Maintain the pace
To create a culture that endures over the long haul, you need to get your employees to buy in over the long haul. To make that happen, you need to continually spell it out for them in three letters:
“Why,” Prior says. “You need to start talking about the ‘why.’ Why is the culture important, and how can you, as an employee, impact that?”
Employees won’t continue to embrace and perpetuate a new culture if they don’t see concrete benefits in their daily or weekly work lives. Recognition is among the key benefits that an employee-centered culture should offer
em
ployees.
“Everybody that we have hired, we want to show them that they can exhibit passion and value achievement,” Prior says. “We want to develop and maintain quality reward recognition systems that reflect the company’s strategic imperative. We talk about our top performers on the top story on our Web site, but we also do it through financial incentives and through nonfinancial product incentives. We also reinforce the culture through word-of-mouth.”
The key to that is keeping the message simple. Write a new mission statement in the form of a bite-sized verbal morsel. No matter what you are communicating, if you want to take root with your employees, simply stated and quick-hitting is the way to go.
“Keep it simple enough that it’s repeatable and understandable,” Prior says. “You can’t have a two-page mission statement, and I would even take that a step further. You can’t even have a paragraph mission statement. You are looking for ideas that can be encapsulated in a few words. For example, our mission statement is ‘Powering our customers’ success.’ If I tried to convert that to a paragraph, when I stop someone in the hallway and ask them what our mission statement is, they wouldn’t have the ability to repeat that. As a result, their actions might not be in accordance with our mission. If your culture-related messages are too complex, people will either not get it or they will reprioritize all the points you’re trying to make into what they think it should be.”
Communicating a culture boils down to taking the long-range, long-term concepts formulated by you and your management team and converting it into something relevant to the employees who are focused on completing the work on their desks each week. You might be able to get some of your employees to think and rationalize according to the big picture, but chances are you’ll have much more success if you can take big-picture concepts and relate them to your employees.
“Your front-line employees are dealing with executing today,” Prior says. “The executive team is future-based and future-looking, and your employees are thinking about working today, executing today and how they can get the work off their desks by Friday. You have to be cognizant of that disconnect so that you can address it. You stop and celebrate successes. You show them how their actions support the community of the company. You give them the tools and show them that their input does provide value.
“You always have to be ready to answer the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question. Any change manager has to answer that question or you won’t get engagement.”
Five years after Prior and his management team began the cultural shift at ICW, the company is progressing well, with 717 employees and $368 million in 2008 revenue, numbers that are both significantly up over the course of the decade. In 2002, before Prior’s arrival, ICW Group had a work force of 460 and generated $234 million in revenue.
“Everything gets back to having a strong culture and brand identity,” Prior says. “If everyone is pulling on the rope in the same direction, it’s easier to pull someone off the rope who isn’t pulling in that direction. That is why we talk about memorializing our processes, so that when we have a new employee come on board, what they need to know isn’t located in someone’s head, it’s embedded in our processes. We’ve taken the art of what we do and turned it into a science.”
How to reach: ICW Group, (800) 877-1111 or www.icwgroup.com
