Organizational Culture

Four signs that a corporate culture may be in distress:

•High turnover: To reduce turnover, businesses often take the strategy of improving the interviewing and on-boarding process, assuming that employees leave because they weren’t the right fit to begin with. However, there’s a good chance that recently departed employees had the appropriate talents and skills for their position, but disliked the environment. Properly phrased exit interview questions can go a long way toward identifying specifics within the environment that pushed an employee away.

•Low motivation: With the continued economic uncertainty, many employees may feel trapped in their current positions. There are common-sense methods to assess motivation. Learning executives should speak with a cross section of organizational figureheads as well as with employees directly to get an idea of engagement throughout the company. These conversations can also help determine the most effective motivators — i.e., fear, paycheck, love of job.

•Minimal communication: In organizations where information is power, it is a closely guarded resource and released reluctantly. This dynamic can lead to redundancies, wasted time and effort, and stifled innovation. Furthermore, the flow of information is often one way, which can leave lower-level workers with the sense that they are a commodity rather than a valued asset.

•Failure to address problems: We’ve seen it in countless organizations: the underperforming employee who continually gets glowing letters of recommendation in order to facilitate transfers to different departments; the leader who desires to put an employee on a performance plan but can’t due to a lack of prior documentation; the manager who rules with an iron fist and has successfully terrified all who report to him or her. When individuals fail to confront known issues, it sets a precedent with negative long-term consequences.