A great work culture won’t just happen by chance. It requires two basic steps that seem so simple, but are often overlooked. First, the company or team must envision what a healthy culture will look like when it is fully built. Without that clarity and focus, they are headed on a trip with no idea of the destination. The second necessary component is to explicitly state the attitudinal and behavioral expectations the organization has for members of its staff. What follows is an expectation that MindSet believes will help you build and maintain a healthy work environment.
What Can I Do To Help?
We can’t tell much about the cultural health of a company or team when all is going well – everybody looks great when we are winning 48-6. But the opposite is also true: one of the most meaningful measures of the cultural health of a work team can be gained from an analysis of how employees respond when a significant problem occurs – those unfortunate occasions when things go quite wrong.
In a brilliantly healthy company culture, employees respond to a crisis by a) showing up, and b) saying only one thing, “What can I do to help?”
It is important to proactively – and explicitly – set this expectation for all employees. Having established this as an expectation, we can then use the occurrence of the problem to learn much about the strength of a team and the qualities of its individual staff members. Just as personal adversity reveals character, organizational adversity reveals much about the health of your culture and the personal qualities of your employees.
Founder of MindSet, LLC.
