To the average Joe, the term “corporate espionage” likely sounds like something out of a spy movie. Or, at the very least, something that only happens to huge corps in high-rise buildings. But the truth is that just about any business may have assets that their competitors covet—and if those rival businesses have a rogue sense of morality, they may be willing to break the law in order to get what they want.
It doesn’t help that many companies don’t share that they’ve fallen prey to corporate espionage, but who can blame them. Would you want the public to know that your company was the victim of a crime, or would you rather that corporate investigations were kept firmly under wraps in so far as policy and good practice would allow?
So, what exactly are we talking about here—beyond the kinds of crimes you might see in a Netflix series? Well, corporate espionage is an umbrella term that covers everything from employee misconduct that sees an insider with a grudge send sensitive data to the opposition, through to sophisticated hacking, illegal forms of surveillance, and on-site theft instigated by hired criminals specializing in espionage.
By nature, corporate espionage usually means either taking something for professional gain—whether that’s trade secrets, research, intellectual property, or precious customer data—or strategically damaging a business through means such as bribery, blackmail, or cyber attack. Oh, and smaller businesses shouldn’t think that they’re immune. If you’ve got an innovative idea or precious information that offers unique value, then it pays to be vigilant.
Gaining the Upper Hand and the Moral High Ground
These days, just about all businesses gather intelligence about their rivals to one extent or another. Doing your research is invaluable when it comes to tracking what consumers are responding to and leveraging gaps in the market. However, when we know that certain companies are willing to cross the line between competition and criminality, it’s important to ask ourselves: are our defences in place, or should we be reinforcing the ramparts?
So, what—or who—is the best secret weapon to have at your side? Unquestionably, when it comes to defending against corporate espionage, turning to specialist investigators gives you the chance to outsmart your would-be assailants. In fact, strategic and cost-effective corporate investigations are ideal for uncovering the gaps in your security protocols, whether they are lapses in digital security, on-site vulnerabilities, or the kind of eroding corporate culture that can quickly evolve into workplace theft or white-collar crime.
Seasoned investigators are highly skilled at helping companies scope out their competitors—discreetly and legally—in order to stay ahead of any possible corporate espionage threats. They can also help you identify red flags that suggest workplace misconduct is escalating or sliding into dangerous territories, and guide you in building a strategy to address every weak-point revealed.
Avoid Corporate Espionage By Knowing When To Ask For Help
At times, employers know that something foul is afoot—they just don’t know what it is. An executive might be behaving strangely, a manager suddenly staying after hours, or a team member accessing restricted areas without permission. At other times, the warning signs may go undetected until crisis strikes. Modern corporate espionage techniques are smart and sneaky, and as they evolve, we must too. When cause for concern arises, swift action is vital. But, it is also crucial that a company does not overstep legal bounds or take action that won’t reflect well later in court. As an objective outsider, a private investigator from Lauth Investigations can help you navigate the matter without risk to the company, and guide you if immediate action needs to be taken. We are also poised to help companies stay ahead of any and all threats with periodic preventative Corporate Culture Audits. Forewarned is forearmed, so why not learn more about our comprehensive auditing and corporate-specialised investigations services. Alternatively, contact our team to discuss your needs today.
These days, the idea that corporate culture is a key puzzle piece for building business success is well accepted. But culture is an illusive concept—it’s emotional, it’s instinctive—so how can we fundamentally change it? There’s no doubt that the way your team feel and think will shape how they perform. But the efforts of many businesses to transform their corporate cultures fall flat. Why? Well, culture is a slow-moving ship—it needs time to adjust course, evolve, renew, and recalibrate. And once it gets there, it needs a captain at the helm to stay on course.
A well-worded corporate manifesto or circulated memo might serve as a useful building block, but they’re hardly going to cut the mustard on their own. Instead, it helps to have a better grasp of the many moving parts of corporate culture and how to steer them as one. At times, a corporate culture audit is a must if you are to understand where you’re going to be launching off from.
What Is Corporate Culture?
Corporate culture can be seen as the ways in which the professional dynamic between leadership and teams manifest into behavioral patterns and beliefs. Sometimes also referred to as organizational culture, this all-powerful state of being dictates whether a company functions synergistically—with energy, satisfaction, and innovation in abundance—or whether employees fall into disengagement, burnout, and even patterns of workplace theft or corporate crime.
