HOW A PURPOSE BUILT CULTURE ATTRACTS AND RETAINS THE BEST PEOPLE
Create a company culture top performers want to be a part of.
Create a company culture top performers want to be a part of.
Culture is key in the success of any company. A purpose-built company culture is one that is specifically designed based on a company’s purpose and values, which then informs the type of people that the company hires. By having a clear, well-defined purpose, and a culture built around it, organizations can mitigate many common problems like low employee engagement and high turnover.
The strong culture at Meetingmax was developed around best-practices from leading businesses and organizational thinkers. It is this strong company culture that allows us to attract and retain top talent and ultimately saw us be named one of Canada’s top ten most admired company cultures.
Below is a list of steps that you can take to develop and promote a purpose-built company culture in your own organization.
Step #1 in Creating a Strong Company Culture: Define Your Culture
Defining your culture means identifying your company’s core purpose and core values. Your core purpose is the reason why you do what you do. For example, Meetingmax’s core purpose is “Helping People Find Their Tribes.” As a provider of room block management technology, we make it possible for people to gather with their tribes, and form bonds.
Your core values are a set of three to seven timeless guiding principles that define who you and your employees are and how you conduct yourselves. To identify what they are, it helps to think of your three top-performing employees. What characteristics do they have that make them perform so well? Within that list of characteristics lie your core values.
Step #2 in Creating a Strong Company Culture: Recruit and Reinforce Your Culture
Once you’ve identified the core purpose and values that define your company culture, you now need to make sure that you are hiring people who are a fit with that culture. At Meetingmax, we work with Fitzii to manage our job candidates. Fitzii manages our job postings and creates an assessment tool to evaluate candidates’ personality and skill fit. This tool has drastically reduced our time investment to source quality candidates. Once we’ve narrowed down the candidates, we then conduct phone screens where candidates are asked tough questions right at the beginning, for us to get a good sense of each candidate before deciding who to invite to the office for an in-person interview.
We then do two rounds of in-person interviews: a top-grading interview and a focused interview. The top-grading interview is an in-depth look over the candidate’s professional life since high school. The rationale for looking so far back is that it allows us to observe patterns in how candidates confront challenges, manage relationships and perform professionally over the course of their careers. The focused interview looks at three key skills necessary for the role and how the candidates have demonstrated with them in their past positions. Finally, reference checks ensure that candidates were accurately portraying their past experience.
Once you’ve hired your best-fit candidates, you then need to provide a great onboarding experience so that they can hit the ground running. At Meetingmax, we assign culture and technical buddies to help all new hires navigate their new workplace and organize a welcome lunch on their first day. We also conduct culture check-ins with new hires after 14, 30 and 90 days to ensure that they are settling in well. For employees who are under-performing and are no longer good company culture fits, dismissal may be necessary. However, before proceeding, you should ensure that you’ve done everything you can to help and support them. Have they received enough training? Do they have the resources they need? Do they feel sufficiently empowered in their positions?
Step #3 in Creating a Strong Company Culture: Engage Employees and Refine Culture
In order to keep employees engaged, you have to know what makes them tick. That’s why at Meetingmax we use personality assessments like DiSC and Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace to help employees and their managers identify their working style, what motivates them, what discourages them and what makes them feel valued and rewarded.
It’s also important to regularly give and get feedback from employees. At Meetingmax, employees have weekly check-ins with their manager where they can discuss their recent performance and any challenges that they might be facing. A few times a year, we also conduct a company culture survey and an effectiveness audit. The company culture survey measures how well our core purpose and values resonate with our employees, while the effectiveness audit asks employees whether they have everything they need to be effective in their roles. We can then use the feedback received to improve and refine certain elements of our business.
Step #4 in Creating a Strong Company Culture: Measure Performance Based on Culture
Now that you have identified your core purpose and values, hired staff who are a cultural fit and are keeping them engaged, it is time to ensure that the way you measure employee performance is tied to your company culture. At Meetingmax, we’ve included a culture category on our employee scorecards that assesses how well employees embody our core values while performing their jobs and highlights areas for improvement.
While it does require some work to implement, creating a purpose-built company culture will give you a clear understanding of who you are as an organization, help you find and retain the best employees, and give your organization a strong foundation on which to grow and thrive.