Hey Everyone,

Above is my video on how to transform your company culture in 2019. These are all strategies I’ve used in my businesses so I know they’ll work for you as well!

If you prefer to read my company culture strategies, check out the transcript below.

Hey team. In this video I’m going to share seven company culture strategies that you may have never considered to transform your company culture. Stay true to the end because there’s a bonus company culture tip that you’re definitely gonna want to use.

I built an eight figure business. I have 150 employees and I’ve been hired by companies like Mcdonald’s, Canada, verizon wireless, an Alfa Romeo.

I know that these strategies are gonna work for you because they’ve worked for me as an entrepreneur, a keynote speaker, and for my clients as well, so I guarantee that they’ll work for you to, these new strategies are going to help you elevate your company culture such as why private podcast should be used for employee onboarding and how my employee advisory board is helping transform company cultures plus much more. Don’t forget about the bonus strategy that I’m going to share with you, but you’re going to have to wait to the end and I guarantee nobody’s using it.

All right, let’s get into it.

Company culture idea number one is to create an internal podcast to onboard new employees. Because you know, new to company culture, I’m going to assume that you’ve already built your employee onboarding strategy.
Some of the education that you might have within this process is when was the company founded? Who are some of the executives and what are some of your core values?

The question is how are you delivering this education to your new employees? Have you ever noticed that during training, managing employee engagement levels can be difficult? We’ve all tried tips and tricks to be able to increase this engagement because of the training becomes more successful.

The answer to being able to create higher engagement is private podcasts. Instead of having your trainee manager stand in front of the room and explain your company culture, how was built and things that are aligned with the culture.

Use an internal podcast that new employees can listen to before their first day with your company.

According to software companies, Silk Road,

53% of HR professionals say employee engagement rises when onboarding is improved.

The beauty of leveraging an internal podcast is that it’s affordable and it’s a different experience for the employee. All you really need is one or two of your current employees to share the story and record it. Not only is this a unique idea, but it sends a message to new employees that you’re willing to think and do things in an innovative manner.

If you want your employees to do the same, you must first lead by example company culture. Idea number two is to create an employee advisory board. The employee advisory board or EA B is the most popular strategy that I’m asked about when I speak at business conferences as an employee engagement and company culture.
The employee advisory board is a fairly straight for strategy, but it does include some intricate details that you must manage to ensure that the program is successful.

The EAB is a group of team members within the company that meet with the senior leader of the organization on a monthly basis for two to four hours to talk about the current state of the company culture.

During the meeting, you will always ask two core questions that will set the foundation for the conversation. The first question is what are the strengths and opportunities to improve the company culture? And the second is describe the workplace of your dreams.

A few key elements of the EAB are is follows. The meeting is confidential. Create an environment where team members feel comfortable speaking freely. The host of the meeting should be a senior leader like an owner or the CEO to ensure every department has a voice.

Elect one team member from each department across the entire company to be a part of the EAB. Flip the team every six months and ask ea be team members to elect the replacement or do so democratically by internal vote.

Now, this is the most important part of the EAB. After you’ve gathered the feedback as the leader of the organization, you must take that information and discuss it with your management team to start transforming your company culture.

That is where the value is.

The employee advisory board is definitely the most valuable company culture idea that I’ve implemented within my business for my clients and have spoken about during my keynotes and workshops. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what one of my managers has to say about the employee advisory.
“I think the employee advisory board is a great opportunity for all staff to have their voices heard, voice their concerns, their ideas to the company and give that to management and ownership.”

Idea number three is to create a company culture book or video.

You may have heard of company culture books or videos before.

The time I was introduced to them was when I visited Zappos in 2008 while these ideas might not be revolutionary, there’s that element of it that I highly recommend doing to take it to the next level and that is to include a section that shares the success stories of current and past employees.

For example, you could share the success story of Sarah, the frontline employee who grew from our call center position to become the vice president of customer success or of Steve, the employee who contributed to the company culture for five years.

