Article Contributed by Noah Rue
If you’re beginning a journey into the business world for the first time, I imagine you are feeling a whole combination of emotions, including anxiety, stress, fear, excitement and joy. You are going to be the boss for maybe the first time in your life and you’re nervous about that — it’s understandable. But making sure you have the necessary resources to help grow your business into a shining success will help alleviate some of those negative emotions associated with running your own business.
Workplace culture can be a really easy thing to maintain, but it can be a very challenging thing to create, especially for an up-and-coming business. Where does all company culture grow from? The individuals who work there and people vary in nearly every way. We have different views, different backgrounds and different values. Sure, these differences are what make the world so diverse and rich, but if there isn’t a clearcut understanding of the values of a company, it can be difficult to hire people who fit the mold you’ve established.
Before the Grand Opening
The hiring process is the best place to begin to sift through the available candidates to find the one who matches your company culture. Be sure to angle your interview questions so that the answers you receive help you gain better insight into who the interviewee is on the inside. Try to avoid vague or irrelevant questions and focus on the questions that you want to know the answers to.
An easy way to achieve this is by putting your interviewee in metaphorical scenarios. For example, ask them questions like, “what would do if you were shrunk down to the size of a nickel and dropped in the bottom of a blender?” Or, “if you could choose one superpower, what would it be and why?” Asking these types of questions helps you discover more about a person’s character than simply having them tell you their strengths and weaknesses.
Leadership Is Key
Company employees are not the only element necessary to establish company culture. Strong leadership is a critical aspect to running any business as well. If you want to be a CEO, you have to maintain a certain level of professionalism, kindness, ferocity and innovation. Leaders are the people in a company who set the expectations for everyone around them. Make sure you’re maintaining high expectations and terrific employees will follow.
There is a common phrase which says, “work harder, not smarter.” In this case, it couldn’t be more true, especially for the leaders of a business. The leaders must be the ones planning ahead, setting schedules, establishing expectations, and setting the business up for the highest amounts of achievement that you can. If instructions are not made clear, deadlines are not set and goals are not reached, it forces all the employees to work much harder to gain success.
Establishing Engagement & Having a Purpose
Human beings are interesting in that we need to have some kind of purpose in order to complete our best work. If we don’t have some kind of internal desire to do something, often it leads to lack of energy or efficiency. Employees are the same way. Establishing a company purpose for everyone really helps create high levels of engagement from your team.
If you have fully engaged employees, work quality goes up and the general sense of positivity around the office is visceral. Unengaged employees tend to waste more time, submit poor quality work and represent a poor image of the company. Engagement is crucial to the success of any business because it opens the floor for frequent and valuable communication, it provides employees with necessary resources and tools for accomplishment, and it rewards quality behavior and production.
Respect, In All Ways
Whenever you put 100 people in a building together to create some final product, you can be assured that at some point in the creation, an argument or disagreement will unfurl. This cannot be changed. Disagreements will happen for all time as long as people are independent and critical thinkers and willing to stand up for their own opinions, which is a great thing. If everyone thought exactly the same, the world would be a far less interesting place.
However, in the workplace this can lead to unproductivity and resentment among employees. There are a few things as leaders that you can do to ensure these kinds of arguments don’t unfurl into something especially disruptive. Setting company rules and expectations for following these rules is critical. For example, if you have made a rule that smoking is not allowed in your business, it’s important to uphold the expectation that those who vape at work need to also follow the same guidelines for cigarette smokers and take their vaping outside.
Respect plays a big role in the rule setting of businesses. Rules must not be discriminatory; they must be inclusive and everyone must be upheld to the same standards for following these rules. I know, rules seems a little juvenile, but you can refer to them as guidelines if the jargon is too serious for your style of leadership.