Every workplace has a culture.
Google is famous for its innovative, campus-style vibe … which has a slightly cultured flavor.
Small businesses range from fun and laid-back to family-friendly to small dictatorships.
Large organizations tend to turn into bureaucratic nightmares. No organization wants to become this way, but size can become unwieldy. The temptation is to create and impose rules so that everything continues to work.
Although all the rules to reduce unwanted behavior also strangles its innovators. The art is in strangling the superstars less than you keep the bums at bay.
It’s tempting to say “what’s best for your employees is what’s best for your organization.” I want that to be true, but then I remember Derek Sivers talking about his first business, CD Baby.
It was incredibly relaxed, not a leadership style that many people adopt.
Your focus on things like salary and employee conditions?
“Speak, tell me what you decide and I will make it come true.”
Which led him to give them all the income of his company.
Whoops! Perhaps focusing on employee happiness to the exclusion of everything else is not the best approach.
Having said this …
Many people think a lot about the culture of their organization.
I certainly do.
I like hearing stories from people in other organizations, noticing how their employees are treated and how their leaders treat them.
Organizational cultures are like foreign cultures: they all seem sensitive if you “grew up” in them and alien if you didn’t.
However, there is still a pattern between the noise:
Happiness and satisfaction.
Sure, you may not want to hand over all your power to your employees, Sivers-style …
But you still want to invest in their happiness.
Satisfied employees work hard, stick around, stay healthy, and attract their brightest friends. They become walking billboards of how great your organization is.
If you had a machine that created all of your most valuable products, you would want to keep it in good condition. You would do your best to keep it.
And yet what do you do to cultivate a great community in your organization?
Well, start by paying them enough to make them feel valued.
And offering enough advantages to attract talent.
But all organizations play that game, and only one can offer the best package.
How do you create the best community, if bribing them is not enough?
A community is not just a group of people. Put humans in a room together and sometimes it gets violent.
It is not lineage or familiarity.
It is not even a shared purpose or set of beliefs. Think of any religious schism: what Catholics and Protestants agree far outweighs what they disagree. That doesn’t stop them from turning against each other, sometimes devastatingly.
It can form a strong and rich community of strangers who disagree on the big issues. Anyone who has been to festivals like Burning Man knows what I mean. You can love a boy like a brother and not even know his name.
A community is born out of security, respect and trust.
Are your employees safe to talk?
Do they respect their leaders and are they respected in return?
Do your people trust each other?
If so, you are way ahead of the rest.
