What ARE You Known For?

An article called “Workplace culture and its impact on corporate reputation” from a UK-based group Igniyte, an organization dedicated to managing corporate reputations, opened with this:

A company’s reputation is all about how other people view the brand. Their perception derives from several factors, including media coverage, the CEO’s social media sites, customer reviews, and whether there is a healthy workplace culture internally. What employees think about the company’s culture and workplace culture is hugely important when it comes to its external reputation.

With that in mind, I’ll stress this once more: our team members, our clients, and the community we operate in directly all care about our values, but so does everyone else who ever hears anything about us!

But hold on, Wes, how did we go from the simple behaviors we use internally to model our values to something as far-reaching as how people view our overall brand? The folks at Igniyte went on to share this, connecting the dots between reputation, culture, and values - and tying all of them to an organization’s results:

Company culture is a catch-all term for its set of behaviors, values, and belief systems that dictate how it operates both externally and internally. A strong culture in the workplace is vital for enhancing employee engagement and overall organizational success.

Workplace culture, then, impacts and influences the following:

1. How customers perceive the organizations culture (its external reputation).
2. How employee engagement manifests.
3. How all stakeholders view and interact with the company/brand.

From this, we can extrapolate that a healthy workplace culture that accurately reflects and lives the company’s core values boosts employee happiness, its reputation, and organizational success.

We’ll dig into how our reputation influences the results we achieve soon enough. First though, we need to be very honest with ourselves about whether or not our reputation is what we want it to be. It’s one thing for our values to be listed online or to have the boss mention them in a soapbox rant, but that doesn’t mean anyone has connected with or lives by those values… As a reminder for how often this happens, think back to the article I referenced before from MITSloan Management Review called “When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?” saying that, “we found that more than 80% published an official set of corporate values on their website” and “more than three-quarters of CEOs interviewed in a major business magazine discussed their company’s culture or core values — even when not specifically asked about it.” That same article closed by emphasizing, “Unfortunately, many organizations’ core values are so generic that they could easily serve as fodder for a Dilbert cartoon.”

So what about that honest, clear-eyed look? What should we be asking ourselves? Several years ago, Cindy and I were part of small group on a call with Mark Cole and Jeff Henderson (author of Know What You’re FOR) where Jeff challenged us with these three questions:

• What do you want to be known for?
• What are you known for?
• Do they match?

At first glance, these questions appear to be focused solely on our personal or organizational reputation, our response to the third ties back to our company culture and how we, as leaders in that company, have (or have not) worked to routinely model what we have listed as our core values. Think about it, do they really “put guests and people first” when there’s a corporate-wide outage of milkshake machines?  Our reputation, the culture it's built on and the values that drive that culture, is based far more on what people see than what we say - and that’s where we’ll pick up next time!