Corporate culture is a system of shared values about how the work gets done in your company and how people and things are treated in the process. In a new organisation, you and others have a great opportunity to take action to create the culture in a positive and productive way that will benefit individuals, revenue and the company’s future.
In any business, you need to share your vision that assisting others in skills-building and sharing information and knowledge is both a good idea and an admirable value. Others need to agree that this new way of conducting business is an effective, productive and worthy process to implement. Then, you need to ensure that all employees fully understand and are willing to implement such a positive programme.
Next, the process of working together needs to be clearly reinforced. Managers throughout the company need to provide concrete rewards – including praise, recognition, increases and public announcements at meetings – whenever this new cultural value and behaviour occurs. By reinforcing and rewarding people, the top administrators show by their actions that they support and reinforce a specific aspect of the new company culture. After all, the best way to ensure that a certain behaviour or action gets repeated is to reinforce it.
Another way to establish and reward a new aspect of your company’s culture is to make sharing and helping others an important and integral part of what the company does. This can occur in several different ways. For instance, knowledge transfer or skills-building can become a formal part of in-house training. If your company has a tight budget, then make sure you rely on in-house employees to do the teaching.
Typically, this plan leads to the “teacher” feeling increased self-esteem and receiving praise from his or her students. Furthermore, the students regard their teacher in a more positive light and are more willing to work with and for him. In any case, it is a clear win-win.
Yet another method of sharing this information is through brown bag lunches. While colleagues and subordinates sit around a table, someone informally shares ideas or methods of addressing and resolving challenges that others are facing. Again, there is praise and recognition for the problem solvers, and other employees are able to learn new ideas in a low-stress, low-risk environment. This clearly results in another win-win situation. (You can go one step further by rewarding the presenters with warm praise and appreciation, as well as a token gift.)
Mentoring is another successful means of transferring skills and knowledge that can address competition between employees. When a new employee is hired, assign him or her (or let them choose) someone higher up in the organisational ladder who will assist that employee in learning the ropes and learning to build individual skills, abilities and knowledge. Mentors can act in a non-punitive way to take this employee under his or her wing until the latter is fully ready to dive into the corporate culture and be a productive, successful and contributing member of the organisation.