So often, organizations focus on culture and on employee communications only once something's gone wrong. The best organizations, the best leaders, invest early and often in employee engagement and in cultivating an honest, inclusive culture constantly.
This means regularly communicating with employees, regularly seeking and listening to feedback, regularly talking about culture and values, regularly celebrating successes, and regularly drawing out lessons learned from both successes and failures.
There are lots of key moments when effective culture leadership and employee engagement matters, and we'll dive into these in a future blog post. But here's why you should start focusing on these things regularly, all the time, now:
- First, if you do a little bit all the time, it becomes habituated. You carve new grooves in the gears that drive the organization. It becomes less of a big deal, more common place, and less daunting for leaders to focus on.
- Second, it creates an environment where people feel more empowered to, and therefore are more likely to, speak up. The worst thing is when everyone sees a problem, knows what's going wrong, but no one speaks up. Sharing good news and bad news early and often, regularly seeking feedback means people are more apt to share it.
- Third, focus on culture and inclusion and effective employee engagement when times are good means you build up a well of goodwill you can draw on when times are hard. People are more likely to trust you, be in for the wild rides, when they feel you've been with them through all the other times.