A Great Company Culture Impacts Employee & Company Success Cartoon
Day: August 8, 2018
Company Culture is a Vital Factor Impacting Employee and Company Success
Getting up and going to work each day should not be a wretched task. However, only 10% of Americans look forward to going to work every day. Employees should wake up and look forward to the challenges, co-workers, diversity and environment that they will face at the workplace. Many companies are hurting themselves and their success by not focusing enough time or attention to creating a comfortable and productive company culture. After all, when employees are dissatisfied, workplace productivity is greatly decreased. However, there is a direct link to successful companies and a great company culture.
In this exclusive Bold Business video from the Synapse Summit and American Dreams Academy, we feature expert opinions on what makes a great company culture from Arnie Bellini, ConnectWise CEO, Vishal Mahtani, Advisor and Intrapeneur The Penny Hoarder (Taylor Media), Steve Tingiris, Founder Dabble Lab, Ed Buckley, Peerfit CEO, Scott Neil, COO American Freedom Distillery, and Rebecca White, University of Tampa, James W Walter Distinguished Chair of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship Center Director.
What is a Great Company Culture and Why is it so Important?
The textbook definition of a company’s culture will list things like company vision, values, systems, norms, assumptions, beliefs, biases and habits. There are also the factors of diversity and inclusion that also impact company culture.
That being said, employers may judge their company’s culture based off of their employee’s enthusiasm or collected personality. An employee, however, may view their company’s culture by the level of comfortability and satisfaction they experience while working at the office.
Company Culture Importance
According to Bold Business’s exclusive Synapse Summit interview with Arnie Bellini, the CEO of ConnectWise, “Culture is the life-force of a company. It is not something you think about later. It’s something that you want to get right away. In fact, very few companies survive even the first year unless they have a culture.”
Employee satisfaction is especially important to the well-being of the company as employee happiness means more productivity and a stronger leg against the competition. In fact, happy workers generate an average of $2,601 more annually in productivity than employees that are unengaged or depressed. Having a workplace that is comfortable and engaging is crucial to company success. So, what are the components that make a great company culture?
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Hiring the Right People
A company’s hiring process should go beyond onboarding individuals solely because they possess the required skills. The personalities of your employees can contribute to the company’s successes or failures. Also, the diversity of the workforce and its inclusiveness impact employee satisfaction and a great company culture.
While many people may be able to accomplish the job, not all of them have the personal skills to work efficiently and effectively with other employees. In a survey asking 17,000 employees about the company culture of their workplace, 66% said they “sometimes, rarely or never” feel like they can trust their colleagues to support them at the office.
So, while these employees may be accomplishing work on their own, they may be bringing down the productivity of others due to the negativity of their presence. This is why it is so important for companies to really learn their prospects before offering an official position. Employees that are passionate about the values and missions of the organization are more dedicated to accomplishing the goal.
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Encouraging Employee Bonding through an Inclusive Workforce
Simply hiring the right people may not be enough for employee workplaces to thrive. Companies that give employees the opportunity to get to know one another are more successful and have more satisfied employees. Much of this has to do with the factor of an inclusive workforce in a great company culture.
The Society for Human Resource Management defines inclusion as “The achievement of a work environment in which all individuals receive fair and respectful treatment. They experience equal access to opportunities and resources. Lastly, they can contribute fully to the organization’s success.”
Today, many companies refer to their employees as a team, working together to accomplish a universal goal. This encourages employee cooperation, enticing individuals to turn towards their peers for questions, inspiration, and ideas. When employees work as a team their relationships are stronger and innovative ideas are brought to the table. This is directly correlated to an inclusive workforce.
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Encourage Employee Contribution
Everyone wants to feel valued and know that the work they are doing is important. If employees cannot voice their opinions, they will feel like just another employee at any another company. Giving employees a voice allows them to feel more independent, trusted and valuable. In fact, some of the greatest business ideas have come from lower level employees. Allow your employees every chance they can get to input their opinions and ideas. As a result, your employees will be happier and confident. The company, in turn, receives brilliant ideas and feedback.
