7 Ways You Can Impact Company Culture

It’s widely known that people quit bosses, not jobs. Usually when the boss sucks, the culture sucks too. Part of the problem is the idea that company culture is determined at the top and works its way down: 59 percent of employees think the CEO and other top leaders are responsible for changing culture. That leaves 41 percent that feel differently, and I wish we could get that number to 100 percent. Employees can impact culture

Company culture can be vague to pin down and define, but for the most part, it’s your company’s unique behavior, beliefs, attitude and nature. It’s also a vibe, a mojo, a mission, a passion and a way to communicate. It’s simply about the people, and people are complex. While it would be nice if companies put as much thought into establishing culture as they do designing business strategy and product planning, the truth is that it usually doesn’t happen that way.

So what if your boss is a nightmare, the culture is toxic and you’re about to start singing, “take this job and shove it”? Or maybe it’s not that bad but is getting there. Do you just give up and quit? Well, if you love what you do, the industry you’re in, the people you work with or if there’s any other reason to have hope, then it is likely worth an attempt to make things better.

Here are seven things you can try to make a meaningful impact and turn things around:

1. Own your own role. First, take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I part of the problem?” Be honest because in most cases, there are at least a few things you can personally change. Make a list–maybe it’s longer than you thought! Your personal attitude, the effort you put into making positive contributions to the culture and how you communicate with others are a few things to consider.

2. Use your influence to make things better. The true leaders at a company aren’t always the boss. Natural leaders set an example that people want to follow, so if that’s you, be a good one! If you understand the vision, use your influence to help others better support the vision. It’s amazing what a group can accomplish with a shared mission. It’s contagious. Influence your sphere–and hopefully it will trickle out from you to your team, your department and ultimately throughout the company.

3. Be open, transparent and fair. I have little patience for petty, backbiting office politics and social positioning, but it is inevitable that there will be people at a company who behave as if they’re still in high school. Let’s help them change. Let’s be open, transparent and fair, and people will reciprocate even if it takes them a while. It’s incredibly refreshing when you’re free to say or do what’s best for the company–even if that means making some mistakes–rather than feel like you always have to CYA.

4. Educate and train your boss. Dogs sometimes find it easy to train their owners . . . maybe we can train our bosses. I’m not saying we’re dogs, but you know what I mean. You’ll find a million supporting articles online to change culture. Check out the slideshares from Hubspot and Netflix, or the Valve Employee Handbook. That should spark a few ideas. Share what you learn and what you’re reading. Maybe help the boss think it’s his idea.

5. Take measurements. I like measuring things, but measuring culture can be tough! This may just be a feeling you get when you walk into the office or when you know your coworkers are happy. Less whining or grumbling. Many times, teams will be much more focused and productive. And frankly, everyone will work harder. Yes, we are happiest when we’re focused and working hard. If the boss sees this impact–if he has any leadership capacity whatsoever–he should jump on the culture wagon ASAP.

6. Talk to HR. Give HR a shot. If anybody should know the mission and vision of the company, it’s HR. Go ask questions, find out what HR thinks about culture and how it’s communicated to employees. Sometimes HR forgets, and you might be a helpful reminder.

7. Be patient. Everyone loves an easy answer, but great culture requires great effort and time to get just right. And frankly it’s never perfect, but we should always be working on incremental improvement. There is a reason patience is a virtue.

The purposeful and deliberate action of working on culture is one of the best things you and your company can do. So don’t quit just yet. Figure out what you can do today, don’t bite off more than you can chew, then sit back and watch as things get better.

via 7 Ways You Can Impact Company Culture | Inc.com.

7 Ways You Can Impact Company Culture

The Best HR Departments Don’t Just Focus on People

Over the past decade or so, the talent paradigm has gained considerable momentum in the HR field. Think of all the books out there on the subject, all the talent management consulting practices that have proliferated, and all the talent-management functions now operating within HR departments—not to mention the HR departments that have renamed themselves to focus on talent.

The trouble is that “talent” focuses on optimizing individual contributions, and the more we emphasize individuals over the organizations, the more HR will lose the very impact it’s taken 25 years to build—as a strategic enabler of organizational performance.

