Marketing leaders frequently talk about culture and leadership within their agencies and how to improve it. The problem is while most owners think culture is important in their agency, they feel it is not where they want it to be.
In a recent study 90% of executives say that the importance of company culture is increasing in today’s market. Leaders are also recognizing that toxic culture is 10 times more likely to cause turnover than a lack of adequate compensation.
The Challenge
Historically, companies use methods to measure employee satisfaction too infrequently. We have all completed the dreaded annual engagement survey. You open it up and click through it as quickly as possible with the feeling that no matter how you answer nothing will change. Leadership posts the results then it is not talked about till next year.
Why doesn’t this work? Simple, culture is not a once-a-year thing, it is important every day! !
Here are three employee satisfaction strategies you are likely using that don’t work
- Annual engagement/satisfaction survey: You cannot measure satisfaction once a year and hope it will be ok the rest of the time. You need to have a true understanding every day.
- Free food and pizza parties: Your employees don’t need you to buy them lunch if you are paying them appropriately. If given a choice, most employees would rather have an extra $100.
- Happy hour/ After hours: Most employees give more than 40 hours a week to you. When you factor in commutes, wrapping up that last thing at the end of the day, or making sure they are at work on time in the morning the average employee gives you almost 50 hours a week. They do not want to give up family time for unpaid hours and a couple of drinks.
Driving Culture Shift: What Do You Need To Know
Culture is daunting to manage. Whether you have worked on your culture or not, your company has a culture. The question is, does the reality of your culture align with the company culture you are trying to foster?
As they build more diverse teams, leaders need to be more in tune with the individual cultural ideals and needs of our employees. That way they can intentionally build a strong culture that matches our corporate culture goals.
To help align your company culture with your employees’ cultural ideals you need to understand the three cultural levels of an organization.
- Individual Culture: Driven by the needs of our employees, their backgrounds, and their upbringing.
- Team Culture: Frontline leader-driven purpose for the team. Impacted by the leader’s understanding of company goals and their level of influence over their team
- Organizational Culture: Developed and communicated down from the executive leadership. Impacted by the level of influence and transparency from the executive leaders.
It is almost impossible to align everyone’s goals every time, but while a challenge, it is achievable.
You need to start by identifying your goals. Review your company’s mission and vision statements, this will help you determine what the company goals are.
This is usually broken down into two core sections – Corporate Goals and Culture Goals.
Some examples:
Corporate Goals
- Increased profits
- Increased productivity
- Employee retention
Culture Goals
- Employee satisfaction
- Engaged employees
- Internal Promotions and advancement
Just like the 12-step program, it’s not a problem until you accept that it is. This step of acceptance is the difference between continuing with the status quo or working to build a better company.
After identifying and accepting what has caused your cultural issues, it is time to build your plan to build a better culture. While every company is different based on what they want to accomplish, the one consistent thing is all leaders in the organization need to be prepared to drive the change. Having leaders who are engaged in all aspects of the organization makes it easier to start the culture shift.
As you can see leadership is an important piece of driving culture. While there are other aspects to the culture shift, your leaders are going to be the key to making it happen. Leaders who are engaged in their teams make the most impact on corporate culture.
Unfortunately, many front-line leaders are promoted because of their high performance in their previous roles, not because of their ability to lead people. It is proven that performers will continue to exceed expectations when they are continually challenged. The problem is, that organizations often forget to provide thoughtful people leadership training to new leaders. When you keep promoting from within based on the numbers you eventually end up with an organization that has forgotten about the people that drive the numbers. Enter the ACES method.
ACES Leadership Methodology
The ACES model is a leadership method based on strategic interactions with your team. It cultivates trust and builds a framework to promote growth. ACES has four key areas; Acknowledge, Cultivate, Empower, and Success. It is time to dive deeper into each area
Acknowledge
Acknowledge is a twofold piece. First and foremost, as a leader, you need to acknowledge your own shortcomings with the team. Is there someone you don’t connect with? Are you too direct, nice, or easy on your team? Do you have unrealistic expectations of your team?
