What Leaders Are Asking

First, a Note on Culture

Remember that Gallup defines organizational culture as simply "how we do things around here." Are you able to express this for your workplace? Too often, leaders and employees have a very different understanding of what their culture is, so it's important to descriptively and clearly articulate your culture to all employees.

When it's time to transform your culture, keep in mind that people need to have timely information about the changes happening around them. Emphasizing how your cultural transformation aligns with your organization's forward-focused purpose can build enthusiasm for your change initiatives.

What to Do About It

• Align core principles to guide your organization.
• • Avoid kitchen sink values. Many organizations have tried to "kitchen sink" their values: They dump everything into overarching values, which confuses employees because the values are not succinct, believable or actionable. Employees don't know what to focus on. Displaying your values on a wall doesn't mean employees will know how to act them out when no one is watching.
  • Create accountability. Once leadership decides on the values, people need to be held accountable for living them out. Leaders need to model the values every day, coach employees on them and recognize those who exemplify them.
• Maintain your commitment. Your culture is great until it's not. Regardless of the circumstances, ask yourself: Are people living out their values? It's hard to live your culture out during hard times while managing external pressures, but that's really when your culture should be at its strongest.
• Take on the challenge. Leaders, more than anyone else, are responsible for creating and maintaining culture. If you take culture seriously, others will follow.

What to Do About It

• Tie values to work. Ensure your organization's values are connected to the work employees do every day, especially work tied to customers. If you cannot connect values to work, you may need to rethink your organization's values.
• Engage your employees. Engaged employees create engaged customers, so make sure to implement an employee engagement strategy and measure progress regularly. Employee engagement and enthusiasm spread to your customers, creating loyal patrons who form emotional bonds with your organization.
• Define roles and excellence. To improve cooperation, clearly indicate what each employee should do and then define excellence for that role. Ensure team members know each other's strengths and strive to develop them. The best leaders seek and share positive examples of collaboration and excellence.

What to Do About It

• Focus on productivity, prioritization and collaboration by understanding the various goals at play. If team members must work together but have different goals, it can disrupt productivity and collaboration. Creating alignment on goals will give teams a north star for how the work should get done.

• • Fix issues when they're small. Most leaders don't celebrate when someone calls out a small issue that could develop into a big issue, but you should. If your team feels psychologically safe to call out issues or problems, you have a greater chance of being able to address them before they become significant. Create a culture where people raise issues that can be solved collaboratively.
  • Make sure your teams understand their strengths. When team members know each other's strengths, they're able to have better conversations that lead to stronger decisions and clearer alignment. Teams that know and leverage their strengths have more insightful debates and reach higher-quality decisions.

• Set effective goals.
• • Set goals with other teams in mind. People often set their own goals and align with their team but spend little time discussing how those goals might connect with other teams' - but they are often related. Strong alignment early on could prevent goals from diverging and projects from stalling as teams pivot and adjust.
  • Align on resources. When setting goals, knowing how can be just as important as knowing what. Develop a unified understanding of which resources will be dedicated to which goals.
  • Choose quality over quantity. It's common to spend too much time and money forming lots of goals. It can be much more effective to create a limited number of must-win goals.

What to Do About It

• Develop a listening strategy. Your listening strategy should be tied to higher-level objectives; otherwise, you might not do anything with the information you gather. Whether rolling out new values, adjusting organizational structure, changing performance management practices, etc., you should consider those pieces when deciding what to listen for.
• Listen and be prepared to act. Listen and commit to sharing your discoveries and what you'll do with them. Set up a listening post, but also think through the implications of having one. Listen to foundational issues that align with the strategy outlined above when employees are overloaded at work, unclear on priorities or working on things they don't think they should be working on.
• Focus on the three ways to listen. You can use data you already have, quick pulse surveys and other conversations you have with employees. Among these three ways to gather data, you can survey employees, capture and aggregate conversations people are having with employees, use focus groups to get qualitative information about what's going on, or gather performance data such as safety incidents, absenteeism and whether people are using healthcare resources.
• Communicate when action is taken. There has to be two-way communication. Employees value their voiced concerns being addressed.

What to Do About It

• Embrace your responsibility. First, recognize that making these decisions is a new demand of leadership - there is no precedent you can draw inspiration or insight from. You're charting new territory. In this new territory, the will of the employee is not consistent with the will of the employer. Deciding on office attendance policy will have unavoidable consequences. People might leave based on your choice. You must accept this. Recognize that it's not unfair for you to say, "Given the nature of our work, you have to be in the office." But at the same time, are your managers in the office? Are your leaders? When you're in the office, are you visible?
• Individualize. You have to do three things: Decide what your office policy is, decide what your exception policy is, and individualize based on the needs of your team.
• Give reasons over rules. It's better to give employees reasons to come into the office rather than rules. Look for ways to anchor your reasons within your organization's purpose, brand and culture, all of which will matter to employees during any major change. Within these higher-order issues, your reasons have to be purposeful and tangible. People come into the office to be mentored, have opportunities to learn and grow, and collaborate with teams. It has to be more than just "come in for free lunch."
• Help people feel in control. If you're not specifying which days employees must be in the office, encourage your teams to decide together when they'll come in. This way, they'll be sure to get dedicated face time and a sense of control over their schedule.