Picture this: an older married couple walking into the sunset, arms intertwined, gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. #Goals right? You’ve probably wondered how they went the distance and didn’t call it quits. You want that for yourself, I mean, who doesn’t? However, speak to these older couples about how to make a marriage go the distance and you’ll be shocked (or won’t) about just how much work goes into it. When it comes to retaining talent, the same hard work applies; you need to go beyond delivering on your employee value proposition, and into continuously building and refining your company culture.
Investing in the acquisition of competent talent puts you ahead of the game. However, to stay ahead you need to maximise your return on your investment by spending even more time on culture, and the systems that reinforce said culture, than you do on selecting the right talent. You can think of selection as 15% of the battle, culture as 45% and systems to reinforce culture would account for the remaining 40% of employee alignment (read: making sure we live happily ever after). So, how exactly do we win at culture?
Culture is simply a way of working – how you achieve your mission. This “way of working” is simply a set of behaviors that you (and whoever the “powers that be”) decided are required to achieve your company’s goals. Therefore, building and reinforcing culture is about fortifying a set of required behaviors.
A practical example: In your relationship / organization, you might decide that a required behaviour to achieve your mission is “candour in communication”, i.e. open, honest and proactive communication at all times. In other words, “if you see something, say something”. Building a culture of candour in communication in your organization will require having this desired behavior recognized, rewarded and reinforced.
The 3 Rs
Let’s introduce you to a virtuous cycle called “The 3Rs”: Recognise, Reward, Reinforce. Simply put, to reinforce a behaviour, you must first recognize it and then reward it. Recognizing the behaviour means you have to have a system to identify when employees exhibit these behaviours, given you cannot be with each and every one of them daily. Do you have ways for their peers to recognize their behaviours? It’s impossible to expect that a biannual performance review will capture every time each employee exhibited “candour in communication” during the 28-week period. Figuring out how to get more real-time “ground-up” feedback (i.e. from the people on the ground daily) on who is exhibiting the required behaviours can be a herculean task. One way to do this is to implement “shout-out boxes” where employees can write anonymous notes (“shout-outs”) celebrating colleagues who have exhibited culture-reinforcing behaviours. Other companies have surveys sent out to employees on a monthly or quarterly basis asking them to mention instances in which colleagues have exhibited these behaviours.
Figuring out how best to reward is an exercise in empathy in and of itself. It’s very easy to assume that everyone wants to be recognized and rewarded the same way we would like to be, but that just isn’t the case. The same way you have love languages in relationships (words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, gifts and physical touch), you have reward/appreciation languages in the workplace. For some, a simple thank you email suffices as all the reward they need, while for others, it’s plainly “show me the money”. While you can’t please everyone, surveying a few team members to find out how they want to be appreciated is a good way to design multiple reward/appreciation languages at your organization. Another rule of thumb is to start as you intend to finish, so it’s better to be consistent in your chosen languages than to start something and realize you can’t afford to keep it running a few months later. Imagine starting a monthly “candour in communication” award with a cash prize or gift voucher and 12 months later, you realize that you’ve depleted your employee welfare budget.
The Good, Bad and Ugly
However, simply recognising and rewarding positive “culturereinforcing” behaviours that team members exhibit are insufficient on their own. You will also have to recognise and reprimand negative “culture-eroding” behaviours in order to minimize/ eliminate them. While this might be awkward, dis-incentivizing negative behaviours prevent them from being a model for others to follow, which will only accelerate the erosion of the positive work culture you build. We all know of those employers who “deduct salary anyhow”, and we know fully well that it isn’t an “anyhow” affair, but if employees feel that negative consequences will be meted out randomly, then the game becomes about “how not to get caught”. Whereas if you have a clear system to identify infractions against the culture, you are more likely to have people focus on how to make sure they fall in line. The same systems described for positive behaviours can also be applied to negative ones without having to wait 28 weeks to identify these infractions.
In our “candour in communication” universe, a culture eroding behaviour might be gossiping about colleagues. I once knew a senior executive who made sure that whenever any colleague came to him to complain about another colleague, he would ask the complainant to give him a minute while he would dial/call in “the accused” into the meeting and then ask the complainant to continue. This demonstrated to his employees that the culture (way of working) was to be open and honest in communicating feedback with colleagues directly.
Just as with marriages, ensuring that you go the distance is less to do with keeping momentum, and more to do with adapting and evolving in sync with each other. To achieve this, leaders of organizations need to forge strong company cultures that are communicated effectively with employees.
(Written by Ruth David the partnership coordinator at WAVE, an orgainsation focused on rewiring the education-to-employment system to create a level playing field for every African Youth to access the skills and opportunity to become what they imagine)