Rebecca White, University of Tampa, James W Walter Distinguished Chair of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship Center Director, offers this perspective, “Company Culture. It’s really about being aware of who your employees and their impact to the organization so that they can actually fill in the gaps. So I always go back to people and their importance.”
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Celebrate Accomplishments and Employee Success
Celebrate every success your employees achieve. A survey conducted by Badgeville found that 83% of Americans would rather receive recognition for their contributions than any rewards or gifts. Another 88% of respondents said that praise from their peers and managers is very motivating. Therefore, it is crucial for companies to acknowledge the work their employees are doing. A celebration doesn’t have to be a large party, however. Simply recognizing the efforts of your team will improve their happiness and commitment at the office. It is also important that companies encourage employees who may be underperforming or struggling with their projects. Catch up with these employees to understand why they are struggling. Talk through a solution and encourage the success of their efforts.
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Promote Diversity and an Inclusive Workforce
According to a study done by Deloitte, workplaces that support diversity and inclusion have 83% greater performance in terms of ability to innovate, 42% improvement in team collaboration and 31% increase in responsiveness to change in customer needs. All ethnicities, ages, genders, disabilities and religions should be shown respect and support. The workplace should be an atmosphere that encourages powerful voices from individuals of every background. Let these minorities feel accepted, comfortable and offer prompt assistance if these individuals have any concerns or feel ostracized
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Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
A survey conducted in 2014 by About.com found that 62% of American workers say the biggest complaint about their jobs is the lack of communication. There are a handful of reasons why lack of communication is a critical error for businesses. First off, when employees fail to understand what is going on in the office, their confidence may be lower. Additionally, and rumors may be rise to what employees are witnessing but are unsure of.
Lack of communication also causes lowered productivity, missed deadlines and unaccomplished projects. When communication lacks efficiency, employees often fail to know their expectations or the assignments they are working on. The establishment of effective and consistent communication needs to occur for both the company and its employees. Questions and concerns should be answered promptly and all expectations should be discussed with employees regularly.
Vishal Mahtani, Advisor and Intrapreneur at The Penny Hoarder (Taylor Media) is passionate about this topic. In his exclusive interview with Bold Business, he offers this suggestion “Once you have a mission statement that people buy into, it’s incredible what sort of results you get from your people. Our people are bought into what we’re doing and they believe in what we’re doing.”
Measurement Brings Improvement to a Great Corporate Culture
If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It. Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Drucker means that you can’t know whether or not you are successful unless success is defined and tracked.
When it comes to culture, there are new ways to measure the impact of a company culture. One of these is through the concept of micro learning. These are relatively small units, videos or short-term bursts of learning activity. At Bold Business, we refer to them as Bold training nuggets.
This is a great format because the learners are actually in control of what and when they are learning. Think of this through the lens of the employee base. By 2025, Millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce. The average attention span of a millennial is 90 seconds based on numerous studies.
If organizations want to attract, train, and retain their talent, then they need to create and deliver it in a way adapted to these employees. The use of video is key to this as 70% of Millennials visit YouTube monthly.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, every employee wants to be comfortable in the workplace. They need to know the work they do is valuable and crucial to the success of the company. Many businesses will focus their attentions towards the customers or the products or services they are selling, forgetting the well-being of their employees in the process. A good culture is crucial to employee happiness and success of the company.
Measuring the company culture and learning ways to improve it is also crucial to a great company culture and happy employees.
‘How Are Scientists Advancing Precision Medicine with Monkeys?’ Cartoon
Precision Medicine: Monkeys are Paving the Way for CRISPR
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a prominent medical technology buzzword. It is widely in discussion and debate, for its innovation to precision medicine and gene-editing, and also its controversial implications on the management of diseases, and humanity. Scientists primarily use CRISPR to experiment on mice. But in 2014, researchers in China successfully engineered twin cynomolgus monkeys with targeted mutations. This is a critical milestone in CRISPR technology as it comes closer to more realistic research models of human diseases. Since then, monkeys are becoming instrumental in further research and experimentation using CRISPR. This is a Bold Idea that is paving the way to improving the way doctors treat patients using gene editing techniques.
