As a supervisor, it is your duty to create a performance culture in the workplace. A performance culture essentially means that you need workers who are dedicated and determined to get results. Focusing on improving the results at your company by hiring high-achieving employees will lead to greater business success and bigger profits. First, it is important to understand exactly what a culture of performance is, which is defined below.
What is a Performance Culture for the Workplace?
A company that has a high performance culture involves the most beneficial behaviors and expectations that lead to superior results for an organization. It also involves setting specific business plans and expecting high-achieving employees to meet those goals. Employers and managers are also responsible for defining the duties of their workers and helping employees grow and advance.
Essentially, a performance culture drives high-achievement and positive results. This can lead to greater financial results and can help meet customer needs. In addition, this type of culture in the workplace can also help engage employees and retain your workers for longer periods.
Now that the essential definition of a culture of performance has been covered, what steps should you take to figure out your business needs and improve performance at your company?
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Determining Business Needs to Boost Performance
According to the Harvard Business Review, when you are figuring out business needs, you will need to establish a basic understanding of your company culture and establish metrics to analyze your priority cultural goals. You will need to have a clear vision for the future of your company, employ shared employee behaviors, and have specific strategies to boost performance at your workplace.
Once you have a clear vision, you will want to start executing that vision and continually improving your product or services to exceed customer expectations. It is also advised to focus on more simple and basic aspects of company culture when you are looking to boost performance based on company needs. Pick several aspects that you want to change and create a schedule for meeting these goals in the next 18 months.
Business improvement initiatives should also be combined with changes in your company culture. For instance, helping customer representatives develop more effective relationships with clients and improve their communication skills will both create a change in company culture and lead to business improvement initiatives such as better customer reviews.
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Ten Steps to Adopt a High-Achieving Performance Culture
Now that you have defined your business needs and understand exactly what goes into a high-achieving performance culture, you are ready to make your organization obtain the best results and as high-performing as possible. Below are key steps you will want to follow.
1. Determine the behavioral changes that will help you boost business performance.According to an article from McKinsey&Company, you will need to pick specific behavioral changes that will influence the results of your company and communicate these behaviors to your employees in a clear manner. That way, everyone will be on the same page and understand how to change their behaviors. In addition, this can help you better monitor the progress toward changing company culture at your place of business. Make sure that these behavioral changes are customized to your company’s needs.
2. Reframe the mindsets of your employees. The mindsets that workers have tend to drive what they do and should do at your company. This has a high impact on their day-to-day behaviors. The workplace tends to have a major impact on the values and belief system that employees have. Essentially, every part of the company culture such as how performance reviews are handled or how meetings are run impact the way workers think they should behave. Managers and supervisors will need to reframe mindsets by paying more attention to the cues they send out in order to create new behaviors. Changing underlying mindsets will go a long way toward improving performance.
3. Create significant business initiatives to better reinforce the preferred company culture. Workers tend to take cues from business leaders and managers. As such, in order to develop new values among your workforce and change the company culture, model the right behaviors and mindsets to drive better results. If those behaviors provide the company a real value, then leaders and workers are more likely to continue performing those same behaviors.
4. Create opportunities for your workers to overcome challenges in order to change their behaviors. In order for an organization to truly change, the staff must change significantly. This is not always so simple since some people are more resistant to change and others generally find it difficult. As such, you will want to create a tailored platform where employees can figure out what drives their own personal behavior so that they can overcome the challenges and barriers to change those behaviors for the better.
5. Change work schedules and assignments to provide a coherent experience. Several factors can affect mindsets and behaviors including “articulating a compelling change story; leadership role modeling; skill building; and formal changes to processes, systems, and incentives,” according to McKinsey&Company. Creating a space where each of these factors works well together will create a more cohesive and coherent experience for your workers that will reduce confusion.
6. Focus on implementing employee-centric changes.Often cultural changes at companies start at the top and work their way down to the workers. Instead of focusing on executives and managers, begin implementing an employee-centric platform for cultural changes.
7. Develop a plan of action. According to the e-book A Results-Oriented Culture – You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure, you will need to set specific, measurable goals and objectives every year. You will need to carefully plan out your goals and the exact schedule you will follow. In addition, you will be required to concisely monitor your results to ensure your plan of action succeeds.
8. Recognize and communicate key data. Analytics tools are a necessity when communicating relevant data and monitoring metrics among your team members. The right analytics tools can help you reach and engage your employees in order for your workforce to exhibit high performance.
9. Provide Measurements to Drive High Performance. According to an article from Forbes, high performers tend to thrive on a multitude of measurements and daily feedback. Research shows that high-achieving employees seek out metrics, results, and rewards. They crave feedback and positive results in order to be provided with praise or monetary rewards. This means providing metrics and feedback can make your entire team perform better. Essentially, this will drive high performance at your company. In addition, when you hire a high achieving individual, this tends to cause others on your team to work harder.
10. Hire the best people for the job. When interviewing individuals for different positions, be sure to focus on hiring employees who will help your company grow and succeed especially those who are high achieving. This will ensure your company obtains greater profit and meets your goals. As such, avoid hiring based on family connections since nepotism may cloud your judgement.
In addition to these 10 important steps, you should also consider implementing a culture of experimentation, which allows you to employ new ideas to bring in more customers and higher profit. Taking part in these methods can make a big impact for the performance of your company. In order to ensure you gain a performance culture at your company, you will also want to implement the right technology.
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How Time Management Software Brings a Culture of Results
In order for you to implement a culture of performance and gain a focus on company results, you will need the right data analysis and time management tools. This will help you better understand data especially when you are making company-wide decisions and attempting to change behaviors.
The time management platform Runrun.it will help you create a culture of results as you work on different projects. The Runrun.it software tool can be used to automate tasks and various work processes including the time spent on different projects. All users are able to track the amount of time they spend on various tasks and communicate by writing comments for team-based projects.
You will be able to easily quantify data for upper management to have access to so that they can make business decisions. In addition, Runrun.it software technology includes a customizable dashboard where you can store and record metrics regarding business needs and project management. This dashboard, for example, can allow you to view how often a project has undergone revisions. This is accomplished in real time on a single screen. If you would like to see whether Runrun.it time management software is a good application for your business, click here to check out a free trial.