Then ventured off on his own to start his own successful business. Your company culture book or video should have anybody who reads or watches it, whether it’s a customer, an employee, the media, or even a prospective employee, invoke a certain type of emotion that gets them excited about your company profiling current and past employee success stories allows you the opportunity to share a great story rather than just listing off facts such as where is the company located and when was it founded?

Company culture idea number four is to invite current and past employees to interviews. Your All Star employees should be leveraged as ambassadors for the company so that they’re able to share their story. Working within your company culture.

After all, when your company is growing, everyone in the organization should act as a recruiter. Somebody has started doing in 2018 within my businesses, I would invite great employees who define our company culture and welcome them to our interview process.

Even if they did not have any interview experience before. Specifically, I would invite these ambassadors into the company culture part of the interview process. They can ask a couple questions and it doesn’t matter if they don’t have a lot of experience in asking you interview questions because you’re going to be the person there that will guide them through the process.

The biggest value is having them there. Describe the company culture from the perspective of the employee, not as the leader. There would even be times where I would excuse myself for the interview to allow the candidate and the current employee to be able to speak one on one without me in the room.

I’ve even gone as far as inviting past employees, individuals who were culture ambassadors when they were with the company to the interview process to speak to the prospective candidate. This works extremely well when you’re trying to recruit senior talent that is being approached by other companies as well too.

One forgotten piece of value in doing this is because if you do hire that prospective employee, not only do they know the or the person hosting the interview, but they will also have built a bond with that culture ambassador.

I would go ahead and make these culture ambassador culture buddies during the employee onboarding experience company culture. Idea number five is to conduct quarterly company culture audits.

In the first few pages of my people first culture book I quoted somebody named Dan Guerrero with the athletic director of Ucla and he says,

“Culture is like a baby. You have to watch it 24/7, it needs to be fed at least three times a day and when it makes a mess you have to clean it up and change it”

Company. Culture audits are something that I implemented with in my own businesses in 2018 and it’s something I’m recommending to my clients as well too.

Before doing company culture audits, I was reminded of a leader that I greatly admire.

The leader I admire is Daniel Schwartz. He’s the CEO of restaurant brands international. The organization is the parent company of Tim Horton’s Popeye’s and Burger King. This organization has a very high level of meritocracy.

Operating a company with high level of meritocracy means that high performers are rewarded and celebrated and low performers are giving coaching to be able to turn their game around. However, if they don’t take the coaching, then they are off boarded and replaced with other potential high performers. A colossal mistake companies make is not offboarding non culture fits fast enough.

If you do not do this, these individuals will erode your company culture from the inside and make your job infinitely more difficult to get the culture back on track. When deploying our company culture audit initiative, I work closely with our senior management team. they will print off an entire list of every single employee on our payroll and they will go ahead and rate these individuals from one to five stars, five being individuals that greatly contribute to the success of the culture.

Before our meeting. I will ask our managers to already come prepared with their list of their rankings and be ready to explain their valuation of each and every team member. This might sound labor intensive for your management team, but it shouldn’t be because they should already have an intimate understanding of each of their team members and how they’re contributing to the company culture, but even if it was labor intensive, what is more important than protecting the company culture you’ve built?

Here are a few reasons why company audits are important. You’re always refreshing your talent pool and protecting your company culture. You’re giving your managers the autonomy to pick their team and make it their own and you’re sending your company a very loud message that regardless of how talented you are, no one is excused from contributing to the success of the company culture and no one will harm it.

After being presented with the list, I asked three key questions.

The first is what are we going to do to celebrate fours and fives? The second is what are we going to do to support threes to turn them into fours or fives and third, what have we done to coach ones and twos? If I’m satisfied the way that my management team has coached ones and twos, then we will begin the offboarding process. Before doing this, I highly suggest consulting with a labor and employment professional to be able to give you guidance.

Reed Hastings, the cofounder and CEO of Netflix says it best:

“We don’t tolerate brilliant jerks because the cost of teamwork is too high.”

