Company culture critical for good staff
A good company culture has rewarded travel software company Serko with a low turnover rate, where several original employees are still with the company today. TAO LIN reports. We’re a family culture in that it’s a very friendly environment.
The days of employees who are content with just being another cog in the wheel are disappearing and companies must adapt to find the best people.
According to Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends survey released earlier this year, the number one challenge facing companies around the world now was employee engagement and culture issues.
With organisations now in the ‘‘glassdoor’’ era, corporate culture was more transparent and subject to scrutiny, which mean it could help or hinder a company’s competitive advantage.
Deloitte director Victoria Yeo said one of the main forces behind this increased focus was the shift of the workplace demographic towards more millennial employees. ‘‘Never before have we had so many different generations in the workforce,’’ she said.
Along with the increasing number of millennials and their new approaches to work came less loyalty, which was not as terrible as it might sound.
‘‘We’re finding they’re now becoming more interested in doing meaningful work and not necessarily focused on career ambitions. They want to do work that resonates with their values,’’ Yeo said.
For companies, that might mean higher turnover as milennials were more likely to make a greater number of career changes – anywhere between five and seven throughout their entire working lives.
Yeo said company culture needed to come from the company’s leaders, who decided what the culture was and made sure each employee understood that and how they could contribute to the values of the organisation.
She used Google as an example, whereleaders decided to run the company based around the idea of a university, involving fresh ideas, innovation and developing people without constraining them with bureaucratic rules, policies and processes.
Fast growing companies like those in Deloitte’s Fast 50 programme typically had great company culture.
‘‘You’re only as good as your brand and your brand is your people. With these small companies and fast growth, they need agility, they need people who are resilient and changeable. They need to be able to respond to a fastmoving environment and take advantages where they can,’’ she said.
Darrin Grafton took his company culture into his own hands by bringing all recruitment inhouse and instilling an openminded, flexible approach to the workplace. In 2007 he founded Serko, a travel software company that listed on the NZX in 2014.
Flexible work arrangements mean the 140 employees can take the time to pick kids up from school, spend time with family and work from home.
Every few weeks all the offices around the world connect for a company meeting to run through presentations and discuss progress.
Every two months there was a team bonding event, which employees can contribute ideas to, and they had two Christmas functions each year.
Grafton said these arrange- ments led to greater productivity, loyalty and dedication.
‘‘We’re a family culture in that it’s a very friendly environment. We work hard but we also play hard,’’ he said.
‘‘We’re here to support each other and we recognise we all make mistakes from time to time. It’s how we get through those to achieve goals in our own careers and as the company as a whole.’’
Grafton said in one of the latest rounds of recruitment he received 181 job applications for a chief operating officer position. His first employee in the company still worked for him today.
That reaffirmed to him that what he was doing was working.
‘‘You’ve got to support people. You’ve got to make the time to work on the business as well as in the business, you’ve got to create visibility and transparency.’’