I certainly knew from my work experience what kind of culture I wanted to establish when I started USA Network; I write about that in "Company Culture Is Yours to Set; Consider It Wisely." My experience seeing how employees wasted time and resources for companies led me to understand that I wanted to create a culture that maximized human capital through teamwork and collaboration.
It's important to set cultural values at the beginning of a company so you don't have to correct culture gone amok later on. I can point to numerous companies where changing company culture has taken tens of millions of investment and years to fix. Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, clearly explained the painful process when transforming IBM's culture in his book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance. Even for young companies, culture is hard to change, but just in case you think your company needs a cultural tweak, read Mary Jesse's article, "Three Ways to Fix Your Company Culture."
If you think trust is not a keen motivator for how employees show their commitment to your company, give them some latitude and see what happens. I certainly always felt that when you give employees some options when they run into a tough spot with a family problem or a personal issue, they will pay you back and then some by their willingness to pitch in when others need the same courtesy. You might be surprised how employees react when you read "Why We Give Unlimited Vacation Time" by Rosemary O'Neill.
Beyond setting examples, what can and should an entrepreneur do to establish the culture they want? Clearly, the first step is to understand the values you establish. It's important to write them down. Digest their meaning to you and why they are important. Then consider how you want to convey them to your colleagues, customers and stakeholders. You want them all to buy into your value creation. I can think of no more perfect example of value creation than the culture Robin Chase established when she and her partner launched Zipcar. Robin explained it at our Springboard boot camp in 2000, when she described the value each member of the car "club" was signing up for. Among the expected behavior was to return each car to its proper parking spot on time, clean, with at least a quarter of a tank of gas and ready to go for the next user. Violators of this cultural code would not remain as Zipcar users. Robin was establishing company culture as well as setting market expectations, and believe it or not, everyone buys in. The reasons for this are best told in her own words in "From the Heart: How Corporate Values Drive Authentic Brands and Customer Loyalty."
Yes, culture is an integral part of what you bring to the table as an entrepreneur. You really have to live your values for others to follow. It's important to most people to work in a culture they can buy into. Invest in creating the right culture and you won't be disappointed in the results.
Company Culture Is Yours to Set; Consider It Wisely
Kay Koplovitz
Create a workplace environment that is just the way you want it to be, and make it one of the first things you do.
I learned my lesson about company culture at the Communications Satellite Corporation in my first corporate job after graduate school. I had written my master's thesis on satellites and their potential impact on the communications business in 1968. Geosynchronous satellites were only put into orbit a couple years earlier and weren't yet a part of the commercial business we know today. So I was thrilled to secure a post at the company leading the way for satellite launches and receiving dish deployment in the U.S.
To a Midwest student brought up in modest surroundings, I thought the elegant offices and people at the L'Enfant Plaza offices in Washington, D.C., were quite impressive. Never one to be modest about my own ambition, I thought that I would be able to work my way up to the C suite in a relatively short period of time. I should have realized at that time, though, that being a retired Air Force general was a priority achievement to be considered for the top post! Working your way up to the C-suite floor was more akin to the military chain of command than I imagined.
Don't get me wrong. My work was pleasant enough, challenging enough, and I met people there who have become my lifelong friends and important parts of my inner circle. However, I quickly learned that the company culture at this corporation was strongly influenced by ambitious people who, I often observed, worked to undermine their colleagues in bold and subtle ways. Protecting the fiefdoms each had managed to build on their way up the corporate ladder was a top priority.
This was also the Mad Men culture that included three-martini lunches-not for me, but for senior guys in my department. I would often observe their office doors closed after lunch and sometimes muted snores could be heard when I passed by. What a waste of company time, I thought, but apparently it never occurred to them, and they were setting the tone.
These and other observations formed my thinking about how company time and resources are used and abused. It was then that I decided that if I were to start a company of my own, the company culture would comprise transparency, team problem solving, goal setting, cooperation and trust. I really didn't want people wasting time back-biting and playing war. I wanted a team environment where honest debates, respect for others and collaborative decision making was the rule of the day.
