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Culture - Team - Winning

Five Reasons CEOs Should Take Culture Seriously

The Bailey Group | April 13, 2015 | Blog | CEO Advisory | 2 minute read

Here’s the funny thing about culture—it’s created and led by leadership, yet some leaders underestimate their participation in it, and the power it can have in getting their company where it needs to go. Some leaders prefer to delegate culture to a department or a committee, or they hope it will create itself. But for those who continue to dismiss culture as “fluffy,” there’s a rude awakening on the horizon.

Culture is officially a buzzword and it is trending. According to Deloitte’s 2015 research on Human Capital Trends, culture and engagement have become the top areas of importance for companies—more than double from the year before. This underscores the connection between culture and the objectives that companies are seeking to achieve.

Here are five important reasons CEOs should take culture seriously:

  1. People want to work in an environment that matches their personal vibe. Culture is what creates the vibe for your company—hence the increasingly popular local, regional, and national “Best Places to Work” lists. Analysis shows direct correlations between those lists and stock prices.
  2. Employees will decide whether to stay or go based on a company’s culture. When it comes to retention and people are paid a competitive wage for their position, culture is deemed more important than compensation nearly every time.
  3. People want to understand how their role will help actualize the organization’s vision. Effective leaders not only define a clear vision, they create the culture that supports the values and behaviors that shape and drive that vision.
  4. Employees want to see themselves in the future of the company. Culture not only trumps strategy (Peter Drucker), it connects strategy to execution. The right culture fosters continuous communication of vision so strategy doesn’t stagnate, and teams understand why they do what they do and how they are contributing to the desired outcome.
  5. Culture helps foster engagement. Gallup’s latest research shows only 31% of the workforce is actively engaged and 51% are actively disengaged. While there are other ways to engage teams, culture is the connective tissue. It is a good place to look to if you are having trouble attracting the right talent and/or you’re experiencing high turnover.

Increasingly, there is a direct correlation between best performing companies and best places to work, proving that what some see as “fluffy” parts of business contribute to the “hard” business results desired. If you are challenged by strategy that is stagnate, low productivity, attracting and retaining talent, and if you yourself aren’t having fun in the workplace that you created, then focusing on your culture could help you get where you want to go.