Enforce your expectations
You can repeat your culture until you’re blue in the face, but compliance really starts when you enforce the environment you want.
“It’s making sure that things that you do and the things that you make people do are all consistent with your beliefs and values,” Heaney says. “It’s not like, ‘OK, it’s policing values time.’ You should have policies and procedures — and approaches to policies and procedures — that are consistent with your beliefs and values.”
For him, that means establishing a clear process to deal with employees whose actions don’t line up with your values. Heaney says identifying those cases is easier than it se
em
s because falling short of a value usually affects other areas of performance. For example, Addus values dependability — but failing to return calls or to show up at the office will send up obvious red flags other than value-related ones.
“If an employee is consistently late for work [or] consistently missing work, they’re consistently generating complaints from the consumer, these are things you can quantify and you can correlate them to a norm,” Heaney says. “We have metrics that we can use to measure their performance, and it’s compared to the expectation.”
In addition to performance metrics, you should also keep an eye on the nuances of how employees act.
“You can listen to people and how they relate to others,” Heaney says. “We treat people with respect; that’s one of our beliefs and values. I can measure that because I can tell you when I’m hearing respectful language and when I’m not.
“So there’s a combination of actual metrics and the more consistent measurements you do when you’re working with somebody — tone, response time, those kinds of things,” he says.
Though the way you identify cultural compliance at your company may differ, the important thing is that you have a structured system to correct it.
“An employee has to be told that they’re not conforming,” Heaney says. “And then continuing not to reform, it has to be written that they’re not conforming. They have to be given a pathway for getting into compliance, and then if it continues, there can be either a final warning prior to discipline or a termination.”
Although it seems like a scary process for employees to go through, the mere existence of such a detailed disciplinary system should be reassuring.
“You’re saying, ‘I’m confident that if I ever get myself off track, there’s a system for me where I’ll be certain that I know I’m off track and I have the ability to remedy,’” he says. “It also works to reassure staff that this is a place where there are no surprises with regard to my performance or my employment.”