That's how I set up USA Network (read more at koplovitz.com/the-usa-story), based on the company culture I wanted. If an executive, support staff or any other member of the USA community didn't see it that way, they were welcome to work somewhere else. That doesn't mean people didn't sometimes have violent disagreements with decisions that were made, but it did mean that they had to argue their position with their colleagues to see if they could persuade them to theirs. I think we were pretty successful in achieving these cultural goals. To this day, I run into former employees who often tell me that their experience at USA Network was the best professional experience they ever had.
It wasn't until many years after I left USA Network that a colleague who worked with me from nearly the beginning commented that I ran USA Network like a woman. It never occurred to me that there was a difference. But we see in much research now from the attributes cited in The Athena Doctrine and The Catalyst, as well as McKinsey reports, that women lead with the attributes I described: transparency, inclusion, cooperation, respect for others, collaboration and trust, among many others. Not too surprisingly, in the social media world in which we live today, employees look for these attributes in their leaders.
I think it is important for all entrepreneurs to know that you have one chance to set the culture for your company, and it is at the very beginning. Even in those heady days of first blush business, it is important to know your values, to establish those values for your employees and to adhere to them. They define who you are and will remain for generations to come.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
As founder, you have the ability to establish your company culture.
Set culture according to your values at the very beginning.
Be transparent about company values and adhere to them as your company grows.
How to Energize Your Employees
Theresa Welbourne
Meetings and performance reviews don't energize employees. For that, you need something a little more… random.
As companies grow, they create routines and processes. Management seems to think this will make their companies more efficient. It might, but routines and processes also sap employee energy. And fast growth, and high rates of change, are all about employee energy.
How can you energize employees? With random moments-praising employees on the spur of the moment, doling out spot bonuses or unexpectedly paying for a nice dinner out, for example. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the routine you probably need the most is one to create the random moments that will help energize your team. Here's how it works:
Energy is key to growth.
Energy is an internal force that propels employees to move forward and keep moving forward. Energized employees have a high sense of urgency to get things done. We can measure energy and urgency, and we can manage it.
Energy is not engagement.
Engagement leads primarily to retention. Unfortunately, high retention rates do not equal high performance. I'm not saying engagement and retention are bad, but our research shows that they do not necessarily lead to high performance. It's entirely possible to have a staff of highly engaged people, with no intention of leaving your company, who are nonetheless doing all the wrong things.
Random actions improve employee energy.
Routine, bureaucratic processes may improve fairness, but they do not positively impact energy at work. Think about it. Do more meetings make you feel more energized? More performance reviews? Of course not.
Random moments energize.
Purposefully creating random interventions helps increase a sense of urgency and our energy to move forward. The minute your practice or intervention turns routine, it starts to have diminishing effects on energy.
I witnessed just this, and was able to use it to my advantage, in my position as founder and CEO of eePulse, a technology-and data-driven human resources consultancy. Like many of our clients, we had to figure out how to redirect employees who seemed to insist on working on low-priority items. Weekly meetings and weekly reporting didn't work, but unexpected Skype calls, in which I asked employees to stop what they were doing and tell me what their priorities were, worked wonders. As long as I didn't do this regularly-as long as it was random-it was well received.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Random acts of thanks energize employees' performance more than any routine performance appraisal.
Random interventions such as a Skype call asking what an employee is working on yield better results than routine meetings or reports.
The minute random turns into routine, the benefits of your practice or intervention start to decline.
Three Ways to Fix Your Company Culture
Mary Jesse
Scheming, back-biting and gossiping do no good. How to put an end to it, now.
Have you ever worked for a really exceptional company? For me, that company was McCaw Cellular Communications. Like many companies, McCaw had its list of company goals and values. The real difference was that everyone in the company truly embraced the culture, making a huge difference in how the company operated.
A positive company culture can drive excellent customer service, inspire the creation of superior products and help develop an award-winning workplace, all of which provide fuel for growth and profitability.
Here are three things every CEO can do to improve their company culture:
Start now.
It is very difficult to change the culture once it's embedded within an organization. Far better to set expectations from Day 1. This means proactively screening candidates for culture fit along with other key attributes. What will drive success for your business? We often want our employees to be honest, responsible, customer-focused, flexible, innovative and efficient. Design your company's personality to be the way you want your customers to experience it.
Lead by example.
