How well is your business operating today – in other words, how do people treat each other in the pursuit of results? You may not know, exactly.
The reality is that our organizations are not great places to hang out in. Gallup’s daily engagement dashboard indicates that only 35% of US workers are actively engaged on the job.
The global percentage is much worse – only 13%. TinyPulse’s 2014 engagement and culture report found that only 21% of workers feel strongly valued at work.
You’ve invested years in building skills – and building a business – that solves construction problems. As a solopreneur or multi-site operator (or anything in between), you know quality work helps keep the enterprise afloat.
But quality work isn’t the only key to your business thriving. You need to make sure the quality of your work environment – the degree to which everyone is treated with trust, respect, and dignity in every interaction – is as important as quality results.
You’ve experienced great bosses in this industry – and you’ve experienced lousy bosses. You’ve even experienced great team members and subcontractors – and lousy ones.
How can you create a purposeful, positive, productive work culture in your business? Craft an organizational constitution, then align all plans, decisions, and actions to it.
An organizational constitution specifies your company (or team’s) servant purpose – it’s “reason for being” besides making money or doing kitchen remodels or building decks or delivering whatever your product is. Your organizational constitution then formalizes your desired values and defines them with observable, tangible, measurable behaviors. It also includes performance expectations in the form of strategies and goals.
Defining your desired culture with an organizational constitution is, to be honest, the easy part. The hard part is aligning all plans, decisions, and actions to these new expectations. Leaders must live the new servant purpose and valued behaviors, every minute. Only then will their organizational constitution be considered credible by employees – and worthy of embracing it by those employees and subcontractors.
The benefits to making values and relationships as important as quality and profits are astounding.
When leaders align practices and behaviors to their desired organizational constitution, three things happen within 18 months of implementing the change. Employee engagement goes up by 40 percent. Customer service goes up by 40 percent. Results and profits rise by 35 percent.
Those are amazing transformations that are within every leaders’ grasp.—
