beer and pizza have nothing to do with telling the truth. If you want to build a healthy culture, here are 10 steps to get there.

Ten Steps To Building A Healthy Culture

1. The higher-level a leader you are, the less connected you will be to your rank-and-file employees. Don't get defensive about that fact. Accept and embrace it, and work hard to keep your ears open. Assume that you do not know as much as your teammates do about what's going on in your organization. Spend more time asking people how they're doing and what they want or need you to know than telling them what you think -- especially what you think about how your team is feeling. (You think you know how your teammates are feeling -- but you don't.)

2. Because it is hard to tell unpleasant truths to a leader, practice hearing bad news and reacting positively. The next time someone at a status meeting says "That bug fix might be a week late" don't fire back with "Why? Who's behind schedule?" or "It can't be late." Try this instead. Say "Okay, I hear you. Sounds like we were too optimistic with our timeline. How do we fix that?"

3. Watch your body and your emotions during the day. What you consider a rousing pep talk might come across to an employee as a brutal beat-down. If your reaction to that news is "Well, my employees should learn how to take criticism" keep in mind that people learn best from leaders who are open to learning new things, themselves (including how to take criticism)!

4. Establish one new channel for communication every month. You need inbound channels that employees can use to tell you about issues and opportunities, and outbound channels you can use to keep your employees in the loop (as well as combination inbound/outbound channels like a Town Hall meeting). Don't assume that it is easy to tell you the things you need to know. Your employees may not feel it is easy.

5. Staff meetings, Town Hall meetings, virtual events, and team messaging systems are all good ways to communicate up, down and sideways the way healthy teams do. Get together with employees in small groups and listen to them. The  information they share with you is less important to your culture than your reaction to whatever you hear -- your reaction in the moment as well as down the road as you address the problems you learn about.

6. When somebody goofs up, make it a point to learn from the experience rather than bringing the hammer down. The hammer is the most destructive, expensive and profit-sucking tool any leader has -- but when things go wrong, it is tempting to break the glass on the front of the hammer-box and pull out that hammer! When a leader's stress level gets too high, the hammer looks like the perfect tool -- but it never, ever is.

7. Tell your employees that they are the only reason your company is successful -- but don't tell them until you believe it! If you don't believe that your employees are the reason for your success, it means you don't trust yourself enough yet to trust the people you have invited to collaborate with you. In that case, your assignment is to grow your own mojo by doing something athletic or creative -- getting out of your head and into your body.

8. If you're using beer and pizza or foosball  right now to show your employees that you care about them, keep those things and expand on  them. Ask your employees every chance you get "What do you need from me?" Ask them "What are the biggest issues we're not talking enough about?" and don't argue with them when, no matter what they say. Don't say "That issue is being handled already." That response shuts your employee down. It's a defensive response. Instead, say "Here's how I look at that issue -- I want to hear your thoughts, also."

9. Deputize your HR people and everyone else to create warm relationships with every person on your team. Forget about chain of command, an obsolete construct in this Knowledge Economy. Everybody can help everybody else. Tell your employees that managers are in place to support them, not to supervise them like children. Role-model that behavior in your dealings with your direct reports!

10. Finally, talk about culture as a business topic. Put an item called The State of The Team on every staff meeting agenda and talk about conflict when it first arises, rather than pushing it under the rug. Don't let the informal grapevine be more trustworthy than your official communications. Don't let great people start checking out and leaving because your company couldn't see past free beer and pizza to build a culture of trust.

You will need to make sure that your culture-building efforts are not impeded by old-school, command-and-control policies that treat your employees like wayward children or criminals.

Convene a group of team members who are interested in rewriting the employee handbook and let them rework that document so that it no longer reads like a list of eighty ways to get fired.

One more note: don't fall for the notion that an Employee Engagement survey will meet your "state of the team" listening needs. Employee Engagement surveys are insulting to your team members.

You work among your employees. All you have to do is turn to them every few days and ask them, "How are you doing?" That's how you build trust -- not by assigning people to fill out surveys and slip them through the bars of their cell to be tabulated.

It's a new day in the talent marketplace. You can get a technical advantage over your competitors, but you can't keep it unless you have brilliant and energized people on your team.

You can get a temporary financial advantage or an operational one, but those advantages are not sustainable without the magnet of a trusting culture to pull great employees in keep them excited. You  have no higher priority in 2017 than building a trust-based culture. Now is a great time to get started!