Culture might be a buzzword within the corporate world these days, but is it really relevant in the construction industry? In truth, great company culture means much more than having beanbags in the office or going on quarterly team building excursions. Instead, it describes how employees feel about their role, their employers, and their co-workers—and the reality is that the culture of any company dictates how smoothly its operations will go. Just as a building needs a firm foundation, the team driving your construction company does too. It’s time for construction culture to become the new “it” term on the block, because when culture’s in your toolkit, the results will speak for themselves.Why You Should Care About Construction Culture
True talent is hard to come by in the construction industry. So much so that 80% of construction companies have a hard time filling specialist craft positions. If I tell you that 46% of job seekers consider the culture they’d enter an important factor, and 86% will actively avoid companies with a bad reputation, might that grab your attention? Going further, there’s so much more to construction culture than attracting and retaining the talent you need to push your company forwards. Establishing this conceptual grail means unlocking your team’s potential for collaboration, commitment, passion, and high-caliber work. If you’re still not convinced, perhaps the potential 202% increase in performance yielded by this kind of jump in engagement will whet your whistle.
So what makes an outstanding company culture—or more specifically, what would great construction culture look like? Well, there’s no clear cut and singular recipe for success, but common themes include the forging of diverse and inclusive teams that, commitment to worksite and employee safety, strong communication, clear values demonstrated by leadership, an environment that allows individuals to feel heard, and opportunity for employee progression. Hammering that last point home, research reveals that 94% of employees would stay in their current role longer if they saw opportunity for professional development.Forging Iron Clad Construction Culture
We’ve covered the reasons to prioritize culture in your construction company, but before we tackle how to tackle the task, what happens when construction culture is neglected? Time and time again, it is our experience that eroding company culture means a fast track to high turnover, employee theft, malingering, workplace discrimination, white collar crime, and worse. Fraud alone costs construction companies around the world an estimated $860 billion annually. So the chances are, if you don’t take the proactive step of calling in an investigator to course-correct company culture proactively, you’ll likely be calling them later to investigate crimes that are breaking down the business you worked so hard to build up.
So, you’ve got the picture—company culture is just as important an investment for your construction company as the latest machinery or cloud-based work order system. But where do you begin? Well, as is the case for so many things in life, it’s vital to understand where you’re starting from. The best way to get the lay of the land is with an industry-tailored culture audit from Lauth Investigations International. Our specialist investigators will perform a detailed analysis of your construction culture, assessing factors such as communication, shared values, company history, caliber of leadership, marketplace positioning, undetected misconduct, and more. From there, we will provide you with a clear and concise road map to get your culture back on track. If you’re ready for guidance on how to move your team onto firmer footing and realize the rewards that come with prioritizing culture in the construction industry, contact our team today.
Working from home became an adjustment for most people at the beginning of the pandemic—and although COVID numbers are falling—many businesses are still maintaining a remote working structure in these turbulent times. While remote working has had it’s undeniable advantages, corporate leadership remains wary of how it might effect their business in the long run.
In addition to a decline in cases of COVID-19, some of the benefits that corporate leadership has seen in recent years under remote working are
Increase in productivity
Savings on physical locations
Reducing the carbon footprint
There have also been great strides amongst companies who’ve gone remote who now have access to talent in all four corners of the globe. The pool of talent for their company is no longer restricted to driving distance of their location. They can hire the very best professionals available as long as the nature of their job is conducive to remote working. This remote working structure has also allowed professionals more time to spend with their families.
However, working from home isn’t a successful strategy for some, like parents with young children, or distractions at home that do not make it an ideal environment for productivity and innovation. These professionals don’t mind the commute and would rather have the space dedicated to their working life so that they can maintain firm boundaries between their work lives and their home lives. This has left many in corporate leadership unsure of how to proceed in a manner that works best for everyone.
This is what brings us to “the hybrid model” of working life. This means that in applicable jobs, employees would adopt a hybrid form of working in which they were in the office 2-3 days per week, then spend the rest of the work week performing tasks at home. Even just reducing time in the office to just 2-3 days per week, employers can save a fortune on daily operations costs, as well as the time lost spent in travel to the office and tasks like getting up to get a cup of coffee, or running to the copy room. In this way, employers get to maintain a working environment that works for everyone, and employees get the work life balance that our national economy has craved.
If you have concerns that your company may benefit from a change in working structure, contact Lauth Investigations International today for a free quote on our corporate culture audit program. The program can be customized for businesses of all sizes and industries and can provide the crucial clarity necessary to improve daily operations. Call 317-951-1100 today for a free quote or visit us online at www.lauthinveststg.wpengine.com.
In the hospitality industry, success and longevity have always been measured by the customer’s experience. After all, the goal of any hospitality business is providing guests and customers with quality service 24/7. Giving guests the best experience means hiring the best professionals to attend to their needs. The demand for quality staff is becoming a tall order for some in hospitality, which is one of the many industries that is suffering as the result of what is being called the Great Resignation. As the labor shortage continues to ravage both businesses and nonprofits alike, owners are more incentivized than ever to improve retention in hospitality.
The Great Resignation is one of many reasons business owners are incentive to improve retention in hospitality. The Great Resignation is the name given to the burgeoning phenomenon in which employees are leaving jobs—not simply in search of better pay—but for a healthier corporate culture that can improve their quality of working life. The Great Resignation is just one of many factors that has contributed to the vast labor shortage throughout the United States, and hospitality industries are on notice to create better working environments for their employees, or continue the struggle against high rates of turnover and loss of profit. Luckily, there are a few strategies that hospitality leadership can utilize to ensure they are providing their workforce with the best corporate culture available.
Prioritizing Health and Safety
In these pandemic times, health and safety of employees should be a no-brainer for employers. Employers should be bending over backwards to provide proper sanitation and protection for their employees in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but their physical health is not the only thing that needs safeguarding. In the pandemic, employers must remain sensitive to employee needs, especially with regards to time off for both illness and personal time in order to avoid burnout in these turbulent times.
Engagement from Leadership
More than ever, engagement from leadership is paramount to improve retention in hospitality. Even in non-pandemic times, it’s easy for leadership to get fixated on big-picture items and not the daily operations that impact the workforce. As such, lower-level problems can go by the wayside, written off for another day, and allowed to fester in the meantime.
Increases in Compensation
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on, more and more employees are pushing for hazard pay if they must continue to work closely with the public. Fewer industries work closer with the public than hospitality. In hotels, staff is required to clean rooms where sick persons may have been exposed. Those in the restaurant industry have felt some of the strongest impact of the pandemic because of how often they are exposed intimately to the public by getting close to take an order or coming into contact with their dirty dishes. As such, leadership who are in a position to offer hazard pay or pay raises to their employees while they continue to work through a pandemic would be wise to do so in order to improve retention in hospitality.
If your company is having repeated problems with employee retention, it might be time to have a corporate culture audit. Lauth Investigations International has a comprehensive corporate culture audit program suited for companies of all sizes and industries. Call 317-951-1100 or visit us online at www.lauthinveststg.wpengine.com for more information.
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.