A company's culture is largely determined by the CEO. You're the one driving not only employee and customer satisfaction, but also the bottom line. As with any culture, people pick up appropriate behavior both directly and indirectly, through examples set by leaders. The CEO sets the tone for the entire organization and reinforces company culture through his or her actions. You cannot teach a concept just once if it is to be truly part of the company DNA. The culture must be reflected consistently in every communication as well as explicitly discussed periodically. Live it.
Reinforce the culture.
Nothing demotivates hard-working team members faster than seeing someone get away with bad behavior or, worse, get rewarded for it. Bad attitudes are contagious. It is always better to replace a bad attitude. This not only removes the negative influence but lets everyone else know that bad behavior isn't tolerated. Of course, you also need incentives to encourage good behavior. Celebrate success, recognize excellence and innovation, and reward those who do the right thing.
Capital is hard earned. Product development costs precious dollars. And resources and customers are like gold. Company culture is a currency available to every CEO. Don't make the mistake of overlooking it as a purely HR issue. It can make the difference between success and failure. Don't leave that money on the table.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
A positive company culture can place your company ahead of the competition and improve your bottom line.
A CEO must set the tone and lead by example from Day 1 through actions and consistency.
Send out consistent and clear messages and incentives throughout the company that good attitudes will be rewarded and strong messages that bad attitudes won't be tolerated.
Why We Give Unlimited Vacation Time
Rosemary O'Neill
How will your employees react to unlimited vacation time? Depends on how you answer these three questions.
The call came in the middle of the day, and our COO was panic-stricken. Her husband had just fallen off a ladder and shattered his leg. Months of surgery and recovery lay ahead. Could she possibly be on a very flexible schedule for the next few months?
It took only a moment to realize that of course we trusted her to maintain her work duties, or delegate them appropriately, as she dealt with this family crisis. And the more we discussed it, the more we realized that we felt the same level of trust and respect for all of our employees.
We had very carefully hired over the years, ensuring that our team was committed, self-directed and focused. So why not put our money where our hiring was? The next Monday we announced that, effective immediately, we were offering unlimited paid leave to all employees at the company.
It was a bombshell to our staff. But it felt completely in line with our philosophy of respect and trust. If you bake in integrity and respect with regard to both employees and customers, you'll be free to spend your time and energy delivering outstanding products.
We realized there were three important building blocks that had allowed us to end up with this type of company:
1. Do you hire people, or résumés?
MBAs are great, but put a bigger priority on hiring people with the right attitude and outstanding communication skills. How can you evaluate these during a job interview? We ask each candidate to write (with a pen, on paper) a one-page essay in fifteen minutes. You'd be surprised to see what you can find out about someone using this simple technique. Asking a fairly senior person to do this task will either result in semi-offended compliance, or a smile of surprise. Hire the one who smiles and is still busy writing when you come back into the room.
2. How open are you to feedback?
The respectful organization is constantly accepting and giving feedback within the team. There's a collegial atmosphere in which systems are flexible, rather than set in stone. If everyone agrees on the destination, then it's easy for everyone to move toward it without micro-management. Our regular supervisor-employee check-ins are designed to measure contributions to corporate goals, not hours worked. If deadlines are being met, products are being shipped and customers are happy, then I don't care if half the staff is surfing on Friday afternoon.
3. Do your employees create fiefdoms?
Every employee should have well-defined goals, and the freedom to accomplish them. That means that the marketing and the technology folks should know what's coming up for each other. When we once had a repetitive, simple coding task that had to be done on a schedule, we cross-trained a couple of non-geeks and got it done in short order. You need to create a business in which colleagues can support each other without getting wrapped up in job descriptions and titles.
Building an atmosphere of respect goes far beyond implementing a single policy or perk. It is a pervasive corporate value, built from the ground up.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Unlimited vacation time is a possible perk for your business if you trust and respect your employees, believe the feeling is mutual and have created the type of company that can support this.
Identify and hire people who will support each other across departments and job descriptions.
Giving unlimited time off as a perk to employees is only one possible expression of a companywide philosophy of mutual trust and respect.
Not Just Another Notebook
Candice Brown Elliott
Scientists' laboratory notebooks have illustrious histories-and deserve a shot at the future.
One of the first things I did, upon founding my first company, was to buy a bunch of laboratory notebooks imprinted with our firm's name. Each new employee was issued a numbered notebook and personally instructed as to how to document his or her work, especially innovations or inventions. This included the receptionist.
