Build up the culture
Whether you are making slight course corrections or taking your company through a radical overhaul, the strength of your culture will be integral to your company’s ability to recover from the change, and then flourish.
Your cultural principles need to remain solid regardless of how much uncertainty is orbiting the company. And a strong culture comes back to strong communication. You need to start by building a team of excellent communicators, who then facilitate an open dialogue with employees at every level of the company.
“Any company is only as good as the employees,” Zettel says. “So developing a good culture begins with assembling the right team. There is never really a point of perfection, but as long as the majority of the employees understand the vision, understand the purpose of the company, and you are fair and respectful of them, and understand the important role they play in making the company, it all starts there.”
You can state the foundational principles of a culture in verbal or written form, but your culture really starts with your actions. If you want employees to embrace teamwork, innovation, high ethical standards and efficiency, you need to demonstrate those traits from the top.
If you can put those cultural wheels in motion when times are fair and stable, there is a much better chance that the momentum will continue when things are murky and less stable.
“Your employees develop confidence in you based on your actions,” Zettel says. “That’s where culture starts — with an attitude that shows everyone in the organization that we’re in this together, and we’re ultimately going to succeed together. But it absolutely needs to start with you, with your words and actions. There is nothing worse as a leader than to not live up to your words. You are probably better off just being silent than to say you’re going to do something and not live up to it.”
It’s a concept Zettel had to put into practice last year when, as part of refocusing the company’s direction in response to the down economy, he and the team needed to suspend some employee benefits.
“This year, we set as one of our goals to begin restoring some of those benefits,” he says. “So we communicated our vision. Our values and goals were communicated to our employees, and we had to live those goals. As we started to phase those benefits back in, our employees were able to see that we take the goals seriously.”
If your actions follow your words, and your words are straightforward yet compassionate, you will gain more followers and employees who are willing to buy in to your company’s direction. Employees who attain that level of engagement are more likely to take an active role in bringing their ideas to the table. In a challenging economic time, any good idea might be the idea that can help you save money or sharpen your company’s focus.
“It’s very dangerous to be sitting back at headquarters without your field generals giving input,” Zettel says. “You need to stay relevant, and you need employees to realize that their role in the company goes beyond just what it says in their job description.”
At AVI-SPL, concepts and policies flow downward, but ideas flow upward.
“Ideas flow upward through each of our divisions,” Zettel says. “The ones that show promise and merit will be discussed at the executive level, and we’ll meet weekly to discuss how the initiatives are coming along and any new initiatives that we might have to talk about.
“Responsiveness on the part of management is key, be it good or bad. You want to respond to employee ideas and give them feedback. There are ideas I thought were good, but when you explain it to our executive committee, there are still some things that need to be vetted out. When you explain that to the employee, they’re generally very understanding.”
Fostering a culture of teamwork and engagement means a faster reaction speed for your company when problems arise or when an opportunity presents itself.
“Now more than ever, your reaction speed as an organization is critical,” Zettel says. “I don’t think you have to be as crisp or as accurate when times are good. When times get tougher, you need to be on the mark. So it is critical that companies increase their nimbleness, and that all goes back to having your field generals out there, constantly communicating with you about what they’re seeing.”
If you can bring engagement, fiscal responsibility and a culture that stimulates ideas into the picture when times are good, your company can find itself on much firmer ground when times are bad.
It’s an approach that has helped AVI-SPL recover, with a new approach to the market, focused on new technologies. Last year, the company generated $418 million in revenue.
“It’s one of the things we talked about in our executive group in the past year or so,” Zettel says. “We are a big company, we merged and increased our size by about 30 percent, and we can’t do everything. We can’t come up with every single solution to every single problem. That is really where we began the process of empowering employees to recommend solutions. You want to have them involved in the solution, versus just complaining about the situation.”
How to reach: AVI-SPL Inc., (800) 282-6733 or www.avispl.com