Let culture be your guide

With doom and gloom all around, and predicted to get worse, how do you keep staff engaged and protect your culture?

I was working in the US during the dot-com bust and 9/11. Our company took a double hit because our client base was predominantly companies from the technology and transportation and logistics industries. One was hard hit by the dot-com bust and the other by 9/11.

In a matter of months we went from plenty of work and a great outlook to having to make the tough decision to cut staff to survive. It’s no picnic, and on top of that we had a great team and strong culture that we didn’t want to lose in the process. But we soon learned that the culture was our best guide to handling what lay ahead.

Here’s what we did.

Once the decision was made to cut people, we took some time and really thought about who to keep and what they bought to the overall make up of the team. Then we made the cuts all at once – black Friday, and one of the hardest days professionally I have ever had.

We were totally honest about the reasons for letting them go, and as a testament to what great people we had, each person understood and we continued to work with many of them in a contract capacity when worked picked up again.

The next and most important thing was rebuilding the confidence of the people left. The Monday after the cuts were made, we took the remaining staff offsite to talk about the path forward and what was going to be needed from everyone.

By making them part of developing the plan and priorities, they became more invested in our shared success, and as a leader I took the situation as an opportunity to show that I was vulnerable as well, and that I needed their engagement and commitment in order for us all to succeed.

We spent time talking about ways we could improve our efficiency and effectiveness; how we could better serve our clients needs; what we needed from each other now we were a smaller team. We redefined success as not just about revenue but about delivering a better product, and discussed what things could be improved starting from that day.

The next day was the first day in the office with the reduced team. It was an open plan space and so the missing people were very obvious, but the session the day before had set the stage and everyone embraced the new reality with energy and determination.

We had set the tone that we would only survive as a company if we did it together. Over the following months, we never hid the reality of the business from the team, with everyone getting monthly financial and other performance reports so they could see the tangible results of their efforts.

Ultimately our company had been built on a foundation of relationships, purpose and curiosity and all played a part in navigating through that time. I doubt we would have survived without the strong cultural base those values supported.

If you aren’t sure what your culture is, now is a good time to figure it out. How you respond and what you are left with is in no small way a direct result of what it is.

Do you know yours?

See you next week.

Alignment is Michel’s passion. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia, and Brand Alignment Group in the United States, she helps organisations align who they are, with what they do and say to build more authentic and sustainable brands.

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