Crucially, toxic corporate culture can be a company’s undoing, while thriving corporate culture can propel a business towards commercial success and prosperous resilience. That gold-standard for corporate culture can look very different between businesses with different goals, tones, and industries—but certain truths remain universal. Read on for the five tenets of strategically supporting a corporate culture on the rise.
1. Mindsets follow behaviors—not the other way around
There is a common misconception that you have to believe something in order to act on it. Instead, neuroscience tells us that it is the habits that we enact daily that actually forge strong beliefs and iron-clad attitudes. When they said “fake it ’till you make it,” it turns out they were onto something. This is why top-down messaging is so ineffective when it comes to shifting corporate culture for the better.
2. A few key players can change the game
When striving to alter corporate culture, getting a core group of informal leaders on board is vital for achieving success. These ambassadors for change will not only convey the ideals that should define your corporate culture, but they will model them through their daily behavior. The right individuals for this task won’t necessarily be those in leadership, but that doesn’t mean leadership are off the hook. When executives and managers don’t practice what they preach, anticipate that engagement in new ideas will be snuffed out immediately.
3. The drivers of corporate culture are practical as well as ideological
If your organization is laden with communication silos or your teams lack clear direction, how can you expect the seeds of a new corporate culture to travel? We mentioned the moving parts of corporate culture, and a vital element is that engaging practical means will be key to addressing the culturally conceptual.
Better yet, introducing strategic prompts for a corporate culture evolution is the perfect opportunity to task teams with collaboration, opening up channels and improving communication in the process. When those cultural expectations are tied into business objectives in a way that you can track and demonstrate, your employees will quickly be on board and motivated.
4. When it comes to changing corporate culture, don’t expect to snap your fingers
What is corporate culture, if not a collective manifestation of your company’s journey so far? In reality, its a mirror that will tell you the truth of where past leadership decisions—and failures—have carried you. And when toxicity has set in, you might find that you don’t like what you see.
But, inescapably, corporate culture needs to be seen so that it can be gradually sculpted—it can’t be overwritten like a hard drive. Shifting the parts of corporate culture that don’t align with your goals requires having a clear understanding of where you are today. Only armed with this information can you set a course to move forwards. In gaining this insight, a Corporate Culture Audit can be an indispensable resource.
5. Corporate culture requires vigilance and management over time
Just as snapping your fingers won’t work, changing corporate culture is not a one-and-done scenario. Culture need to shift as your business objectives grow and evolve, and active monitoring is required to ensure that positive transformation sticks, holds fast, and rolls with the punches.
Far too many companies don’t realize their corporate culture has become problematic until red flags are popping up in every direction. If things get dire enough, employee theft, malingering, workplace harassment, espionage and many more potentially catastrophic symptoms of cultural erosion can take an already-strained organization to breaking point.
When those flags are raised—and ideally long before that point—individually targeted corporate investigations won’t cut it. Widespread warning signs indicate that the problem is pervasive, and a Corporate Culture Audit is the best way to gain clear oversight of the scale of infection, as well as the right course of treatment. For businesses going strong, this valuable preventative investigation can help to illuminate weak-points and ensure that corporate culture does indeed only goes from strength to strength. Wherever you are on your corporate culture journey, Lauth Investigations are here to assist. Learn more about our comprehensive corporate auditing service, or contact our team to discuss your needs today.
Is yours is one of the businesses clamoring to get your workforce back to the office? If so, then you’ll definitely want to read this. Equally, if you see working from home as the way forwards for your team, then what we’re discussing today should be on your radar too—because, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, your corporate culture is one of the most valuable assets at risk, and you might not even have realized it. If you are to weather these giant shifts in the way that businesses operate unscathed, then improving corporate culture should be at the top of your to-do list.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone? In the Corona era, it’s a poignant lyric indeed—but perhaps not in the way that you imagine.
Even back when everyone came to work suited and booted, keeping track of evolutions within corporate culture was a substantial task for organizations of any size. That’s why we developed the Corporate Culture Audit here at Lauth Investigations—so that companies could enlist expert and strategic assistance is mapping out their current corporate culture standing, as well as plotting a course to reap the rewards of making sweeping improvements.