I had two reasons for doing this. First, I wanted to reinforce the idea that intellectual property development and protection was a key component of our firm's business plan, and that we took it very seriously. Second, it sent the message that everyone's ideas had value to the company. No exceptions.
Too often, a company's corporate culture creates expectations about whose ideas will be heard and whose won't be. How many companies expect-truly expect-their receptionist or their shipping clerk to suggest the inspired idea that leads to the next blockbuster product? Thirteen years after Clairvoyante, mine does.
The lowly notebook does not often get the respect it deserves. We think of notebooks as repositories for nearly illegible meeting notes, appointment dates and to-do lists. These are all necessary functions, of course. But the noble laboratory or inventor's notebook is in another league altogether. Leonardo da Vinci's paintings might still be in our leading museums, but would his name be known by nearly everyone if not for his notebooks filled with illustrations and text describing his ideas on flying machines?
Attending Fairchild U
My first job as an engineer was at Fairchild Semiconductor. It's called Fairchild University for a reason: It's known for the number of firms founded by its alumni. On my first day, I was issued a numbered laboratory notebook. My new boss, C. C. Wu-the man who invented the matched dual operational amplifier in the early days of the integrated circuit-showed me how to use it.
Writing in that notebook became a very strong habit. I took pride in the neatness of my entries, the workmanship of my illustrations, the clarity of my thoughts. The discipline of a well-written entry forced me to think through my ideas and their implications. Each time I made a new entry, I had a senior colleague read it over and then sign and witness each new page.
This was not some perfunctory review. My colleagues questioned each idea, in detail, until they understood exactly what I was attempting to document. I came away with new ideas for further research and better skills as a writer, with a new ability to more clearly state what might have started out as only a vague idea. I will be forever grateful for this early discipline.
When I moved from Fairchild to Advanced Micro Devices, I was again issued a numbered laboratory notebook. But, surprisingly, I wasn't given any instruction about how the notebook should be used. The act of assigning the notebook was just another task on a checklist that the human resources department rushed through for each new hire.
Months later, as I prepared for my first patent application, AMD's attorneys complimented me on the quality of my documentation. Over the next several years, those attorneys used my notebooks in training sessions for both new and longtime employees.
In thirty years, I've filled volumes of lab notebooks. I've been told that such notebooks will soon be a relic of the past, and will go the way of manual typewriters. Now we write up our reports on laptops while sipping our second mocha. When we're done, we hit send and entrust our writings to the vagaries of the local Wi-Fi hotspot. I'm even told that the whole reason for an invention notebook-the need to prove priority-is no longer valid. The United States has joined the rest of the world, granting priority by "first to file" rather than "first to invent."
Yet I remain the anachronism, sitting in the corner of a café, with my pen hovering above the pages of yet another notebook, marshaling my thoughts to renewed clarity before committing them irrevocably to paper, and perhaps to prosperity.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Protecting intellectual property by keeping detailed documentation in a notebook may seem tedious and time-consuming, but it will be worth it if you ever need to defend the ownership of your work.
Notes will show organization of ideas and will credit the person with patent filing.
Three Key Traits of Great Entrepreneurial Hires
AlexAnndra Ontra
Just because someone was a star at a big company doesn't mean they'll shine for you. Here's what to look for.
When it's time to hire, many of us have the same instincts: Look for Fortune 500-level company experience combined with a prestigious education.
No doubt those candidates offer a wealth of experience and contacts. But on many levels, it's easier for someone to succeed when they have the resources and branding of a large company behind them. Think of John selling Nabisco cookies compared to James selling Granny's Best Chocolate Chips out of a makeshift kitchen. Both John and James can put in the exact same amount of time and effort, but you can bet that John will sell more cookies and make more money. If John transitioned to Granny's Best, would he be successful? Maybe, if, in addition to his pedigree, he shows the following:
Flexibility
Look for employees who are flexible in both thought and action. Smaller and newer companies often reinvent themselves over and over again, as they define their market and their product offering. Their employees must be willing to put aside their alleged job descriptions, roll up their sleeves and switch gears as the company's needs dictate. They need to be as nimble as the company itself.