Among the many brilliant insights in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is that economic organizations come into existence because of their ability to coordinate labor to make the whole greater than the sum of individual laborers’ parts. The essence of organization is to coordinate and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of individual efforts.

“Talent” focuses on ensuring that companies have the individual talent necessary to achieve their purposes. Certainly this is a critically important agenda for any organization. However, by focusing primarily on individual contributions, the talent movement, by definition, succeeds in making the organizational whole equal to the sum of the parts. This overlooks the central contribution of organization to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. It is this integrating and leveraging function of organization that creates sustained competitive advantage.

Labor economists have long known that over time major competitors will have hired roughly the same raw talent. In your hiring processes, you will win some and you will lose some. The critical issue is not the individual talent that you have; the competitive advantage resides in what you do with the talent once you have it. And that is an organization issue. This is not to say that you can let up for one minute in striving to have the best talent. But if HR focuses primarily on talent, its ability to create competitive advantage is limited.

Obviously the tools, practices, and processes that create effective organization are substantially different from those that optimize talent. For example, If optimizing talent is the agenda, then an HR department will probably hire HR professionals with individual-oriented psychology backgrounds. If optimizing organization is the agenda, then a department is more likely to hire HR professionals with backgrounds in business and economics. The latter two disciplines are the ones that focus on making the organizational whole greater than the sum of the parts. To be truly effective, most HR departments need to balance the individual and organizational focuses.

Yes, HR must ensure that the foundation of talent is in place. That puts HR in the game. But the game is won by creating competitive organizations that can beat the competition. With this latter focus, HR then creates sustained competitive advantage.

via The Best HR Departments Don’t Just Focus on People – Wayne Brockbank – Harvard Business Review.

The Best HR Departments Don’t Just Focus on People

Which Social Network Has the Most Job Search Activity? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Another day, another cool infographic about social media and job search. Recruiters, employers and jobseekers are all out there using social networks. But what do people think about using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus for career purposes?

Our friends at Jobvite commissioned a study of 2,049 adults aged over 18 across the US, asking them for their opinions on using social media when finding a job.

It discovered that though almost all of those surveyed seemed to be socially active, just 16% used social networks solely to find their most recent job – but a massive 54% have used Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn in some way.

Here’s an interesting result: Most job search activity takes place at Facebook (44%), LinkedIn (26%) and Twitter (23%).

Other key findings from the study were that:

• 45% of those employed were open to a new job

• 86% of active and passive job seekers have a social profile

• 40% are ‘super social’ with over 150 contacts

• One in six found the last job through a social network

 

via Which Social Network Has the Most Job Search Activity? [INFOGRAPHIC].

Which Social Network Has the Most Job Search Activity? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Survey: What Your Employees Really Want

The success or failure of a company always depends upon the talents of the people who work there. If you want to recruit and retain the very best employees, you’ll need to provide them with what they want, not what you think they need.

As I explained in “Where to Find Top Sales Talent,” I was recently asked to co-host a free webinar that will present groundbreaking research based on LinkedIn’s huge database of personnel and recruitment activity.

LinkedIn surveyed 11,813 non-managerial employees to determine what they value the most in a job. The surveyed employees fell into two groups: technical (4,658 engineers) and non-technical (7,155 salespeople). Here are the results:

The two groups were in broad agreement about the importance of most aspects of the work environment. As I predicted in “10 Things Employees Want More Than a Raise,” both groups put a very high value on work-life balance.

Employers would do well to heed this and stop requiring unpaid overtime (which is unproductive anyway, as I have explained in “Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week”).

There are three areas in which the opinions of salespeople and engineers greatly differ:

Having a good relationship with your colleagues. Salespeople see the ability to work with other people inside as a crucial part of their ability to make sales. Engineers, by contrast, don’t care nearly as much, probably because their work tends to be more solitary.

Challenging work. Here’s where we find the greatest disparity. Engineers want interesting projects that push them as individuals. Salespeople, by contrast, aren’t all that motivated by job difficulty, probably because they see selling as enough of a challenge on its own.

Having a long-term strategic vision. Engineers aren’t much interested long-term strategy, probably because they know that in five years everything (from a technology standpoint) will be completely different. Salespeople, however, want to work for a company that knows where it’s headed, probably because it’s easier to sell a company’s products if they fit within an overarching strategic vision.

via Survey: What Your Employees Really Want | Inc.com.