The second piece is learning how to acknowledge your team’s performance. I like to start looking at this from the simple measure of asking leaders, “When was the last time you genuinely thanked someone on your team for their performance?” About 1 out of 8 has done it at least one time in the last five working days. When your team is successful, thanking them and acknowledging their performance will help you build trust. This is also important when you must acknowledge poor performance as well. Not everything is rainbows and unicorns!
Acknowledgement in its simplest form is appropriate feedback for your team. It needs to be done frequently and honestly. Not just at the annual review and employee engagement survey, which often occurs at the same time in many companies.
Acknowledgement in its simplest form is appropriate feedback
Cultivate
Cultivating your team is all about helping them grow. You want them to be as awesome as you are right? How you help them get there is incredibly individual and takes time. To cultivate their skills, you need to understand what skills they want to improve. Remember not everyone wants to be the next CEO. Some people are truly content with exactly what they are doing professionally, and that’s okay.
As a leader, it is time to get personal. Have a conversation with them about their goals, desires, challenges, and skills. The more you know about where they want to be in six months or a year, the better equipped you are to support them. More than half of employees who left a company say they did so because they wanted to take their careers to the next level. Cultivate their skills so you can empower them to grow.
More than half of employees who left a company say they did so because they wanted to take their careers to the next level
Empower
Employees want to have autonomy to make decisions so they can better utilize their skills and abilities. In fact, 69% of employees say they would be more satisfied if they could better utilize their skills and abilities. So, why are you not letting them?
Teaching your employees how to make the right decisions for you will help them to increase productivity. Why? Because they no longer must stop working to find you and ask the question. When you teach them how to make the right decisions and acknowledge when they do, you cultivate ownership in getting the job done. This translates into trust for your and the organization.
Teach them how to make the right decisions
In our ACES workshops, the question is often asked: “What happens when they make the wrong decision?” My response: “Did anyone die?” You get the point. The decisions we make in business are not life or death, therefore we can afford a missed step here and there if we learn from our mistakes. Teach your employees why the decision was incorrect and show them how to make the correct decision next time. This will strengthen your team.
Success
Once everyone is on the proverbial bus, it is time to sing our kumbaya as we drive off into the sunset, right? Wrong, it is time to start talking about it more frequently and in terms of success.
No one likes going to a post-mortem discussion after a project. No one wants to sit in a conference room and talk about how we screwed up in the last project. We need to shift the script. It is time to talk in terms of “what did we do right and how can we do that to create success in future projects?”
“What did we do right and how can we do that to create success in future projects?”
When we talk in terms of success consistently, people will be more willing to share, provide opinions, and most importantly tell you how they could have done it better. That trust and positivity will help you continue to win for years to come, as long as you fight to live in a positive space.
What’s Next
One of the questions I get from front-line leaders during our workshops is: “How often do I need to do this?” The short answer is you should never stop doing this. Culture takes continuous attention and effort. ACES is simply the process to get it done.
The next question we get is, “I have spent so much energy to get this far, how do I keep it up and stay on top of my tasks as a leader?” The good news is, it will get easier as time goes on. Instead of working to make ACES to happen regularly, it will just start to occur. You will know it is happening because you will experience it over a casual conversation in the breakroom or as you are stopping by their desk to get a status update.
I always get asked, “If it is occurring in our regular interactions, do I still need to have formal discussions about it?” The short answer is yes. The frequency to which they occur is dependent on you and your employee. I recommend a minimum of once a month as a starting point.
Final Thoughts
Culture shift has two variables that need to be constantly monitored for it to be successful: leadership engagement and consistency. If not all leaders in the organization from the CEO to the front-line team leader are participating then there is a chance that the cultural changes you want to implement will not succeed.
How is your Culture at your marketing agency? Is there room for improvement? Most likely, there is!
Contact our team to schedule your ACES Culture Workshop for Agencies
