Are You a Workplace Champion?

By Michalle Faulkner – Managing Director
EastCoast Human Resource Group

With a fresh new year ahead of us, it’s a great time to reflect on the atmosphere or culture within your organisation.  Does it serve your business as it stands?

Workplace culture is best described as your accepted behavioural norms.  A healthy strong culture deters individuals from ‘trying behaviour on’; because they know what is acceptable ‘above the line (accountable, seek solutions, proactive and positive attitude) and what is unacceptable or below the line’ (blame others, play the victim, find fault, make excuses, negative attitude).

When it’s not so clear or the line keeps shifting, human nature dictates we will try something on, push the boundaries and where no one says anything it must be ok. Others see this going unchecked and now they will try it on as well or worse and bam there is your new norm!

Your culture influences your brand and service reputation in the community – people see your logo they hear your name dropped in conversation and will either think to themselves either positive “I’ve heard great things about working for them” or negative “I’ve heard really bad things about that company – there’s no way I’d ever work there”.

Culture also drives performance and achievement of outcomes, either a high performance, a lack lustre performance (because near enough is good enough) or worse really poor performance because there no clear expectation or standards, no accountability and there are no consequences for under performance.

The culture or behavioural norms will also drive compliance to legislative and internal frameworks like your policies, procedures and protocols. Attitudes displayed of “we can get around that…. it’s just a guideline…. Or directives of “don’t care how you do it just get it done” creates risk.

Everyone in your team adds to or detracts from your culture – their personal values, their shared organisational values, their experiences and their lens of life (how they view the world and process what is going on for them internally and externally).

Surveys studied around culture say that a direct Supervisor has the greatest impact on team culture and the Service Manager or CEO and Senior Managers have the greatest influence– and this is because they are observed by others in the workplace and the observation of:-

“Do they demonstrate the organisations values?”

“Do they buy in, how do they behave and respond in the good and not so good times”

“Do they walk the talk”!

So what can you do?

Respecting that everyone is responsible overall for the team culture and workplace environment is critical.  Always assess your own personal contribution to the environment and if it isn’t positive and does demonstrate below the line behaviour, it’s time to do some self-correcting to move back above the line.   Your business success depends on it.

When things do occur as they will or you have an issue in the work environment be that with regard to a policy or procedure, a colleague or even your Team Leader or Manager, make sure you direct your concerns appropriately focused on being a champion of the culture that drives results.

Culture champions should always practice the three “R’s”, respect for self, respect for others and responsibility for their actions and behaviour.