Humility
There is nothing more humbling than getting tripped up over tasks that, in a previous job, an underling used to do for you. A friend of mine with an Ivy League MBA recently moved from a senior position at an international packaged goods conglomerate to a senior position at a tech start-up. She has the knowledge, skills and contacts to succeed in her new environment, but she became ridiculously frustrated after spending five hours fumbling with fonts and images for a PowerPoint pitch. The content was spot-on, but the slides looked awful. Her comment was simply, "I had an assistant do that for me!" But she sucked it up, persevered, sent her deck to her client and closed the business. Not everyone with her credentials would bother with menial tasks they considered to be beneath them.
Creativity
Such a trite word. But what is it? The ability to think out of the box; to make something out of nothing; to make lemonade out of lemons. However you define it, a start-up requires employees who can think for themselves and excel without a lot of process and spoon-feeding. Small companies lack the protective layers and systems (bureaucracy) that slowly grow their employees and compensate for any one person's weakness. Some people will sink without structure. Others will thrive; they love the intellectual freedom and challenge. Hire the latter.
The challenge for the employer is that these traits are difficult to qualify in a résumé or job interview. But they are critical to success within a start-up. Ask a candidate to describe situations in which he or she had to act quickly, solve a problem or change course. Then listen between the lines to how they reacted in the situation. Do they tell their story with pride and excitement? Or is it laced with negativity and resentment? You want the positive attitude.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Skills needed for entrepreneurial businesses may be different than those required or learned at big corporations, where support staffs are prevalent.
Flexibility, humility and creativity are needed to succeed in start-up businesses in addition to the contacts and experience learned in corporate careers.
From the Heart: How Corporate Values Drive Authentic Brands and Customer Loyalty
Robin Chase
Draw in your customers with transparency and authentic core values and your customers will become your best advocates.
Marketers trying to convince customers that a company is value-driven and cares about them when the CEO and the corporate culture don't match that reality have a difficult task. Over time, cracks will appear and the lack of authenticity shines through.
When one of my daughters moved to a new school, she told her fellow third graders that I was raising eight foster kids in addition to my own three, and that her father was a professional ice hockey player. Not. At one point, she admitted to me: "It gets harder and harder to remember the details and keep it all straight." Indeed.
Back when I was founder and CEO at Zipcar and establishing the brand, we'd do periodic customer surveys, comprising both quantitative and qualitative elements. My favorite free-form response, which we actually got several times, was: "Everything you say is true." And it was.
As CEO, I deeply believed in the benefits of the service, in the general goodwill of our members (who we had to trust to treat the cars well), in being transparent about our shortcomings and fixing them quickly, in being a learning organization, and in recognizing that it took teamwork (customers included) to produce the Zipcar service. A good customer experience was thanks to the efforts of everyone all along the chain: website design and writing, a simple and straightforward application, a reservation system that took seconds, cars that were consistently outfitted and well maintained, helpful and sincere customer service, great marketing and business development. Every employee understood that what they did mattered, was valued and was integral to the whole.
I took Zipcar's core principles and turned them into one word so that we could all remember them: SCREACH. Zipcar sought to be simple, convenient, reliable, economical and environmental, admirable, customer and community focused, and humorous (that is not how you spell "screech"). This mnemonic was an easy way to keep us on track.
Zipcar members were part of this team, an idea that is increasingly accepted today but was totally novel back in 2000. As such, we would genuinely ask members for advice on all sorts of things. Sure, some of the engagement was for fun and to generate participation (What shall we call the next car? Come to our holiday cookie-swap party), but it was also sincere (Want a job? Do you know of any good parking spaces? Where shall we expand to next?).
Storytelling in routine emails proved very powerful to communicate our values to members. As a side benefit, employees read them as well. The storytelling was an important part of culture creation and branding: Here's what we think is funny, interesting, amazing; here is what we do; here are our challenges; here is how we treat people and talk to our customers; we admit mistakes. And I always tried to tell a story that someone would want to repeat. Zipcar grew virally because at every touch point, the customer was surprised and delighted and went on to tell someone else about it. Customers couldn't help but talk about us.
KAY'S TAKEAWAYS:
Authentic messages ring true with customers. Be true.
The CEO needs to drive the authentic message through the organization straight through to the customer.
A satisfied community drives social marketing success.
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