Centering Workplace Culture

I chose the above graphic as a powerful representation of what happens when companies focus on attracting talent, without balancing their efforts on centering workplace culture. Drawing the right people is critically important. However, what good is attracting talent you’ll lose (quickly) because your culture is lacking and, in some instances, toxic? 

Naming Workplace Culture

Workplace culture is the common set of behaviors, underlying mindsets, and values that shape how people work and interact in the workplace. It’s based on shared attitudes, beliefs, customs, and written & unwritten rules. Workplace culture has become a proxy for understanding and measuring the employee experience. As an inclusive culture strategist, I often counsel clients that culture develops by design or by default. For all leaders, I simply ask…which paradigm have you prioritized, intention or chaos? 

We know employee needs have changed in this post-covid era. Employees want to be considered, engaged, and developed professionally. They want to work for inspiring leaders in organizations with great workplace cultures. This shift is resulting in the centering of workplace culture. Consequently, organizations see the need to develop a new approach to leadership to meet employee demands while building high-performance teams. To accomplish this, leaders must be equipped to lead with culture. This requires an enhancement of leadership competencies around emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring. Winning with culture, requires organizations to meet employee needs, focus on inclusive leadership and bring heart & humanity to the workplace.

Fix Your Culture

To stem the flow of employee turnover, fix your culture! Attracting talent by creating an appealing veneer is a waste of organizational resources. Those resources would be better utilized funding the transformational change to lead with culture by putting culture on every leader’s agenda, making it part of the strategic plan, and creating accountability for harnessing the collective potential of individuals, teams, and the organization. You can’t game the system forever without significant costs (turnover, lost time, training, burnout, reputation) to your organization and workforce. To thrive in this post-covid era, you must do the work to center, strengthen and curate your workplace culture.

At The Perry Perspective, LLC we partner and co-create with leaders to transform their workplace cultures and cultivate inclusive leadership development. In our service offering, we focus on making the workplace great, elevating leadership and normalizing “impact with heart.”

For more information on how we can support you in transforming your workplace culture, schedule a consultation.