Article provided by King Price Insurance
No matter the size of your enterprise, it’s not easy driving growth and sustaining a competitive edge. Market conditions are volatile. Competitors are… Well, competitors. Clients are demanding faster, more personalised service. Technology is evolving faster than we can keep up with it. It’s getting ever-harder to stand out.
Turns out there’s one competitive advantage that can’t be duplicated: It’s your company culture, and it’s not only unique to your organisation, it helps to shape your brand identity, improve employee retention, and inspire your people. Culture makes you stand out as a company and makes your people want to come to work every day, embrace innovation, and get closer to your customers.
More importantly, it drives real and lasting company value. Take technology giant Microsoft as an example. When CEO Satya Nadella took the reins in 2014, his first priority was to fix the company culture and entrench a sense of purpose. The result? The company has not only radically reshaped its business model and its culture, but its share price rocketed from a low of $16 to a sustained level of around $213.
For the previous 11 years, studies in the US have shown that companies where people ‘want’ to work have outperformed companies where people ‘have’ to work. This is because a great company culture builds higher engagement while a dysfunctional culture causes employees to disengage, which leads to poor performance and negatively affects financial performance.
Every company – large or small – has a culture. Whether you have three employees or 300, and whether intentional or not, your company is defined by a set of behaviours, attitudes, and norms. And, contrary to popular belief, the value of a positive company culture isn’t that it makes your employees feel all warm and fuzzy. The value sits directly on the bottom-line.
Being intentional about culture
A popular statement asserts that culture eats strategy for breakfast. This might be true, but it also may be just partly true. Good culture enables or empowers strategy while dysfunctional culture bites into strategy, or totally devours it.
Organisational culture is often referred to as being either enabling or limiting. It’s only when we become very intentional about our strategies and culture, that we can build healthy environments where people perform at their best.
Click here to see how you can build and sustain a positive culture that will support the growth of both your business and your people.
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