PERSPECTIVE
Culture:
Sponsored Content | By The Thrive Partnership Group (Glenn Busby, Jon Rogers, and Robert Seguin) and Environics Research (Dr. David Jamieson)
The secret weapon of winning corporations A guide to how culture plays a key part in building a high performing team
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n the October/November 2015 issue of Biotechnology Focus, the results of an online survey of employees in the Canadian Biotechnology and Life Science sector were published and explored. The results suggested an industry staffed by generally happy and engaged employees: • Employees rated their company as providing a “strong performance” on all four key aggregate indices: Job Clarity (77 per cent), Organization Climate (72 per cent), Visionary Leadership (71 per cent), and Recognition & Reward (67 per cent) • The number one thing organizations do well, is empowering employees to do their jobs in the best way they know how. • Employees were most engaged by flexible work schedules, strong leadership from senior management, professional development opportunities, challenging employees with greater responsibility/variety, and rewards for performance The results, while good news overall, do raise several important questions: 1. In an industry where employees are generally satisfied, how can an individual company truly stand out to become the employer of choice in terms of recruitment, engagement, and retention? 2. How can a company deliver more than great employee engagement; how can it create a strategic culture that is a true “force multiplier” to improve business results over the long term?
realized that certain companies have no obvious technical, structural, or cost advantage, and yet they nonetheless consistently outperformed their peers. These successful companies were driven by people and culture. Culture and employee engagement became the new, sought-after competitive advantages. Unfortunately, the focus on engagement, while important and highly measurable, has led some companies to miss the mark on three key points: 1. Culture should be a strategic choice; 2. Measurement only works if you measure the “right” things; and 3. Actions speak louder than surveys.
This article will explore what employers can do to define, measure, and lead their desired operating culture in today’s dynamic Canadian biotechnology and life science environment. People are typically the largest single corporate cost. Historically, this drove waves of costcutting and employee-shedding. While some leaning down was needed, most companies learned that over the long term, you cannot cut your way to growth. Successful leaders
In our experience, companies that understand these principles and undertake a carefully planned and executed approach to implementing them, can strengthen their organizational culture to further increase team productivity and sustainably accelerate business performance. In our Thrive Culture process, the path to successfully building a strategic culture has three deceptively simple but actually quite challenging steps:
26 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS October/November 2017
1. Define Culture should be a strategic choice. We view culture as the collection of values, beliefs, and behaviours that collectively define “who we are” and “how we do things around here”. Some suggest that culture is effectively an “accident of history” – something that comes to be over time based on leadership behaviours, personal experiences, etc. At Thrive, our belief is that we are products of our experiences, but effective leaders deliberately and actively plan and shape culture, evolving it over time. Importantly, leaders must avoid the pitfall of attempting to define their organization’s desired culture from only their perspective. Closed door executive team vision and values defining sessions tend to yield wonderful plaques for the wall, but often miss the mark, because they fail to take into account what internal and external stakeholders see, believe, and want. Therefore, the process must include careful stakeholder identification, stakeholder understanding, and structured data review, values definition and selection. “Typically, we engage all stakeholders and work with the executive
