What is Culture?
The word “culture” can mean many different things to just about anyone. When I was younger, I didn’t give much of a second thought to a corporate culture. My feeling was that a company’s culture was completely undefinable and that for large corporations, it was something that didn’t even really exist. Now I realize I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Culture really is everywhere you look. Small and large corporations alike each have their own unique cultures. Geographic regions, states, and cities and towns have distinct cultures. Even families have cultures. Sure, sometimes a company’s culture is relatively hard to define or understand. But not always. Just think about major businesses. McDonald’s definitely has a culture, and it’s much different than the culture of Panera. How a business treats its employees and customers is, in my opinion, the quickest and easiest way to assess their corporate culture. And culture always starts from the top. The executive team defines the culture and sets the tone for the entire company. As a customer, an employee, or a potential employee, the more you know about a company’s culture, the more you’ll know if you want to do business or work for that company.
Stanion Culture?
In late 2019, a branch manager and I attended a seminar with a culture expert who talked about what culture is, how to define it, and how to be deliberate about it. This gentleman spoke about how most companies have sales, finance, and marketing plans but neglect to create a formal plan regarding their culture. That really hit home for me. Culture is how a company and its employees themselves. Actions define the culture. If we want to have a strong, positive culture, we will really need to work at it. Defining, improving, and implementing a process to live our company’s culture seemed like a great way to make the entire company better. The actions our employees take day in and day out absolutely reveal to our vendors, customers, and all our employees what we believe in. What if we started a program that would help us improve our actions? Would that help us to attract and retain fantastic employees? Could we service our customers better and be better partners for our vendors? This company already had a strong culture; now we needed to identify and reinforce what makes it so good and then encourage all employees to live it every day.
Setting Out to Define and Live Our Culture
The Stanion executive team spent a substantial amount of time crafting 29 behaviors that we believe makes our culture what it is. We decided to call these 29 behaviors “The Stanion M.O.” The next step was to inform everyone in the company that we were creating a program where we focused on one of the 29 behaviors every week. Our company operates in a decentralized manner, so we have ways to drive this program in a way that it permeates our entire organization. Each Monday, our each of our employees receives an email that highlights and explains one of our fundamentals. On Wednesday mornings, everyone receives a lesson in quiz format. Each email takes a minimal amount of time to read and interact with, but we believe that the constant focus on the behaviors will be a beneficial reminder to everyone about how we want to treat each other and everyone we interact with.
What’s Next?
Our plan is to run through the 29 behaviors each week. When we get through the 29th, we’ll start back at the 1st behavior and keep going over and over. We believe that the repetition is the best way to really “bake” the behaviors into the daily lives of all our employees. We’re only a few months into this program, so we are still somewhat in the “rollout” phase. This is not a short-term fad. This is a way of doing business that we intend to continue. Ultimately, this program will help our company perform better. Our employees can use this in all parts of life, not just at work. We will continue to work on living our culture every day.
