The Quality Culture

Co-Authored by:

Lorrie Morrow and Mario Maltese

One cannot describe the sense of satisfaction when an AV Team fully understands the criteria for a system in compliance with the Customer’s SOW and applies easy-to-use instrumentation to prove it. But that may not be enough to keep good Team members in the fold. There are other concerns.

“Organizational culture was 10.4 times more likely to predict employee attrition than compensation, according to analysis of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews for companies across 38 industries. “Compensation is at best a moderate predictor of attrition”, said Donald Sell, co-founder of CultureX, an analytics company that performed the survey.

What keeps people around? Predictable job schedules and job growth and recognition.

What were predictors of high quit rates? Job insecurity, failure to recognize employee performance, and a poor response to COVID-19.

A “Culture Quality” is one that keeps the team together, leaves members with a sense of pride and knowing the company has their backs. A Quality Culture can be described as one that:

Follows the Principles of Honor, Education, and Discipline

1. Management has ultimate Accountability

2. Has formal training program, with clear objectives, tracking, and periodic reviews where Management assists in the progress of each team member in reaching common aspirations. Further, if the student failed to learn, the instructor failed to teach

3. Has Leaders that understand their role is to motivate through challenge and show appreciation and recognition when due.

4. Has a constant challenge to improve, to go beyond, to stretch outside of one’s own self-applied constraints.

5. When obstacles appear, the reaction is to gladly seek the clever work-around.

6. When there is a Customer complaint, the urge is to get on a white horse and save the day.

7. Demonstrates error-tolerance.

8. Has non-repeating errors that indicate continual learning.

9. Humor is prevalent.

10. Has an absence of back-stabbing, consistent rules, and a presence of cheerleading and praise.

11. Knows that growing the individual results in growth of the organization (as Kipling put it, “For the strength of the Pack is in the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is in the Pack.”)

We would suggest Management inspect how they’re doing by asking Team Members periodically to fill out a “Report Card” on their perspective on company culture for each of these points, with scoring 1 to 10 on each point to track progress. Leave room for their suggestions to improve. The insights generated will be much more valuable and effective than hiring an employee relations lawyer to defend the company from lawsuits.