Three Culture-Building Steps To Create A World-Class Company

• When executives prioritize and nurture their company’s culture, they can lead the brand with a purpose that instills confidence in workers, customers, and partners.  
• World-class companies with passion and purpose (like Costco, Ikea, and Commerce Bank) develop a significant and sustainable competitive advantage over their counterparts. 
• You can’t manage what’s not measured, so it’s important to conduct a survey to measure values to get a baseline for the current state of your company. Values can include concepts people rate such as teamwork, creativity, flexibility, and so on.  

As businesses get ready to meet the opportunities, challenges, and unknowns in 2023, they must focus on prioritizing and nurturing their company’s culture. When that happens, you can lead your brand with a purpose that instills confidence with your workers, customers, and partners.  

Even if you have a great business strategy, your culture should provide an environment where people are passionate about their work, mission, and company. Perhaps that’s why management guru Peter Drucker once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast.   

In the classic business book Firms of Endearment, the authors describe how world-class companies with passion and purpose (like Costco, Ikea, and Commerce Bank) develop a significant and sustainable competitive advantage over their counterparts.   

They’re referred to as “endearing firms” because they create an emotional connection with their stakeholders, while prospering and delivering value to society. People interacting with these companies can feel safe, secure, and confident when purchasing their products or services.   

Corporate culture is particularly important when a company is remote or hybrid because you need to help people feel connected to the organization and its mission, even if they never get to meet in person. My company, goLance, is a global freelance marketplace that’s entirely remote. That’s one reason why I engaged Jairek Robbins, a world-renowned business coach, speaker, entrepreneur, and president of Success Enterprises, to implement a survey and analysis of my organization’s culture, and help determine how to make it even stronger.    

Here are some highlights of best practices he shared: 

Assess Your Culture — Get a Baseline 

Surprisingly, organizations may take different approaches to analyzing their culture — doing 360-degree assessments, getting a net promoter score, and so on — but many of them tend to skip the most important step of obtaining a baseline. You can’t manage what’s not measured, and measuring values is a great start.   

The process begins with a survey, where participants describe what’s most important to them, the current state of the organization, and where they see the organization headed.   

If you want to be a great company, think about growth from a long-term perspective, and have a shared vision. When your team members understand where the company is headed in the short term, as well as the long term, and they are excited to be on the mission, you can create a culture based on shared values, greater clarity, and insight.  

According to Robbins: “A culture with a team that’s willing and enthusiastic about being on this journey together fosters creativity, innovation, and commitment. When that happens, your team members’ performance goes well beyond the mindset that they’re just doing a job. Instead, they’re on a mission. They feel like this is their calling and that fuels the fire of innovation.” 

Develop a Plan and Set a Target to Move Toward Your Desired State 

Do a culture survey. The survey explores the process of: 

• Categorizing and assessing the personal values of team members 
• Understanding their perception of the current state of their company’s culture 
• Identifying your desired-state culture    

Survey results should also reveal any potentially limiting values in terms of viability, relationships, processes, and performance. Once the information is collected and evaluated, it can be used to develop  

a roadmap to help companies move to their desired state, while also meeting the needs of their stakeholders. 

After reviewing your organization’s strengths and areas for improvement, focus on the most important areas to reach your desired culture. The survey feedback should highlight issues that impact reaching your objectives. For example, if the analysis indicates that your organization is unclear about the company’s mission, then you can develop a plan to clarify and reinforce the mission through communications and activities over time. 

The assessment might even indicate important values you hadn’t previously considered and need to reinforce. Conduct a survey each year to see how the organization has adapted to certain changes. 

Don’t Try to Tackle Too Many Changes at Once

Even if the survey identifies five or more “value jumps,” which are basically new values the survey reveals, focus on the top three or so before moving on to an emerging one. Values can include concepts people rate such as teamwork, creativity, flexibility, and so on. “If people don’t have at least three places where their values match with the way a company is being run, they’re likely to feel they’re just doing a job and it’s not a reflection of who they are,” says Robbins. “However, if there are three or more value matches, then they don’t feel like it’s work — instead, they’re happy and more productive because it’s more of a representation of who they are as a human.”   

goLance Culture Case Study 

Maintaining a vibrant and effective corporate culture is a true differentiator as companies increasingly shift away from traditional models and move to remote and hybrid environments. Here are some of the interesting findings I discovered after going through the initial culture assessment with Robbins:   

• I was proud that the team had a very low entropy score. This score gave us confidence that people were dedicated to their work, excited about opportunities to innovate, and were overall satisfied with their role and the company. 
• To integrate their personal values more fully with our future direction, we’re giving our team more autonomy, trust, and empowerment in decision making. This also supports innovation, which is a key value for our business. 
• My team, like many others, prioritizes continuous improvement. They indicated a desire for more training to expand their skill set. I’m going to consider offering more online educational options as a perk. For example, Udemy provides more than 200,000 online courses in tech, business, design, marketing, and other areas at affordable rates.  
• As Robbins mentioned, focusing on a company’s mission is essential. The culture assessment helped us to refine and solidify our mission.  
• We’ll enhance our communications and continue to discuss results with our team each quarter. These communications will describe what we said we’re going to do, what we learned, and what we choose to do next. 

This assessment is the start of our journey toward building a more powerful culture that helps our team, businesses, and freelancers to thrive. To learn about getting a culture assessment, you can reach out to Jairek Robbins at [email protected].