Culture is one of those corporate buzzwords, often misused or misunderstood. It’s not ping-pong tables, beer fridges, and breakout spaces.
Team culture is true synergy connecting all departments, collectively working towards a shared mission. It’s reputation, employee satisfaction, personality, and confidence.
When I took over Nitschke we had no culture (or, at least, that’s what I thought). But culture exists, even if it’s not intentionally created.
We all worked in silos, operating as a team of individuals, like many real estate agencies do. It was a bunch of agents, out for themselves, with no shared mission, systems and workflows or cross-communication between departments.
Fast-forward to today, we have a vibrant culture, happy employees, and a growing, industry-defining business.
There’s no playbook for creating a culture, because it’s specific for every CEO and company. But I can tell you the key perspectives and concepts we used to turn Nitschke into a destination employer in the Adelaide Hills.
How to hire right for your business
Explore current problems
Be honest about your current culture and what needs to change to allow you to become a destination employer.
For example, with Nitschke, we needed to become an independent agency to have the freedom to build the culture we wanted. So, we prioritised a rebrand, refocus and refresh before doubling down on our culture-building plans.
Know where you’re going – your destination
To create an industry-defining company and culture, you need to know your end goal. It’s a moving target and likely to change, but it’s helpful to nail your mission because this will influence your culture.
We interrogate our mission once a year. For us, our mission is to deliver the most authentic real estate experience.
This means hiring good humans who get better each day, while also elevating their team in the process.
‘Right people, right seats’
Hiring and personnel decisions are easier with a clear mission/vision. The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) ‘right people, right seats’ is a framework we’ve adopted.
It’s a two-part decision-making process when building your team:
- Right people: Are they a vision and values match?
- Right seats: Do they get the role? Do they want the role? Do they have capacity for the role?
#1 (right people) is the most important part of making a culture hire.
Systems and standards
It’s helpful to have a framework, either created or discovered, to embed into your business. Run every decision, problem and idea through this lens. For us, it’s the 3 Steps to Success.
- Elevate our state (mental, emotional, physical and spiritual states)
- Raise our standards (establish and protect our values and vision)
- Simplify our strategies (pull back and re-establish our baseline as a business)
Your people should uphold both your big mission, as well as the values, vibes, systems and standards that’ll help you reach it. The right people will also find you, so be open about who you’re for and why you’re categorically different.
If you’re struggling to define your culture, grab a spot in my schedule and let’s chat.