It Really Pays to Have a Rich Company Culture

Monday morning. This is John Garrett coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices where I always call Rachel Fisch and cross my fingers hoping that she’ll answer, because otherwise it’s just going to be me talking.

Rachel: Nobody wants that.

John: There is she is giggling, everybody, Rachel Fisch.

Rachel: Hello. How are you, John?

John: Right. The group leader in Canada for Sage.

Rachel: Yes.

John: Yeah. I think I got it right. Look at me.

Rachel: Good job.

John: But last week, you brought up that you wanted to know more about why is it that more engaged employees are more productive and what have you. I went out and find an article that I think can answer some of your questions anyway. It’s an infographic even which I love pictures. That’s awesome.

Rachel: Basically, it’s the blog first and then he uses the infographic to summarize a lot of the elements that he has in the blog. I was like blabbity-blabbity-blah until he get down of it two-thirds down on the infographic, and I’m like, okay, I like that. So probably we could start from the bottom and work our way up a little bit. It just kind of goes over the same kind of steps that we’ve talked about before. The number of employees that are not engaged or actively disengaged which means almost like their sabotaging things that aren’t going on. The connection between being unhappy and being productive and all of those other things. But when it came to the staples of a strong company culture, I was thinking that here, we’re starting to see maybe some of the hows or whys. So thank you for finding this. I appreciate that.

John: No problem. There were nights I didn’t sleep. Like you said though, the staples of a strong company culture, the physical health, emotional wellbeing, mental clarity and spiritual significance and then it goes on to how to measure employee engagement. It shows examples of that of how people can actually use this and measure it as oppose to just a bunch of vague language in a cloud world or whatever.

Rachel: Well, it kind of feels that sometimes that’s what we see over and over again as we see some of these blogs. But I thought that this actually started to kind of narrow them in. How can you tell if your culture sucks? Basically, some of the suggestions here tracking employee turnover and absenteeism, organizations like at Atlassian uses the mood up to gauge how employees are feeling. Although that kind of weirds me out a little bit that my employer would be tracking my moods. Okay.

John: Right.

Rachel: Oh, number three is your favorite, surveys. But just a way to collect employee feedback of course, John, and I both would much prefer a conversation than a survey. Weekly one-on-ones or company outings, I would say both weekly one-on-ones and company outings because they do things differently and things like net promotors score that talk about your willingness to recommend basically your employer as employer. Would you want your friends to work there? Would you tell them about a job opening that came up?

John: Right, like you said, though the one-on-ones in the office are completely different than a group outing outside of the office, different atmosphere. It’s a lot more relaxed, things like that. The one-on ones can also be outside of the office, go for a walk, or go to lunch or something like that. But certainly, in a group setting, it also, it just magnifies that even more which was really great.

Rachel: Absolutely.

John: It’s just interesting at how much data there is behind all of this. For instance, the account executives that a banking company were actively disengaged, they produced 28% less revenue than the executives who were engaged. That certainly impacts the bottom line especially when it’s the tone at the top is really negative and is slowly suffocating their people basically from being happy much as what we’re all after at the end of the day. I think that if people want to read the article, there’s a link at it at greenapplepodcast.com. There’s no video this time like last week, but there’s an infographic.

Rachel: There’s an infographic.

John: There’s a lot of information there. I think there’s some good stuff for people to be able to take away.

Rachel: Yeah. There’s actually quite a lot and there’s a lot of stats. The thing about stats and some of the research that’s happening is that you don’t get all of those results from all one research program, right?

John: Right.

Rachel: It’s comparing different reports to each other that then get you these types of results. The whole ecosystem automation technology thing I think were going to get even more insights as to how we can maybe help improve our culture that will of course drive profits.

John: Right, absolutely. That was it in a nutshell, everybody, right there. That was awesome. But yeah, check it out and you could follow us on Twitter as well at, I’m at RecoveringCPA and Rachel is at FischBooks and the podcast itself is at GreenApplePod. Check that out and shoot us emails through greenapplepodcast.com. Have a great rest of your week, Rachel.

Rachel: You too, John. Talk to you later.