Implanting the Seed, Gene Editing Technology
This technology is fairly new, and studies have not yet fully explored the potential side effects of gene-editing. A new team of Chinese researchers and scientists looked into CRISP-modified monkeys to find out if it causes severe side effects like cancer and unintended mutations., They assessed these monkeys to look for any unintentional mutations in their genomes. The study, however, is not yet peer-reviewed, but a version was published in bioRxiv in June 2018.
Researchers of the study designed a system to make the MCPH1, a gene expressed in the developmental stage of the fetal brain, inactive in rhesus macaques. Mutations in the MCPH1 gene cause abnormalities in the brain, effectively causing microcephaly in humans. They injected the system in 15 rhesus monkey zygotes, 13 of which developed into embryos. It is the next gestation phase where the cells begin mitosis. This was a preliminary experiment that allowed them to move on to testing on female rhesus monkeys.
The research team then injected the CRISPR-Cas9 system into 30 zygotes, and 24 of them developed normally. These 24 zygotes where then implanted into six surrogate female rhesus monkeys. Out of the six monkeys, two became pregnant. One gave birth to twins—one male, and one female that did not survive. The other female monkey gives birth via C-section to surviving triplets—two males and one female. All but one offspring, including the female monkey that died, consequently did not have any mutations that caused abnormalities.
Precision Medicine using CRISPR-Cas9
The CRISPR-Cas9 system consists of two critical molecules that create a change or mutation in the DNA. The enzyme Cas9 cuts two DNA strands at specific locations in the genome of a virus to add or remove a sequence. A guide RNA finds its target in the viral genome, and Cas9 cuts the strands, essentially disabling the virus. In the case of the rhesus monkeys, the team did not find MCPH1 genes in the DNA. This enabled the monkeys to develop normally. The team discovered that the CRISPR gene modification was effective on the test subjects.
The study then focused on looking for de novo mutations (DNM), or noninherited mutations. When Cas9 cuts the DNA, the DNA tries to repair itself as quickly as possible, which may result in connecting random strands. These random strand sequence could eventually manifest as diseases or mutations. When they inspected the sequence of the modified genomes, they discovered that it did not produce CRISPR-related DNMs. The monkeys did have some other DNMs, but these are expected to occur in any new generation of primates.
CRISPR Conclusion on Gene Editing Techniques
The researchers concluded that CRISPR-Cas9 is a relatively safe gene-editing technology for primates. Until this experiment, most scientists only worked with rodents or human cells. This study is the first to analyze CRISPR-modified genomes in non-human primates. There is only a 7% genetic difference between humans and rhesus monkeys, therefore scientists think that humans will respond well to this experiment. These gene editing techniques are paving the way for scientists to experiment for societal benefit.
With all its innovation on human genomics, CRISPR has its fair share of detractors. Some say it causes unintended genetic mutations and has far more negative ethical and moral implications than scientific advancement.
Those in the medical field see it as a breakthrough in precision medicine that will advance the quality of human life by permanently deleting diseases in human DNA. Because of the study with the rhesus monkeys, leaders in science consider CRISPR as a replicable and feasible study on human beings.
The first reported clinical trial on humans was in China in late 2016. The Chinese team did not disclose a lot of information because of doctor-patient confidentiality, but its leader, oncologist Lu You of Sichuan University said that the treatment was a success, and the patient was due for a second injection. It was also reported that clinical trials will start in the US and Europe almost simultaneously, but FDA put a pause on the US trials.
The world is anticipating more news about CRISPR, precision medicine, and their concrete applications and consequences on human life. And with laboratories and companies racing to conduct human trials, we may be hearing about conclusive reports sooner than expected.
