Much of the recent discourse in employee training and development has shifted toward workplace culture: the set of shared values, belief systems, attitudes, and assumptions that are consistent throughout the members of the company. A positive culture improves productivity, engagement, and loyalty. But, while culture initiatives often focus on factors like empathy and connection, that's often not enough to shape behaviors. There’s no fool-proof formula for creating training around culture shifts; however, with any organizational change, company leaders will play key roles. When equipped with the right skills, leaders can shape behavior and maintain attitudes among their employees. So, we may yet find a solution to our cultural challenges through leadership development training.
Cultural Alignment Through Values
To align individual values with company culture, your company's mission statement and purpose should be the first place you look. Corporate training should remind employees why they do what they do. Offer insight into what is meaningful about your organization as well as what values are important to the organization. Those values (such as accountability, quality, and trust) will affect areas like quality control and reporting on an individual level, so instilling those values early on will be critical.
Occasionally, ideal organizational values don't reflect business processes or policies. For example, your training may highlight accountability and trust, but if employees feel micromanaged, then this disconnect between ideals and processes may leave employees feeling disenchanted with company culture. This is something you should avoid.
Start With Leadership
In that sense, perhaps one of the greatest challenges to shaping company culture is employee buy-in. As L&D professionals know well, it's difficult to change ingrained behaviors and attitudes. But we also know that leaders have significant impact on their teams, so, getting your leaders to support the cultural initiative early-on is critical. Consider having your leaders complete the training before pushing it to their employees. Leaders can then help shape the behaviors of the teams through modeling, instruction, and social influence.
Listen to Your Employees
That being said, cultural shifts may be met with disagreement or aversion, so, leaders may have to navigate some difficult conversations. Fortunately, the same skills that will help leaders guide their employees through this transition are the same key skills acquired through leadership development training.
Actively listening and providing feedback, for example, are vital to guiding employees through organizational change. Only 51 percent of employees think their companies listen well. As one focus group participant expressed, “My company asks for my feedback. My leader asks for my feedback. They do nothing with it.” However, when leaders know how to respond to constructive criticism, employees feel more psychological safety at work—they feel more comfortable expressing concerns and more hopeful about trying to enact change. Moreover, they will be more likely to buy-in to changes.
Conclusion
To create a positive workplace culture you’ll have to balance organizational needs and the individual concerns of employees. Conveying clearly defined organizational values during onboarding will go a long way, but it will be up to your leaders to help their employees maintain new behaviors and attitudes. Give leaders the skills they need to support their employees with meaningful leadership development training. Your corporate culture will thrive.