Compensation requirements, government checks and generational laziness have all been blamed for why many companies are struggling with staffing shortages and the “Great Resignation.” But above all, workplace culture is the biggest factor when it comes to hiring and retaining employees, Schilling Cider CEO Colin Schilling said during Brewbound Live last month in Santa Monica.
A toxic workplace is more than 10 times more powerful of a factor in predicting employee turnover than any other factor, including compensation, Schilling said. As a result, companies must look at their workplace culture and determine what adjustments need to be made to improve and become more profitable.
Schilling Cider recently transitioned from a “strategy driven” to a “people first” company, and while Schilling doesn’t consider himself a “culture expert,” the shift provided him with a “roadmap” that he shared with conference attendees.
A key to that roadmap is to remember that when enacting cultural change, it has to “be driven from the very top.”
“This is not a process that you can toss over to HR and say ‘Hey, let me know when this is done so I can come up and give a speech about it,’” Schilling said. “The CEO has to drive this conversation; the entire executive team has to be very aligned on this.”
When assessing a workplace, Schilling noted the importance of distinguishing between culture and morale.
“Culture is really driven by beliefs and assumptions that every employee and all the employees collectively hold to be true, and those things are hard to shift,” Schilling said. “Whereas morale might be something where if you announce a huge company bonus, and then you immediately do a morale survey, it’s probably going to be pretty high. But culture is something that’s much more lasting and enduring. And it’s really one of those things that is harder to change.”
To help assess its own company culture, Schilling Cider conducted a search for a leadership coach and after interviewing 14 different candidates, brought on Moe Carrick, an executive leadership coach, author and CEO of Momentum, Inc. Carrick helped guide Schilling’s executive team through a valuation of its company values.
“We actually rewrote our entire mission-vision-values with employee feedback along the way,” Schilling said. “And a company like us that’s just about 10 years old now, we found that a lot of our mission vision values were still relevant today, but a lot of them weren’t and it didn’t represent where we were today or where we wanted to go. And so we did actually rebuild those from the ground up.”
Beyond mission and values, how a company measures and addresses performance is also a part of its culture, Schilling said. He acknowledged the more “West Coast style” of feedback that Schilling Cider previously had and how they’ve adapted to become more direct with performance feedback.
“Companies that have a really strong internal company culture drive performance better than companies that don’t because they’re willing to have those conversations, and they’re willing to be honest with their employees and have real-time feedback,” Schilling said.
“We used to do annual performance reviews and the data around annual performance reviews shows that they not only don’t create lasting change, but there’s actually some new data coming out that shows it hurts performance in a company if you’re only doing annual reviews,” he continued. “And so we moved that to what’s considered the gold standard now, which are monthly performance reviews that then roll up into an annual performance review process.”
Watch Schilling’s full presentation above, which includes a deep dive into how to use data to analyze and improve workplace culture and performance.