These days, when the closest interactions employers have with their teams is via a split-screen, old skill sets for fostering and reinforcing corporate culture have become redundant. But, if you’re thinking that mean you should roll back as soon as possible, hold your horses. According to research from FlexJobs, 65% of employees want to keep working from home after the pandemic, and a further 33% are fantasizing about a hybrid work arrangement. That likely means that only 2% of your entire staff are going to be coming back to the office with enthusiasm. There’s no question about it—the time has come to evolve.
Eliminating the Risks That Come With a Team Working From Home
What forges strong corporate culture? Constructive social bonds and a clear sense of the values and purpose of the organization at hand are vital ingredients—and these ingredients require communication and resources if their flavors are to take. While employees might be lauding the creature comforts of home and being able to ditch the commute, are they losing opportunities for critical relationship-building and meaningful interactions with leadership?
Sadly, many companies are already reeling, having not pivoted effectively. Research from Gallup highlighted that employees working from home are 10% less likely to feel that their contributions are being recognized, 10% less likely to think that someone cares about them at work, and among them, only 60% feel certain of what their company stands for. Meanwhile, the same research tells us that turnover is up 24%, which means that alarm bells should be ringing. This is companies putting their reputation and performance on the line in real-time, so its time to get serious about building corporate culture remotely.
Unlock the Potential of Working From Home With a Corporate Culture Audit
The key to improving corporate culture is investing in deepening working relationships, and the first step is understanding exactly where you are today, so you can plot a course for tomorrow. Without a solid overview technology can be an aid, but it can also be a crutch. To ensure that your evolving corporate culture strategy is on-point, turn to seasoned experts for guidance via a comprehensive Corporate Culture Audit. This innovative process serves as a health check for your business, helping you better understand the dynamics at play within a team riding the wave of a fast-changing world. Corporate Investigators from Lauth Investigations will help you make sense of this new form of navigation—ensuring that you’re not only on track to weather the storm, but ultimately robust and thriving when the storm has passed and your competitors are still trying to get their bearings. Discover more about Corporate Culture Audits, or simply contact our team today to discuss your needs. As the landscape of business changes, the next evolution of your prosperity is our objective.
Companies across America spend a fortune on curating and dispatching just the right marketing messages—in fact, last year alone, that number ran to roughly 296.4 billion U.S. dollars. But its interesting to ponder how many of these businesses and organizations pause to think about the messages they send inward. If a well or poorly-chosen tagline can make or break your next big campaign, what sort of cues do you imagine language in the workplace might be serving up to your employees?
The Power of Words
Just like any other element of an organization’s branding, the way that communication flows between many turning inner cogs plays a powerful role in shaping the performance of teams, employee turnover rates, and the perceptions of potential future hires. A strategy for the way that words are used is a vital resource for improving corporate culture and, in all truth, these days companies have to be more careful about language than ever.
That’s because, in a world that sees every word immortalized by technology, poor language choices can travel—reaching not only employees, but also wider audiences, doing untold damage in the process. Meanwhile, larger organizations that drop the ball may be unaware that a festering vernacular has taken hold among middle-management, triggering burnout and turnover that doesn’t leave a paper trail. In many cases, a Corporate Culture Audit becomes the only way that executives can get to the bottom of a hard-to-track unraveling.
These days, great leaders understand that thriving corporate culture is key to driving productivity and delivering soaring profits. While attractive perks and trendy communal spaces might make a business look appealing on paper, a culture driven by aggressive or negative language will inevitably derail efforts in other areas. It’s all about perception: Does language in the workplace make employees feel proud and supported, or stressed and marginalized? In an era that sees 86% of job seekers avoid companies with a bad reputation, could language be costing you the very talent that your brand deserves to attract?
Language Changes Everything
On a subconscious level, language impacts the way we feel, the decisions we make, and the goals we pursue. Facebook serves up a fascinating example of the power of a few words strung together. As a company that began subversively and grew to dominate the global social media stage, Facebook has been no stranger to perception crises—but it has adjusted course at various junctures by altering its language.
