Organizational Culture

John: Thank you so much for coming back for another episode of Green Apple Slices. Happy Monday morning, Rachel.

Rachel: Happy Monday morning, John!

John: There we go. See, everything’s good. So I’m here with Rachel Fisch, the head of Deloitte Bookkeeping Canada, extraordinaire. I don’t know, I keep messing up the title.

Rachel: I’m definitely adding “extraordinaire” to my title, yeah, for sure.

John: It seemed like a given, it should be just in parenthesis, like of course, it was supposed to be there. Why wouldn’t it be, hello? But I love talking with you and getting your real world take on things. There is this great article that I read in the Virgin Pulse blog about organizational culture. Virgin did a State of the Industry Report, 95% of their respondents said that culture drives business results; and 80% said that they plan to improve their corporate culture. I don’t know what the other 20% think they’re already like kicking butt and taking names?

Rachel: Yeah. So 95% of them say that it drives their business results, so I’m really hoping then that if 80% of them plan to improve their corporate culture that they also realize that they need to work on their business results, as well. That’s a huge majority which was pretty astounding.

John: No, it is, it is totally astounding and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 20% not improving are accounting firms. I’m just taking a guess.

Rachel: Just a wild stab out there.

John: Ah, that’s rude of me. No, there are some really, really great firms out there, I just wish that we could bottle it up and share it with everybody. But yeah, I thought this report was really, really interesting. And they just said that employees are engaged when they’re truly a part of the company’s future and their culture, you have great relationships with your coworkers and the easiest way to do that is just the Green Apple Message, really. Share a little bit of your hobbies and passions and then genuinely interested and finding out what the other people’s hobbies and passions are as well.

Rachel: It really is a great effective way to do that. And I’m just not plugging what you do every other day or every day when you’re not talking to me, but it really does help and those are some of the really simple ways that we, as individual employees, can be bringing that to the workplace and then allows us to connect with each other regardless of what the corporate culture actually is or how it’s mandated from senior management.

But again, I have this little bee in my bonnet about the word “culture”, I think that it is overused and not clearly defined and I’m glad that at least in this article it says that it’s not clearly defined and yet, fully defined because it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what that means. We’ve talked over the last several weeks about aligning your personal values with your company’s values but that means that you have to know what your values are, that means the company needs to know what their values are. And so we’ve talked about some of the things that can increase culture but I just don’t think it comes in a box, that it arrives in your office one day.

John: Yeah, that would be fantastic if it did, wouldn’t it? And then John Garrett jumps out like “Hey, everybody!”

Rachel: I can’t unsee that in my mind.

John: Wait till that refrigerator box shows up at your Deloitte office, you’re like, “Wait, guys, don’t open it. I think I know what’s inside.”

Rachel: No, there’s a green-striped tie in there, I can see it through the cracks, don’t open it.

John: That’s hilarious, that’s so funny. But it is something that does take time and certainly requires some effort on part of everyone, really, but I loved how they referred to it as improving employee wellbeing. So it’s more than just engagement, it’s your wellbeing, it’s your happiness, it’s what lights you up, what makes you alive when you’re talking about it, and if you can bring some of that into the office then by all means, let’s encourage that.

Rachel: Yeah, I really like the way that they kind of connected that physical aspect to that professional or that corporate aspect. And the part where it kind of picked up for me a little bit was closer to the end when it’s talking about the benefits of cultivating, so things like attracting top talent. So if you have this great and engaged workforce people want to work at a great and engaged workforce and so it will be easier for you as a corporation to be able to have access to that top talent and be able to select from those, bringing out the best from your employees. We’ve talked about how employees that are highly-engaged have increased productivity and all those things that go along with it, if people are happy they’ll stay, increasing your employee retention.

I think it was a couple of weeks ago we talked about people don’t quit their job, they quit their managers. So again, through your success line if you’ve got a good engaged workforce that wouldn’t be the case and then of course increasing employee engagement productivity and then the levels of satisfaction and teamwork because if people like each other, guess what, they’re going to want to work together.

John: Yeah, it’s really that simple, it really is. And then it drives the bottom line so it’s not just a fun thing that is a need, whatever we should do, no, this actually impacts your bottom line.

Rachel: It’s good business.

John: Yeah, absolutely. So look at that, there we go. I think we just solved all the world’s problems right there, so the other 20% just got onboard. It’s 100% now, Virgin, you’re welcome. There we go. So that’s another episode of the Green Apple Slices, if you want to check out the article and read it yourself, you can go to greenapplepodcast.com. And thanks so much, Rachel, for being with me again.

Rachel: Of course, my pleasure.