Let me spend a few minutes here telling you what your corporate culture should be like, and how to get there. (Since you and I haven't met, this is a somewhat risky and approximate proposition; although I throw my opinions around daily as a corporate culture consultant, its for leaders and companies that I actually know.)
In this article, I'll focus these unsolicited cultural opinions on the most important part of the organization: your employees.
Quick question: Who knows best what customers want? Upper management or the people who face customers all day? (I don’t need to answer my own question here; it’s a no brainer, like asking, ‘‘Who's more likely to know what students need: professional administrators or the teachers on the front lines?’’)
With that answer in mind, how should you treat your employees? The way you'd want to be treated if you were in their position.
This makes it pretty simple. It also is a relief in its simplicity, in what it lets you know that company culture isn't about:
Don’t get disheartened that the physical environment you can afford to provide for them compares negatively to Pixar’s offices, so dauntingly perfect that a writer who gets frustrated and throws his Coke against the pristine wall would, it would seem, set the place crumbling, as Anthony Lane so aptly put it.
Google Campus
Or that you’re unable to offer, like Google, ‘‘20 percent time’’ to engineers so they can work on projects of their own choosing one-fifth of the time, a brave and brilliant idea that led to Gmail and other key products, but may sound like a bankruptcy invitation for those of us less well-funded (and who isn’t less well-funded than Google?). Just start with treating your workers the way you would want to be treated in their situation.
Which means what?
• Without abuse or capriciousness.
• With respect for—seeking out of—employee ideas, observations, and concerns.
• With opportunities for growth—not as a cliché to put in a press release but as a bona fide way of life in your culture
• With attention to the moral right of employees to have input into how their jobs and workdays are designed.
Again, don’t look at reports on Google’s Googleplex and think, ‘‘I have to offer subsidized massages for weary employees?’’ That’s crazytalk for the average business trying to make payroll. Do look at Google and think, ‘‘How can I make my campus, like theirs, friendly to workers who have children?’’ (Because workers will have children.) That’s smart business and solid culture building.
Micah Solomon is a corporate culture consultant, keynote speaker and bestselling author.