Survey: What Your Employees Really Want

Here’s what it"s really like to work with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook

Not a lot of people get the chance to work directly under billionaire founders and CEOs.

That’s why most people take what they see in the press or movies and create their own – often false and distorted – images of what it’s like to work with them.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example was depicted as an arrogant nerd-punk in “The Social Network,” the 2010 film about the founding of Facebook. The film perhaps played a role in creating some of the negative images that follow Zuckerberg to this day.

But is Zuckerberg really a hard person to deal with in real life?

Former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor, who worked with Zuckerberg for 3 years, says he’s definitely “a different boss.”

“Even when we disagreed, he didn’t have this ego about him, like you could argue with him,” Taylor told Business Insider. “I mean, he would overrule you at that end if we couldn’t reach a conclusion, but I always felt like he was willing to argue it out and listen – which is sadly not that normal among many Silicon Valley CEOs.”

Taylor says he’s still good friends with Zuckerberg even after leaving Facebook, and hopes the rest of the world could see the good side of Zuckerberg as well.

“I also learned that because the movie (‘The Social Network’) came out, it was really easy to build a caricature of these people with very public profiles, but I got to know a version of Mark that was much more human that I wish other people could see.”

In fact, this is not the first time Taylor had good things to say about his former boss. In his resignation letter, Taylor said Zuckerberg’s his mentor and one of his closest friends.

Taylor left Facebook in 2012, shortly after its IPO, and is now the CEO of Quip, a mobile-friendly collaborative word processor. You can learn more about Taylor and his new company here.

via Here’s what it’s really like to work with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook | VentureBeat | Business | by Eugene Kim, Business Insider.

Here’s what it"s really like to work with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook

How tech companies compare in employee diversity

From Apple to Google, we ranked 14 tech companies from most diverse to least

Silicon Valley companies like Google, Apple and Facebook may be innovative, but they sure aren’t when it comes to making their workplaces diverse.

Criticized for their hiring practices, tech companies started publishing employee demographic data over the past few months. It only confirmed what many people had suspected: White and Asian men dominate. Everyone else – women, blacks and Hispanics – are severely lacking.

In many cases, the companies issued a sort of apology in tandem with their diversity reports. “As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a blog post online. “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, said.

At least 14 tech companies have released data. In an effort to provide further clarity, Fortune has ranked them in individual categories and then again overall, using a point system. Here’s how they compare:

Gender diversity (overall)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Pandora (51% male, 49% female), Indiegogo (55% male, 45% female), eBay (58% male, 42% female), Pinterest (60% male, 40% female), LinkedIn (61% male, 39% female), Yahoo (62% male, 37% female), Hewlett-Packard (67% male, 33% female), Apple (70% male, 30% female), Facebook (69% male, 31% female), Google (70% male, 30% female), Twitter (70% male, 30% female), Microsoft (72% male, 28% female), Cisco (77% male, 23% female), Intel (77% male, 23% female).

Gender diversity (leadership only)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Indiegogo (57% male, 43% female), Apple (72% male, 28% female), eBay (72% male, 28% female), Hewlett-Packard (72% male, 28% female), LinkedIn (75% male, 25% female), Facebook (77% male, 23% female), Yahoo (77% male, 23% female), Google (79% male, 21% female), Intel (79% male, 21% female), Twitter (79% male, 21% female), Pinterest (81% male, 19% female), Cisco (81% male, 19% female).

Gender diversity (technical workers only)

From most diverse to least: Indiegogo (67% male, 33% female), eBay (76% male, 24% female), Pinterest (79% male, 21% female), Apple (80% male, 20% female), Pandora (82.1% male, 17.9% female), LinkedIn (83% male, 17% female), Google (83% male, 17% female), Yahoo (85% male, 15% female, 1% other/undisclosed), Facebook (85% male, 15% female), Twitter (90% male, 10% female).

Data for Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel were unavailable.

Ethnic diversity (overall)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Apple, LinkedIn, Intel, Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Pandora, Indiegogo.

Ethnic diversity (leadership only)

Analee Kasudia/Fortune

From most diverse to least: Apple, LinkedIn, Intel, Google, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Pandora, Indiegogo.