Company culture idea number six is to host company culture tours. Company culture tours is a fantastic way to showcase your culture, to perspective employees, the public, the media or anyone who is interested in learning about company culture.

1-800-GOT-JUNK. The company that I started my career at does company culture tours in a fantastic manner. When I first joined 100 got junk in 2007 as a call center employee, I was amazed that people from throughout North America would fly to Vancouver and take the tour.

This told me early on my career that company culture matters to the success of any business.

Don’t feel that it’s absolutely necessary to be able to host the company culture akin to 1-800-GOT-JUNK after all they’ve been doing it for years.

My recommendation is to start small, host a couple tours and start refining it along the way to host company culture towards you’re going to need a single point of accountability and give them a couple of resources. The first is give them guidance by sharing this video with them so that they can review the examples I’ve provided.

Next, allocate time for them to design what the tour would look like and consider other logistical things such as time of day and duration of the tour and third a budget that they can work within to make it a great experience for tour members.

I will never stop learning about company culture.

I will always be a student, which is why to this very day I will still go on company culture tours from other companies so that I can learn from my organization and share ideas with you as well.

Company culture idea number seven is the 3 x 5 strategy. It is by far the easiest. It costs you nothing but it’s often forgotten by most organizations.

Let me ask you a question. If you walked around your business and ask your employees to recite your core values or your mission statement, would they be able to recite it back to you?

Similar to how if you went to a Starbucks, they would most likely be able to recite the mission statement of their company, which is:

“to inspire and nurture the human spirit. One person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” 

The three by five strategy will have you asking three employees at random across different departments in the organization five days a week to recite your core values or your mission statement.

After doing this for a long enough period of time, you’re going to create alignment which will help transform your company culture.

And now for the bonus company culture idea…

I present you the $20 interview question earlier in this video I told you that the EA b was the best strategy I’ve ever created, but I’m having second thoughts based on the feedback that I get from my keynotes, my workshops, and my book.

The $20 interview question is what’s resonating with companies around the globe.

All right, enough teasing here is the $20 question.

What is an indulgence that you can’t live without that costs less than $20?

At first, the candidate is going to be stumped and they may be thinking, why is this company asking me this question?

One thing’s for sure. They have never been asked this interview question in their career before, which makes it very unique. I’ve heard many different answers to this question. Dark chocolate, cool ranch, Doritos and red skittles.

After asking this question, what do you think is waiting on the desk or the workstation of the new employee on day one along with a hand written personalized card from the management team is the $20 gift that they had answered to the question in the interview.

Now there are a few key elements that you must follow to make this successful.

Number one, when asking the question probe further, if the candidate answers with dark chocolate, ask them what brand of chocolate from where this will help you further personalize the gift.

Number two, when presenting the gift to the candidate, ensure the person delivering the gesture reminds a new team member of the question.

For example, say, Hey Kelly, do you remember what you answered when we asked You what your $20 indulgence was? Have the gift out of sight, then hand it to them and number three, make sure it’s an indulgence, not a necessity because handing out a large package of toilet paper is just weird.

Not only will this transform your company culture, it is sending a very loud message to each and every new employee that this is how we treat people within our organization. We are thoughtful, we are genuine and we are caring not just to new employees but to everyone that interacts with the brand.

Start asking the $20 interview question today.

There you have it, the seven it company culture strategies to transform Your Business and that bonus interview question that I shared with you whenever you visit my youtube channel, my promise to you is that I’m going to share company culture, customer experience and employee engagement strategies. If you learn something by watching this video, it would mean the world to me.

If you subscribe to my youtube channel so that you can be alerted when I released my next educational video, visit my website, Michelle falcon.com to learn about my keynote speeches and the private workshops that I host. But before you go, go into the comment section of this video and answer this one question so that I can help you implement some of these strategies. What strategy are you looking forward to implementing the most within your business?

Leave a comment below and let’s start the conversation.

Thank you so much for watching this video and I’ll see you next time. Right.