Leading By Example For A Powerful Workplace Culture

What should leaders be doing to ensure their company culture stays positive, productive and supportive?

Workplace culture is inextricably intertwined with productivity and performance and can truly make or break an organization. You can offer the best salaries and benefits in your industry, but a negative company culture will send top talent running to your competitors. A renewed focus on employee engagement and wellbeing in the wake of the pandemic has led many organizations to cast a critical eye over their workplace culture, and the same theme comes up time and time again - leadership.

Your organization’s leaders and managers set the tone through their own behaviors and decisions, which will either reinforce or undermine the desired culture you wish to nurture. “Do as I say, not as I do” is all too common. We’ve probably all experienced a senior leader waxing lyrical about the need for downtime while responding to emails at 1am and spending 14-hour days in the office. So what should leaders be doing - rather than just paying lip service - to ensure your company culture stays positive, productive and supportive?

The pandemic forced the world to work remotely, and many organizations intend to retain a remote-first or hybrid approach. This is popular with employees, giving them the freedom to strike a better work-life balance, cutting out stressful commutes and allowing them the time and space to focus on their tasks. Indeed, the research demonstrates that productivity has gone up, not down, as some traditional-thinking leaders fear.

However, remote working places a bright spotlight on the prevailing company culture. When everyone is suddenly not based in the same physical location, it can polarize the way people feel about the company. That’s why it’s vital to support the communication and collaborative flow between your people. With the right technologies and strategies in place, company culture can become much more resilient, innovative, self-supportive and adaptable - all essential characteristics of organizations primed to succeed in the exponential business environment in which we all now work.

A critical tool that supports collaborative innovation and problem-solving is the learning experience platform (LXP). Organizations can create workspaces for employees to share ideas, navigate roadblocks and challenges together, very much as they would have in person. Leaders should be active in these spaces, contributing to conversations, encouraging input from others, establishing the tone for safe, open debate and discussion.

When everyone is working remotely, it’s easy for weeks or months to pass with no real communication from the organization’s leaders, even though frequent, open conversation is needed now more than ever before.

There are two types of communication to establish here: firstly, top down orientation, news and recognition from your leaders. Regular online town hall sessions, an authentic, honest CEO update in your internal newsletter, and senior management open blogs on your intranet or within your LXP can make a huge difference in helping employees feel respected, informed and in the loop. Secondly, feedback from staff at all levels should feel listened to and actioned by senior managers in a timely fashion. This means implementing continuous performance management, complete with regular check-ins, and two-way discussions on how to action new objectives or respond to performance metrics that need improvement. .

No matter where your people are working, they should still have a clear understanding of what they - and you - are working towards. The company's purpose and values need to be understood and aligned with those of your teams and individual workers. These then need to be translated into achievable, motivating goals. Your performance management system should provide the ability to set and manage goals at all levels of the organization to ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

No company culture remains static over time. Employees leave and join, teams expand and the organization undergoes restructures that make the culture fluid. “The Great Resignation” and “The Great Discontent” are clear signs of widespread low engagement at work, which in turn will drive significant change across today’s workforce. This is something to be embraced, not resisted - but this can only happen if you know how and why things are changing.

HR should stay on top of employee engagement in the form of annual employee surveys, pulse surveys, focus groups and open communication across the organization. Managers also have a vital role to play in monitoring the culture of their own teams by checking in with employees on wellbeing, motivation and happiness at work. What can managers, and in turn, senior leaders, do to better support the needs of employees, and help them feel productive and competent in their roles? This will differ for every organization and every team, so don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions.

Staying vigilant about changes in company culture is key to preventing toxic behaviors and nosedives in motivation from taking hold. If your surveys or conversations with employees are revealing growing discontentment, dig deeper to explore what’s gone wrong and how employees would like to see it rectified. Changes in the company culture are inevitable, especially when the workforce undergoes massive upheaval like switching to fully remote work, but they don’t have to be inevitably negative.

Etex Building Performance is a manufacturing business producing and selling plasterboard. In 2020, the UK’s national lockdown prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic forced Etex to temporarily close its plants and furlough employees. Understandably, this created a lot of anxiety and uncertainty among the Etex workforce, and its leaders were keen to keep employees informed and engaged in the company while they were furloughed.

Being off-site meant that employees had no access to any of their work systems - except for one. Employees still had remote access to their LMS, Totara Learn, so the learning team rapidly set up an additional area within the LMS to support communications between employees, managers and leaders, branded the “Learning & Communications Hub.” The expanded application of the LMS was a massive success for Etex. It provided a vital lifeline between employees and Etex’s leaders, ensuring people felt connected at a difficult time, leading to an incredible 284% increase in usage of the system. On top of this, course completions more than doubled in the height of the UK lockdown, as furloughed employees sought opportunities to upskill and stay engaged with work during this rare downtime.