Last month, our community came together for another dynamic InnnovateLocal event. This year’s theme was Culture By Design, featuring Dr. Bob Kelly as the keynote speaker.  

To our crowd of local business owners, culture cultivators and more, Dr. Kelly demonstrated how intentional culture becomes a real competitive advantage for local, independent businesses.  

Building a strong culture is imperative to growth, regardless of your company size. It all starts with creating shared values, ensuring employees can understand their purpose and being so in tune with your company culture that you know when it’s thriving — and when it’s at risk. 

Shared Values 

Does your organization have shared values? And more importantly, can all of your employees name them?  

Organizational culture is driven by shared values.  

Dr. Bob Kelly is a culture consultant, seasoned senior executive, speaker and entrepreneur with over 35 years in food retailing, consumer products, and management consulting. He started his career as a retail employee working on the floor at Ukrop’s. Ukrop’s maintained four key values that every employee had to memorize: be honest, be safe, be hardworking and be helpful.  

Kelly recalled that these simple, yet impactful values acted as a North Star for all of Ukrops’ employees and kept customer relations consistent across the board. When Kelly went on to be Vice President of Operations at Ukrop’s, his work continued to be guided by these four values. He and other former employees are still able to recite these shared values decades later. 

Organizational values guide the behavior of all those who work to drive the performance of the brand and thus create culture. Your company’s shared values should align with your brand’s values. 

 Shared values should be… 

• Simple (i.e. Be kind) 

• Easy to remember 

• Measurable  

Employee Purpose  

In a research study about brand, strategy and culture, 20% of respondents said they have a clear “line of sight” between their tasks and their team and organization’s goals (Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit). 

Dr. Kelly believes that a clear line of sight for all employees, at every level of the organization, is crucial to retention, employee happiness and organizational success. Every employee who has customer contact should understand their role as a brand ambassador. 

For example, Dr. Kelly once served as a dishwasher at a restaurant. One night, the manager walked all the way to the back of the kitchen to celebrate Kelly and his colleagues on helping them get through a busy night. They had washed more plates than ever before in the restaurant’s history, and his manager said, “we couldn’t have done this without you.” 

What initially felt like a simple role in a busy environment became something meaningful to Kelly that night. His manager had created a clear line of sight between his role and the organization’s success. It was a conversation he never forgot, and it fuels his advice to CEOs to this day. 

Measuring Culture 

Culture must be measurable to ensure traction and ongoing credibility. You can measure culture by ensuring it aligns with your brand strategy. 

Brands should create clear measurement, accountability and recovery guidelines when the brand flips over the guardrails. 

Culture in Practice 

This year’s InnovateLocal also included a panel about how company culture shows up at local, independent businesses throughout the Richmond region. We heard from Jill Lemon, Co-Founder of Sandbox, Andy Frank, CEO and Founder of UDig and William Groves, President and CEO at New Horizon Bank. Each culture leader offered candid insights into how to create, nurture and manage workplace culture. They also shared how to know when it’s time to refresh your values to keep your company moving forward. 

Panel Takeaways: 

• Many CEOs fail by ignoring the importance of culture. It is easy to brush off things like company culture, especially when it doesn’t factor into strategic KPIs. The most successful leaders view culture and strategic priorities as equals. 

• You can’t teach kindness. When it comes to hiring new employees, it can be tempting to hire the person with the best resume, even if they do not align with your company’s values. However, remember that you can teach hard skills; you cannot teach interpersonal skills and values. 

• Culture evolves over time. Don’t be afraid to refine and change culture as your business evolves. For example, a startup with a fast-paced hustle culture may slow down as it matures. Over time, certain organizational values may start to feel stale or cause you to attract the wrong job candidates. Change is okay, and sometimes necessary. 

• Culture fits don’t all feel the same. You need different types of energy to round out the workplace. When hiring new employees, keep an open mind, and focus on finding shared values, not personalities. 

• External forces impact culture. A busy Q4, high-stakes project or stressful clients can cause even a strong culture to strain. Employees may question leadership, strategy and values during times of turmoil. It is up to leaders to stay aware in their organizations to be able to identify when culture is at risk and quickly address what needs to happen to get it back on track. 

Conclusion 

Workplace culture is the DNA of an organization. It affects the way employees interact with each other, customers and stakeholders. Long-term success and growth start with cultivating a strong culture within your organization. Next week, we’ll be sharing a worksheet where you can put takeaways from InnovateLocal to work and focus on culture within your own organization with a series of guided questions and prompts. 

If you attended this year’s InnovateLocal, we’d love to hear your top takeaway from the event.