Workplace Culture To Focus Your Attention In 2015

Where Did The Time Go?

All too quickly, the clock struck midnight and it’s suddenly 2015.
Where did the time go?
Look at all of those things that you were going to do in 2014 but somehow never found time in the 365 days you were given to do them.
Does any of this sound like you?

Time to Work on the Workplace

Let’s get focused this year and start dealing seriously with the things that have been annoying you (and others around you probably) about your workplace.
Let’s start with FIVE facts about workplace ‘cultures’ that will get you thinking about your own situation.
When we take a look at the latest research and polls that exists concerning the best places to work (http://fortune.com/best-companies/) such as Google, SAS, The Boston Consulting Group, Edward Jones and Quicken Loans (to highlight the current top five) there are cultural factors within those workplaces which don’t exist in the vast majority of other workplaces.
What does exist, in the many workplaces, is six sure fire signs that you have a culture problem.
These should be the targets of your activities this year:
1. Gossipers
These are the folks with too much energy for what is going on in other people’s lives. They find comfort in likeminded others and before you know it, you have cliques setting up shop and pitching groups of employees against other groups or individuals. It doesn’t even matter if it is spiteful or not, the fact that it happens sucks the positive energy out of the air sort of like the scary Dementors in Harry Potter.
2. The Leadership Team has poor habits
Role modeling the behaviour that you want to see from your employees is the single most critical factor of the activities from any leadership team. If your leadership team demonstrates nothing but bad moods, sloppy attendance activity, zero collaboration, and a general sense of ‘couldn’t give a rats’ attitude…..this is how the employees will behave as well. If the leadership team doesn’t care, why should the employees? Fix the leadership team, and you’ll be taking big strides along the path to improving your organizational culture.
3. Your employees battle with each other
Stop and take a really close look at how your employees get along with each other. Do they work together? Do they collaborate? Or are they in competition with one another. This is not competing in the same way as people engage in ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ but done in a way where each person is trying to beat others around them and although disguised as healthy competition, it is actually damaging things.
4. People don’t ‘play’ together out of the sandbox
Having worked in an environment which is built on teams for so long, you can definitely tell which groups of employees have relationships in and out of the workplace. There is a different energy about their conversations and how they communicate generally. Those organizations that want to ensure that their teams have added value within their relationships at work need to work on encouraging those same teams to have team building moments outside of work too.
5. Your Team Spirit is missing or was never there in the first place
Let’s face it…the workplace is where we all spend an amazing amount of our waking hours. As such, it is a place where we should enjoy spending time. If it’s not, then that is a huge problem. Employee’s level of enjoyment is usually linked to how connected they feel to the workplace itself. Do they care about what the business is trying to achieve in the marketplace? Do they understand and believe in the mission and vision of the organization? If they don’t….if they do not see themselves as valuable to the future of the company…as being of significance and of value to the organization….and taking pride in the work that they do……if that is not there, the organization is at risk.
So, there you have it…….FIVE aspects of a workplace to focus your attention on this year (if they exist in your world of course).
This is no time for complacency however, and the moment you say to yourself that none of these things exist in your workplace, then you probably aren’t looking in the right places.