Change Is Coming To Corporate Culture

There are a host of changes coming to your corporate Culture as the workplace demographics and dynamics change. Thinking that you can operate in the same way you did ten years is going to get your butt kicked.

Sales & Service
51% of your customers choose to do business with you because of attitude factors: your friendliness, your approachability, your after-sale service, your exchange and return policies and how easy you make it for people to do business with you. But a lesser percentage buy from you because you know your product. In every sales situation, there are two sales being made: 1) you - if you don't do a good job of selling you and offering good reasons why people should do business with you, there is little chance that you will get the chance to make the second sale, which is 2) the product. Train your people in being better people. It's far more important than having facts, figures and ammunition in their heads. I would rather hear a sales rep say, "let me get right back to you with that information," and then get right back to me with it. We like to deal with people with good attitudes and abhor bad attitudes and smarmy "know it all" attitudes. Training of the future is going to need to focus on building better attitudes toward customers and not so much on knowing everything.

Absenteeism
1,000,000 North American workers are home sick today because of "stress." Stress is caused when you don't believe that you can handle what is in front of you today, can't meet deadlines, feel overwhelmed, stretched too thin, etc. All of it is perception. People perceive they have too much to handle and that's why they feel stressed. So their attitude is that work is stressful and they get sick because of an attitude they have developed about work. If you would just help change the attitude, you would lower your absenteeism rate.

Values
A recent survey showed that up to 40% of Gen Y (Millennials) workers are prepared to use lying, cheating, backstabbing and even blackmail to get ahead. They don't see anything wrong with it. Four out of ten new workers think that way. Wake up people. Are you addressing this new worker's attitudes towards getting ahead? Think about it, many have grown up with a steady diet of reality TV and all many of them know about operating in the real world is what they have seen watching the contestants on Survivor backstabbing each other to win the million. In their own real world (which isn't real at all - it's mostly virtual), when they anger a friend, the biggest consequence is being removed as a friend from someone's Facebook page. Values and attitudes in the workplace are changing.

Productivity
Having computers on desks connected to the Internet is a double-edged sword. People need it to do their work but it's just as easy to get sucked into the abyss called YouTube - and be lost there for hours. The average worker today wastes 2.09 hours of productivity doing things like surfing the net or shopping - especially as we get closer to Christmas. Managers knew some time was being wasted and thought it was 0.94 hours. The truth is, workers waste more than twice the amount of time managers thought they were wasting. Why? Two reason: 1) they don't feel they are paid enough (kind of a work-to-rule campaign - I'm only being paid 75% of what I think I'm worth, I'm only going to work 75% of my day), and 2) an attitude of apathy - they just don't care about the job, the work, the responsibility, the customers or the company. They've got an attitude of doing just enough to not get fired.

Management
The future worker does not want to have all of their decisions made unilaterally. The Gen Y worker needs to be involved in the planning and strategy development. Locking them out of the process is only going to dump your corporate culture program on its ear. If you want to engage people in their work, engage them in the decision-making. If employees believe they have a hand in deciding the corporate direction, they are more likely to help you deliver it. Employee engagement's problem is nothing more than a separation of today's Gen Y and Gen X attitudes clashing with old-school, top-down employment hierarchies. Workplaces that have found ways to include their people in critical decisions (not social fluff like Christmas parties) of the day-to-day workings of the organization have a much higher engagement rate because their employees "own" the work. Change your attitude that there is only one person who makes decisions. You have a lot of bright minds working for you. Ignoring that fact is only going to send them someplace else where they will be recognized. 89% of managers think their people leave for another job that pays more money. Truth: only 12% of employees leave for more money. The rest leave because of an attitude of believing management is out of touch with what they want.

Culture
Your corporate culture is changing whether you think you have a handle on it or not. No culture "program" is going to stem that change. Culture is nothing more than the collective attitude of your workplace anyway. If you want to improve your culture, then you must change the prevailing attitudes that are creating your culture right now. Culture is how your employees see your organization. When you see your employees differently, they see the workplace differently and that's when the corporate attitude/culture changes.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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