In 2014, denoting the brand’s maturation away from its rebellious roots, Facebook changed its brand motto from “Move fast and break things,” to “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” In 2021, following heat over Facebook’s failure to police nefarious users, the brand changed it’s mission statement from “Make the world more open and connected,” to “Bringing the world closer together.” It’s interesting to take a moment for introspection, and consider how these shifts change the way we feel about the mega-brand.
Improving Corporate Culture Through Language in the Workplace
Of course, Facebook’s linguistic pivots are public examples—but what about language used behind closed doors? Subtle differences in the makeup of everyday language in the workplace can serve as a pendulum of influence that either provides your teams with fuel, agency, and direction, or robs them of it entirely. The good news is that when language shifts, behavior always follows. The key is identifying the idealogical roadblocks that are being perpetuated through words through a Corporate Culture Audit process. This allows organizations to reveal the tricky-to-pinpoint thorns in their side, and provides a roadmap to correction, including strategising a rich lexicon that motivates and attracts the crucial elements for success. If improving corporate culture is on your agenda, have no doubt that overlooking the power of language would be a grievous mistake. Private Investigators from Lauth Investigations International are not only versed in uncovering the silos, security risks, and malfeasance that may have taken hold in your workplace, but also analyzing and adjusting the finer points of culture—down to the last sentence. If you’d like to know more about how we can transform language in the workplace into your brand’s superpower, contact our team today.
Back in 2015, the chairman of the World Economic Forum at the time, Klaus Schwab, coined the phrase the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. He was trying to convey the dramatic changes ahead in the way that we live and work, driven by emerging technology and interconnectedness. These emergences denote a turning point for mankind, and one that he saw unfolding at a whirlwind pace. However, what Schwab couldn’t predict at the time was how the transformation was going to be realized in double-time, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Has your organization put together a survival strategy for navigating the pitfalls of pandemic corporate culture? If not, then now is the time, because without oversight, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be paying the price later. Why? Because the mainstays that used to define the culture within any workforce have largely vanished—or at least they did for a while there—and the impact of that isn’t something that should be ignored.
While some of your employees might have come back to the office, global indicators like the “Great Resignation” tell us that the undercurrents of business have changed and things won’t be going back to the way they were before. The pandemic has well and truly pushed us into the arms of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, so now is the time for revamping corporate culture and embracing the potential of what is yet to come.
What Are the Technologies Driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
During the first industrial revolution, man harnessed the machine. With the second came mobility and the infinite possibilities of electricity. The third, also known as the digital revolution, saw us ask computers to do things beyond human capacity. So, what of the fourth? Our current shift sees us sharing our world with the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, artificial intelligence, and so much more.
Normalizing technologies that were once conceptually sci-fi is exciting, but as they transform our daily lives, the need for businesses to keep up is at peak urgency. With faster, glossier, more complex tech comes far more intricate data-related security risks, more sophisticated criminality, and dramatic changes to the ways in which people consume and communicate.
Beyond the need for businesses to transform how they meet their customers’ evolving expectations, there is also an unmistakable need for companies just like yours to pay close attention to where the pandemic corporate culture that their team has moved into might go next. Make no mistake; if the performance and cohesiveness of your employees has taken a hit during the disruption of the last few years, a Corporate Culture Audit may well be your saving grace.
Revamping Corporate Culture to Meet the Fourth Industrial Revolution Head On
The businesses that cruised through the upheaval of Covid-19 unscathed may have been many things, but what they certainly had in abundance was united resilience and flexibility. The corporate culture of tomorrow—the one that will inherit and build upon the remnants of pandemic corporate culture—is going to need to have these qualities baked in, because dynamism is going to be a defining factor as these new technologies and forms of communication gather ground. If revamping corporate culture is your next vital step, the place to begin is understanding the foundations that you’re working with so that you can firm-up and remodel as required, and get ready to build towards the sky. A Corporate Culture Audit from Lauth Investigations is the ideal tool for this task, dispatching expert corporate investigators who will build a clear picture of your organization’s current status quo, and help you draw up plans for making that all-important foundation unshakable so that you can leap ahead of the innovation curve. If you’re ready to be the change, learn more about the power of Corporate Culture Audits, or explore your unique needs with our team today.
