Manifesting a Successful Company Culture

Central to every successful business is a thriving culture because employees are a company’s greatest asset, and a company’s culture is shaped by its employees. When it comes to improving Touchcore’s culture, I start by focusing on thoroughly understanding how our core values are currently being applied by the employees. To give you a better idea of us, Touchcore’s core values are creativity, openness, and growth with the additional supporting values of quality, authentic customer relations, a positive employee culture, and corporate citizenship. Values are important, but I have learned that in order to create a company culture where all of the employees buy-in to and believe in it, there needs to be an accurate understanding of the current culture. This is where a cultural manifesto comes in: it delves deeper than ideals and value statements do by zooming in on the reality of what will actually improve employees’ experiences.

A manifesto serves the purpose of explaining the behaviors that establish the company’s culture. Many companies advertise their values prominently on their websites or hallways but when you look under the hood at their demonstrated culture you see inconsistencies between the values and employees’ behaviors (e.g., Enron, Lehman Brothers, to just name a few…). The actual company values as opposed to the nice sounding values become apparent in which employees are rewarded and recognized for their behavior. It is in the way a company rewards employees for demonstrating certain behaviors that their values become obvious. In this way, the culture and behavior at a company shape what the values are, instead of the other way around. A culture focuses on helping achieve excellence in the company by empowering employees to do the right thing. By creating our manifesto for Touchcore, I am seeking to create a workplace that encourages the behaviors that will demonstrate our company’s values of creativity, openness and growth.

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