Overall rankings

To calculate how the 14 tech companies fared overall, Fortune assigned points based on how they ranked in five categories: Overall gender diversity, overall ethnic diversity, gender diversity of the leadership team, ethnic diversity of the leadership team and gender diversity among technical workers. Companies that failed to report data in a particular category were given last place points for that category. Here’s how they stacked up, at least by Fortune’s measure:

1. LinkedIn

2. Apple

3. eBay

4. Indiegogo & Yahoo (tied)

6. Pinterest

7. Pandora

8. Facebook

9. Intel & Google (tied)

11. Twitter

12. Cisco

13. Hewlett-Packard

14. Microsoft

via How tech companies compare in employee diversity.

How tech companies compare in employee diversity

Hackerspaces Help Techies Turn Ideas into Reality

Inside a nondescript garage-like workshop nestled between restaurants, a flower shop and jewelry stores along Main Street, ideas are taking shape.

At HeatSync Labs, the tables are littered with computer chips, pens, pads and tools while the room is abuzz with the chatter of would-be inventors hoping to change the world–or just make cool things. They are part of a growing global movement of so-called hackerspaces.

“It’s all about sharing what we know with one another,” said Mitch Altman, 57, founder of a similar setup in San Francisco called Noisebridge. “It’s centered around community and education and a place where people do what they love doing and hopefully make a living from it.”

The idea began to take shape in the U.S. after Altman and other Americans attended a 2007 computing conference in Germany where panelists spoke of their ownhackerspaces. Altman returned home, met with fellow tinkerers, rented a space for Noisebridge the next year.

“I didn’t want it to end,” he said.

At the same time, similar workshops were opening up across the country–NYC Resistor in New York, Hack DC in Washington, and The Hacktory in Philadelphia–while dozens more have popped up since. More than 1,600 are now operating around the world, according to hackerspaces.org, a website dedicated to the effort.

At HeatSync, which opened in 2009, Larry Campbell, 49, is working on a nuclear fusion chamber, while Ryan McDermott, 27, tinkers with an electric keyboard programmed to make the colors dance on an LED strip in preparation for Nevada’s annual Burning Man alternative arts festival.

Campbell, a network engineer, hopes his device will “change the universe” by turning hydrogen atoms into helium.

McDermott, who works in information technology, has more modest plans for his keyboard.

“Anybody that I’ve shown this thing immediately wants to play with it and touch it and make the colors dance and things like that,” McDermott said. “That’s the fun thing for me: getting people’s reaction out of it.”

While many projects in hackerspaces are done as hobbies or just for the challenge, some have been turned into multimillion-dollar products. The MakerBot, for example, was created by a tinkerer at NYC Resistor and is now one of the most well-known 3D printers on the market.

And while hackerspaces have been quick to spread, each has sprouted locally with its own unique flavor.

HeatSync, for instance, gives members 24/7 access to the facility for paying dues that help cover the costs for rent and tools. For non-paying members of the public, HeatSync opens its doors for three hours every weekday, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., during which they can work on projects and share ideas.

“Anybody can get their foot in the door,” said HeatSync co-founder Jacob Rosenthal, 33. “It’s their job to make it work for them but (we) give you a time to meet the people and to get access to some of the tools and to show people your project and get people excited about what you do.”

Jeremy Leung, 30, an IT security consultant and another co-founder of HeatSync, said those involved in the movement also are working to dispel the myth that hackers are, well, hackers who are an ominous security threat to credit card data and computer systems worldwide.

In reality, those involved in the movement say it has a much more productive mission: to improve existing technology and in some cases create new ideas.

“Hacker had become this muddied term in the media,” Leung said, describing the origins of the word as merely “someone that takes a technology and they learn so much about it that they’re able to take it past what the initial idea was.”

Campbell hopes to do just that with his nuclear fusion chamber. When he fires it up, nobody will be able to change those helium atoms back into hydrogen.

“All of a sudden, something’s irrevocably different,” Campbell said. “And that’s kind of cool.”

via Hackerspaces Help Techies Turn Ideas into Reality | Inc.com.

Hackerspaces Help Techies Turn Ideas into Reality