Ensuring Your Culture Sticks

I’ve talked about the value of a strong culture and how to build one in "Culture Doesn’t Equal Employee Perks" and "4 Steps to Engineering a Great Culture." But then what? Here are seven best practices for making sure your culture thrives.

1. Hiring: It’s a lot harder to get someone to change their personality to fit your culture than to hire people who already fit. I recommend clearly articulating the culture in all job postings so non-fit prospective employees can opt out before they even apply.

2. Onboarding: At Kasasa, all new employees are shown a video of me explaining our values. They receive a booklet that details the company’s values and describes real-world application of the behaviors we demand. New hires are then tested on the values and forced to retake the exam until they pass. Next employees spend a full day in our “War College,” where they examine the values in great detail through structured exercises and presentations from existing employees.

3. Employee Reviews: Either your culture is important enough to measure or it’s not important at all. Most employee reviews focus on job performance. If there is a nod to culture, it is usually described as “attitude” or something equally vague. I suggest that a better way to do it is to define what your values mean, specifically define what behaviors those values should elicit in employees, and regularly (at least twice a year, but more often is better) evaluate employees on how well they adhere to those values. At Kasasa, we require managers to discuss scores every month and to perform a formal review every year, which they present to the senior leadership team. With more than 300 employees, this is a time commitment for people leaders. But it’s worth it to show how seriously we take these scores. And they are every bit as important to the employee as the more traditional measures of performance when it comes to raises, promotions, or exit paths.

4. Manager Reviews: Strong culture literally asks employees to believe in the mission and values. While you can demand that an employee perform tasks, you cannot demand that he or she hold a “belief”; belief must be volunteered. And nothing will short-circuit their willingness to volunteer their belief in the organization more quickly than hypocrisy at the senior leadership level. That is why it is imperative that the leadership team submits to the same type of cultural review that the employees enjoy.

5. Firing “Brilliant Jerks”: The biggest sin I’ve made against our culture at Kasasa has been a slowness to fire productive employees who don’t adhere to our values. It can be tough for a manager to terminate a top producer because they don’t take the culture seriously. But the short-term gain of having people like that around is dwarfed by the negative impact they have on others’ performance.

6. Infusing the Values Into Your Lexicon: If I want to encourage an employee to be more aggressive in seeking resolution to a challenge, I’ll say, “Use your five stars.” I’m referring to our value of five-star leadership, which asks employees to seek results no matter who or what they have to challenge. I could have just said, “Find a way to get it done.” But part of the way you keep the values top of mind is to work them into the way your organization speaks.

7. Recognizing Cultural Leaders: Employers should recognize the top cultural performers. At Kasasa, we have an award for the employee who best exemplifies each patch value every year, as well as an overall award. These are the highest, most praised awards in the company. We also give out patch coins for spot recognition when someone does something that really shows off their adherence to the values.

To have or not have a great culture is a choice of prioritizing time and effort. Speaking from personal experience–having both failed and succeeded as a cultural leader–I assure you that no investment will have a greater impact on the long-term success of your credit union than building a vibrant culture where employees believe in your “why,” live your values, trust your leadership, and are committed to doing everything they can to make yours a winning organization.

Gabe Krajicek is CEO of Austin, Texas-based Kasasa, formerly BancVue, an award-winning financial technology and marketing services company that provides branded retail banking products and services to community financial institutions. Also from this blog, read "Consciously Creating Culture."