When we speak to clients for the first time, one of the things we’ll often tell them is that creating a brilliant workplace culture isn’t about making your company a nice place to work.
Now, we usually recommend that as a tactic, and it can be a powerful tool — but it’s not the point. This is where many companies, consultants, and HR professionals go wrong. They focus on making people “happy,” and that’s such a variable and elusive concept that it’s almost impossible to capture. Instead, think of workplace culture as the most powerful lever you can pull (much more powerful than strategy) to deliver your objectives, vision, and mission.
That doesn’t always entail making people happy, and there are many different ways to achieve your goals. Some will be right for you, and some won’t.
The key to workplace culture: employee experience
Employee experience — how your people perceive their relationship with your company, from the physical aspects of the environment to the work itself, their relationship with peers and managers, the tools they have, the brand, and the workplace culture you’ve created — has a major impact on engagement levels, retention rates, and productivity, all of which in turn drive business performance. This is because greater engagement leads to greater levels of discretionary effort, and staff turnover, especially in small, highly technical businesses, is a huge drain on productivity. When you have to replace and retrain an expert, you can lose months of optimal performance.
There’s plenty of data to support this. Gallup has found that highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable and 17% more productive than those with average engagement levels. Deloitte’s research shows that companies with a strong focus on employee experience have 25% higher profitability and are twice as likely to have high customer satisfaction levels. Salesforce, HubSpot, Zappos, and Adobe have all spoken at length about how central employee experience has been to their success.
The challenges of building a positive workplace culture
The challenge facing Biotech leaders is that every team is different, as is every member of the team. Over the last ten years, workplace culture has been mistaken for perks, and they’re very different things. Typically, perks don’t matter to people except as an expression of a company’s underlying culture — the important things are feeling valued (thanks to recognition and reward), positive relationships with other people, making an important contribution to a cause that makes the world better, and personal growth. These things take time, though, and often investment to get right, so it’s critical to focus on the right areas for your people rather than copying what other businesses do.
Reducing friction
Another crucial element of how employees experience your workplace culture is the amount of friction they face. People who are good at what they do want to perform and deliver, and when things get in the way, they create immense frustration. Sometimes it’s a lack of tools or resources; other times, it’s clunky processes. Often, it’s other people and their priorities. Whatever the case, understanding the obstacles that your team face and removing them is a direct route to improving how they experience your culture.
If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a lot,” don’t panic. The secret that no one tells you about employee experience is that your team doesn’t expect you to be perfect. If you’re a small, early-stage startup, they’re not going to penalise you for not having the resources of a major multinational. What they expect is that you make an effort to listen and that you try to make things better.
With that in mind, we’ve developed an approach to driving employee experience and engagement that we call Continuous Cultural Improvement.
1. Gathering feedback
The first step is to create multiple channels for gathering feedback from your team. Regular surveys are great, as are short pulse-takers, but you should mix these up with one-to-one conversations, group lunches or coffees, structured discussions around particular areas of the business or life at your company, suggestion boxes, and plenty more. Your objective is to understand the frustrations, challenges, and aspirations of your team individually and collectively to see which you can help them overcome or achieve while still delivering the results you need from them.
2. Implementing change
The second is to take steps to resolve the things that really matter to your people, usually incrementally. You don’t have to give them everything they ask for — this isn’t about creating spoiled children! But if there’s an obstacle you can remove, a problem you can solve, an edge you can give them, or something that you can do to improve their experience of your company, thereby enhancing engagement and productivity and driving business results, wouldn’t you want to do it? Much of the time, it doesn’t cost any money to fix the things that frustrate your team — in fact, one of the most impactful changes we’ve recommended to a client is moving a reagent cupboard from a room down the corridor into the lab, meaning that their scientists didn’t have to go and get what they needed multiple times a day. Often, it’s the simple things that matter, and you’ll never discover them without asking.
3. Continuous improvement to workplace culture
Thirdly, keep asking for feedback and resolving issues. Gradually, over time, the quality of your workplace culture and employee experience will be unrecognisable from where you are today, and you’ll have a more engaged team, with less turnover and greater levels of productivity than ever before — so start today!
