Are you creating a culture more like The Office or Google?

Having a great culture doesn’t mean throwing a pool table and a putt-putt green in your break room- but it does mean caring about your staff, infusing company values and creating an environment conducive for both personal and career growth.

While it’s far easier and less time-consuming to have a culture where people are trained to have a “clock in, clock out” mentality, the way that you maintain high-quality workers and create loyalty with them is to create a magnetic culture.

What are your values? Are they part of your everyday language or are they stuffed away in a handbook somewhere?

As a nonprofit or ministry, you do great work, but HOW you do that work is equally as important. This is the difference between burnt out, robotic teams and teams composed of energy, excitement and drive for the future. So on the podcast this week, we thought it would be helpful to talk about some practical ways to start implementing a culture unique to your organization.

Where do you even start? Start with the leader’s values.

Companies don’t necessarily have values- the people who work for those companies and organizations have values. So, start there.

As a leader of a nonprofit or ministry, list out eight to ten of your own personal values. Then, send an email to your entire organization and ask them to list their top personal values. From that point, compare your list of values, find the consistencies between them and identify what values ring the most true to your mission and vision.

Now, once you’ve identified your values, use these 5 practical steps to infusing the values into your staff and culture:

1. Make a short, catchy phrase

• Find a way to make the value memorable and inspiring.

2. Incorporate imagery or an icon for each

3. Attach a story

• People remember stories and help to humanize the value.

4. Reward it when you see it

• What gets rewarded is what gets repeated.

5. Live it out

• “Culture is shaped by how the leader behaves, not believes” – Andy Stanley

And hey, why not throw in a ping pong table for good measure.

If you’re interested in learning more about culture and how you can make your organizational more like Google and less like Michael Scott, check out our FREE white paper, The Guide to Creating a Contagious Culture, that gives you more helpful tips, worksheets and interactive examples of the five steps listed above. If you would like to listen to the podcast with Pete Wilson and Chuck Dennie discussing this very topic, check it out here.