Win the Talent Game with Culture

Attracting and retaining top talent in an increasingly competitive, post-COVID hiring market has become a hot topic for business leaders in many sectors, including those who specialize in industrial automation. It’s a universal challenge, but solutions that will have lasting impact demand a common language so employers and their teams can understand the core issues and stakes.

Defining company culture terms

Decades ago, organizational development and efficiency icon Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” In five words, Drucker set a compass for today’s conversations about employee engagement. No matter how perfect your business strategy might be, it can’t succeed without the buy-in of the people you rely on to implement it.

To start a meaningful conversation about company culture, it helps to agree on working definitions that help everyone understand what it is, how healthy it is, and how well it’s responding to the cultural initiatives you put in place. Here are ways successful organizations talk about culture internally.

1. A collection of norms and traditions that form a company’s identity
2. Common behaviors a team exhibits when they’re not being actively managed
3. Clear core values that guide internal and external interactions
4. An environment that empowers people to grow and do their best work
5. An expression of the way people treat one another (and customers) at work
6. A simple description of the way it feels to work in an organization
7. A positively magnetic framework that attracts the right people to the organization
8. The way an organization puts its mission and vision into practice through people

Keys to a healthy company culture

Employee retention has always been a challenge and before the coronavirus hit, companies were increasingly putting culture forward as a competitive differentiator for top talent. The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 raised the stakes significantly, practically overnight.

Employees who were fortunate enough to be able to do their jobs remotely started working from home in large numbers. Leaders who could once rely on contiguous workspaces and large gatherings found they had to get creative in areas like these to keep their people connected.

1. Communication has to be an authentic two-way dialog, not a one-off message
2. People leaders at all levels must model the culture and own the message
3. Leadership training and development is critical for success in the cultural part of the job
4. Cultural adoption depends on a balance of top-down and bottom-up participation
5. Protecting your culture requires frequent measurement of true team engagement
6. Management must actively listen to employees to understand the health of the culture
7. It’s important to understand the long and short term COVID impacts on culture
8. Culture can be nurtured across remote work groups with creativity and persistence

Continuing the culture conversation

We look forward to discussing how culture can contribute to a healthy bottom line, and offer programs and tools to guide this process. If you need support on other growth strategies, we can help. Contact us today to learn more.