What's your company's culture?

Do you, or someone you know, sometimes work through lunch to impress the boss? Or to keep the boss from questioning your value? Do you know anyone who comes in to work even when they are sick, because the company has no tolerance for unplanned absences? Are ideas freely shared in your work culture with no worries about who gets credit, or blame? When you take your vacation does your tablet or smart phone go with you, in case the office calls?

If the answer to one or more of those questions is 'yes,' and for most of America it is,  then you work for or know of a company that thinks the year is 1980, because such a culture no longer works. Sure, there are plenty of people out there looking for a job, but how many of those looking for work are employees the company would seek out intentionally? And, if they are people the company wants to hire, why didn't they try to find them in the first place?

In fact, company culture is directly tied to company profits, as the Top 100 Places to Work in America are well aware. The more your company culture makes it obvious how much employees are valued, the higher the company profits soar. Or, as in the case of a non-profit, the lower the revenues spent attracting and retaining the best employees when competitive salary and benefits are not always easy to fund.

The following article brilliantly addresses this 21st Century paradigm shift.

What the Top 100 Places to work know that other companies do not

Culture counts at top companies

The top performing American companies are showing every other company how it's done, but not all of them are listening. A company's culture is the Undiscovered Country for many CEOs, who are invariably trying to squeeze more productivity out of their work force but without doing anything radically different than before.

This, of course, is a short cut to disaster, since the latest Gallup results show that more than 70% of American workers are disengaged from their work. Therefore, those CEOs who try the same old thing over and over again are depending on employees who largely don't care about their job and are looking for a new place to work to increase their productivity with no additional motivation. And those disengaged employees are often ruining the workplace environment for the employees who do care.

Retention problems, anyone?


Below is a link to a brilliantly insightful piece by the CEO of a highly successful firm that has finally seen its hard work pay off; you can bet their employees are not only engaged in their work, but are glad to have their jobs and will fight to keep them.You can also bet that their bottom line reflects this.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2013/11/14/four-ingredients-for-a-winning-company-culture/#!