Creating and living a workplace culture which fosters a productive and profitable environment is something every company talks about constantly.  It all starts with an idea of what the company wants to accomplish.  Some companies even hire “experts” to make sure the mission statement reflects ideals customers and employees can easily understand.  The mission statement should be relatable and reflect a need which cannot be met by a competing company.  Sounds so very simple, doesn’t it?  If creating company culture is as easy as writing the perfect mission statement, why do so many companies have such low ratings on Glassdoor?  Since this has been a frustration of mine for many years, I’m ready to examine where and why so many get it so very wrong.

I have my own personal theories regarding mission statements gone wrong but, I know my theories won’t prove true in every company and every environment.  The simple truth of workplace environments is that they are comprised of people.  We hear it all the time.  People make the company.  Most companies completely forget the simplistic truth of that sentence.  I believe most of us know why it is so easily tossed aside in the day-to-day of running a business. 

People are complicated.  Doesn’t that feel like a fully loaded sentence?  While it is only three words, it perfectly summarizes the challenge of creating a workplace culture which churns out not only profits but also happy and well-adjusted employees.  Let’s face it, maximizing profits means having those well-adjusted, properly motivated and engaged employees.  There is absolutely no way to get around it unless you want to keep your company a small one-person show.  Most people understand the basics of needing a diverse team of people but, what does true diversity look and feel like?  If everyone knows and understands the need to build a diverse team, why do so many companies look for only one type of personality when they evaluate applicants?  Why are people who perform their job duties successfully shown the door because “they just didn’t fit”?   Why are people pushed to promote out of positions in which they perform very well, feel sufficiently challenged and where they are happy to remain for a large portion of their career?

So where is the disconnect between the desire to create a culture which delivers personal satisfaction while achieving financial success and the ability to make it a reality?  The answer to this question circles back to that simple three-word sentence – People are complicated.  To really begin wrapping our heads around this concept, I’d like to share two recent personal experiences.

My last career position was with a vendor company.  My supervisors with my own company were wonderful leaders but, they were constantly overloaded and overwhelmed.  This left me on my own to deal with the complex interactions with the customer most of the time. This gave me the freedom to consistently exceed contract expectations and grow professional trust to very high levels.  Even on challenging days, my job satisfaction was at the highest level I had ever experienced in my career.  The key to this relationship for me was mutual trust and respect.

My working relationship with the leaders of the customer company was very different.  It was a study in contradictions and a lack of clear direction.  Most people can agree that there is a huge difference between a “rapidly evolving work place” and “the right hand having no idea what the left is doing.”  Often the first phrase is mistakenly used to describe the reality of the second phrase.  This was the world which I carefully navigated every day.  Of course, the customer company assigned one of their own managers to oversee the contract.  This specific manager was someone who was very knowledgeable in technical skills but, new to management.  At first, everything went very well.  Sure, we had some bumps in the road but, we navigated them with success towards a nice level of mutual respect.

The customer company started showing cultural cracks when they were forced to downsize their staff by forty percent.  Shortly before the formal announcement of the cutbacks, the customer manager asked me for some productivity data with no explanation.  Without knowing the reason this information was needed, I provided just the basic statistics which were requested.   Decisions were made based on the incomplete information and incorrect assumptions regarding the missing information.  The domino effect of those decisions led to various productivity implosions within the building and negatively affected multiple departments.  I don’t need to state the obvious damage to the company culture because we have all experienced this at some point in our career.  In these situations, many promises are made with no knowledge of how they can be kept.  We also know that the resulting damage is very difficult to overcome without a heavy dose of honesty about the root causes.  Company decisions are often made based only upon financial reasons.  Forgetting to also uphold the stated mission statement and company culture destroys the trust with employees and customers.  Rebuilding that trust is difficult because, people are complicated.

Recently, I formed a private group on a social media platform.  It’s a small group of amazing people who I have had the pleasure to meet and get to know throughout my personal and professional life.  For most of our members, their only connection to each other is simply my relationship to each of them.  This past week, I posted the link to a values assessment which I have used to refocus the direction of my career goals.  Each person took the assessment and shared their results.  They were then encouraged to examine their results and compare those to how they view themselves.  Through this process, I was able to see complexities in these people which I would have never known or appreciated without this experience.  However, just one test or the results of one sample will never help us build a truly all-encompassing culture because, again, people are complicated.  

What is the answer to perfect corporate culture?  It’s been researched, examined, written and lectured about by experts for many years so, why don’t we have the perfect answer?  The answer is as complex as it is simple.  Corporate culture must constantly evolve because people and society are constantly evolving.  And, people are complicated. 

To be continued……….