Welcome to this session on culture. You may have thought that we've been talking about strategy all this time we have been. You also may be wondering what does culture have to do with performance management as these folks are. Let me tell you why it's important. This old quote I read, I think it's from Peter Drucker, that says culture eats strategy for breakfast. What does this mean in real terms? It means you can have the greatest strategy, the greatest performance management practices, but if you have a culture that's toxic and is uncivil, it will eat it for breakfast. It will not support your performance management process. So culture is supremely important. A positive culture is the key to success. After this video, you will be able to understand the role of culture in the performance management. So let's look at some of culture's influence in the performance management and HR processes in general. Number one, Workplace Design. I'm going to give you an example of how culture plays a role in this. I once worked in an organization where they had almost no conference rooms and they built wide halls. Sounds sort of odd, we need places to meet, correct? Their vision was, they did not want a culture where people were in meetings all the time, which they thought didn't get that much done. You may agree with that, or may not. But we've all been in those kind of meetings. They wanted large hallways where people would congregate and talk on an ongoing basis. This is a wonderful example of how workplace design can reinforce a culture of good communication. Speaking of communication, you can also tell a lot about an organization's culture by communication. Is it top-down? Are we getting the message out of what our values are? What our strategies are? Does the communications include that? That's the culture's influence on communication. It's also recruitment, now we are back in sort of the HR world. Are we recruiting just for a certain skill set or are we looking for people who buy into our values and our strategy, crucial of that alignment. When we get to the selection process, are we hiring for that? Are we hiring the best candidate based only on their experience, or do we have that fit in the organization as well? That's culture's influence on the selection process. Onboarding and training, culture influences this in a good organization. Onboarding, do you just go in, and you may have had this before, and read a bunch of policies and procedures. Or did they have someone come in and talk about the organization, their values? One organization I worked in, we made sure that the executives came in and talked to the individual on day one and they didn't talk a lot about policy and procedures, they talked about the organization, the history, and the values. So from day one, it was impressed upon them the importance of our value system. Also what we did in the training is we talked to managers while we were doing the training, whether it be on selection processes, performance management processes, why we are doing this, the value of the training and how it fit into our culture. Performance reviews,this one should be pretty simple because we've talked about these a lot. But in the reviews, are you just looking at my goals and my accomplishments, or are you looking at how I lived out the values? Did I work on developing my people? Do I act in accordance with the values of the organization? Am I being rewarded for that? Promotions, do I get promoted because I'm the top sales person? Or do I get promoted because I'm good at my job and I embody the values of the organization? And finally termination, this is maybe an unusual one to put on here. One of the things I've noticed, many organization's values are really represented in the termination process. Whether it be a lay off, or due to poor performance. How we terminate people says a lot about us as an organization. If you have that attitude of don't let the door hit you on the way out, that signifies a certain value system. My approach to this was always, treat people with the highest regard dignity when they are on their last day. This will say a lot about you as an organization. And remember, these people are going to get jobs elsewhere and talk about their experience with your organization. And they will tell you, others about the values of the organization about how they were treated on their very last day. So when you think about your culture and why it's so important to have a strong culture it influences every part of your HR processes. And we will talk more about that in greater detail.
