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Faced with today’s market uncertainty, some organizational leaders feel they do not need to focus as much on their workplace culture now that the power dynamic is shifting from employees back to employers. Real or expected corrections in the labor market suggest to them that they will devote a big part of their time and a focus elsewhere.
They couldn’t be more unsuitable.
The economic downturn is a culturally critical time for organizations, especially people who rely heavily on their employees. The threat of layoffs, pay cuts, reorganisations, and other internal changes seriously undermine morale. And while the fears that permeate such events in the workplace may push some people to “work harder,” those efforts often don’t result in higher performance. As a substitute, hidden fears hinder connectivity and collaboration, stopping teams from adding value and achieving ambitious goals.
Furthermore, organizations that fall into this trap often suffer more when markets return to normal. Even short cultural gaps make engaging in successful culture constructing in higher times an added challenge for them, stopping them from taking advantage of recent opportunities. In the end, they lose to the competition.
Related: What Makes a Great Company Culture (and Why It’s Essential)
The importance of constructing culture
Workplace cultures—that’s, encouraged behaviors which are ideally intentionally shaped to help employees meet and exceed overall goals—are critical to the health of a corporation. As a consultant who has supported a whole lot of culture-building initiatives, I even have seen first-hand how the strength of an organization is frequently directly related to the strength of its culture.
For instance, a long-time client in the highly competitive medical technology industry decided to invest in constructing a culture in 2019 to differentiate themselves and preserve the organization’s legacy. This job helped her attract and retain top talent and instill a collaborative mindset in order that when the CEO analyzed 2021 sales, valuation experts specifically addressed the company’s culture and valued its value.
Simply, culture serves as the foundation of a corporation. And identical to the physical foundations, the true value and potential of a culture is commonly revealed when misfortunes strike it.
Related: Company culture is all the pieces
What should leaders do?
Leaders who currently face or anticipate challenges should subsequently correctly focus on cultural activities. At a minimum, they will clearly and consistently reinforce the established mission, vision, and values as a method of maintaining a way of purpose and belonging to teams. For organizations which have yet to define a mission, vision, and values, doing this exercise is a super first step toward constructing a culture.
Leaders can even adopt cultural norms which were shown to consistently help organizations weather tough conditions. For example, while each culture is uniquely placed on a distinct spectrum of behavior, people who lean towards greater transparency in their messaging tend to be higher at maintaining the trust of their people in difficult environments. Similarly, organizations which are more collaborative, modern, inclusive, and relationship-oriented, and people who take a long-term view of how they measure ROI over time, tend to come out of a crisis in higher shape, each financially and and cultural .
Adopting these norms often requires leaders to relinquish some level of perceived or actual control. Very often, top management tries to control not only systems, processes and messages, but in addition real human responses that naturally defy top-down dominance. They need to consider giving up that need and make room for the chaotic, complex individuality of their people to achieve greater transparency and construct commitment and trust.
As well as, leaders can be smart to reject any manifestation of misconceptions about “capitalizing” employees’ fears and anxieties for the profit of their firms. This might mean countering the emerging trend of backing away from popular workplace principles reminiscent of flexible or hybrid working arrangements. Unless there may be a well communicated strategic need to get rid of such programs, employees will view such changes as calculated, punitive, traditional and unnecessary. They are going to influence the level of engagement and productivity of the teams they carry to their work and inform their pondering after they have more employment opportunities. In fact, employees are way more receptive to personal work when it’s directly linked to goals reminiscent of team constructing and brainstorming.
Related: 5 ways to change your company culture
take the challenge
Meeting the challenge of organizational leadership requires top executives to consistently grapple with the tension of doing what’s best for his or her people while doing what’s best for his or her organizations, keeping in mind the opportunities and consequences that may affect each individuals and in addition to collectively. This implies giving real importance to the high performance of team members together with their humanity, accepting the challenge of treating each priorities concurrently, even in difficult times. While leaders could also be forced to make difficult decisions, which of course may include firing people, they need to not lose their sense of empathy and compassion in the process – and never simply because doing so represents poor corporate citizenship. It is also a strategically bad move that can prove unwise eventually.
The more leaders take up this challenge, prioritizing the humanity of their people alongside their high performance, the more they are going to see their culture improve and serve to prepare their organizations for whatever lies ahead.