Culture Archives

Purpose Drives Financial And Competitive Advantages – Deloitte

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-Driven Companies

Deloitte is the world’s largest audit, tax, and consulting firm. They have done extensive research on purpose-driven companies and the role of purpose in them. And according to their report, companies at which people agree there’s a “strong sense of purpose” perform significantly better than those that don’t.

Specifically, these purpose-driven companies have:

• Excellent financial performance
• Distinct and differentiated brands
• Strong workplace cultures
• Highly satisfied customers

Three Drivers to purpose-based performance improvements:

1. Create a Purposeful Culture

Invest in making your purpose a mainstream and actionable idea across your workplace. So work on aligning everyone to your purposeful ambition by making it relevant on an individual level. Show employees how they will benefit from helping make your purposeful ambition a reality.

2. Exude a Purposeful Presence

In order to succeed, ensure that every level of management and staff is included in the process of training and engagement around your purpose. So don’t only talk the talk, walk the talk. Make sure to acknowledge, celebrate, and reward the purposeful behaviors of individuals, teams, and departments. Shift your brand and marketing messages to better reflect your purposeful ambition.

3. Adopt More Purposeful Behavior

In order to change the way your brand and its people interact internally, and with the outside world, make sure every interaction reflects and amplifies your purposeful ambition. By examine processes, policies, and procedures and amending as needed purpose will drive your business.

People Connect to Purpose

Purpose isn’t simply a “nice to have” business attribute. Purpose-driven companies positively impact virtually every measure of success. Why? People connect to purpose and they change the way they think, feel, and act when they embrace a purpose that truly matters to them.

For additional reading on driving business through purpose, read Pathway To Sustained Growth

Check out some of the companies driven by purpose we have had the pleasure of doing work with.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

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How I See Our Culture – David Ogilvy

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Jerry Holtaway

I worked for Ogilvy and Mather for nine years. At the beginning of my time there, it was still a privately-held company – though within a few years of my tenure, it was absorbed (and changed forever) by WPP.

I came across this piece written by David Ogilvy (whom I had the pleasure of meeting once), about the culture of Ogilvy back in the day.

I think all leaders should use it as a culture check-list for their companies.

From The Unpublished David Ogilvy.

Here is how I see our culture.

A NICE PLACE TO WORK

Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a happy experience. I put this first, believing that superior service to our clients and profits for our stockholders depend on it.

We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble – with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.

We help our people make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training – perhaps more than any of our competitors.

Our system of management is singularly democratic.

We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.

We abhor ruthlessness.

We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence. We like people with gentle manners.

We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company – and above all, honest with consumers.

We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.

We do not admire superficial people.

We despise office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses.

We discourage paper warfare.

The way up the ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind – religious prejudice, racial prejudice or sexual prejudice. We detest nepotism and every other form of favoritism.

In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.

Like all companies with a strong culture, we have our heroes– the Old Guard who have woven our culture. By no means have all of them been members of top management.

Wise words, from a wise man. Creating meaningful workplaces and a strong culture is not an old concept, but it is getting harder and harder to achieve.

To read more about how Emotive Brand thinks about building more meaningful workplaces, download our paper below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

Business Success is All About Building a Meaningful Workplace Culture

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Jerry Holtaway

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” – Albert Einstein

A business’ fate is determined in large part by its culture. A business culture is the reality created by how people act, react, and interact with each other based on their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.

The most damaging business cultures are those in which aggression, neglect, and punishment leave employees feeling they have no reason to commit their energies and skills, share their ideas, or help the company advance.

Wanted: A culture that unites and connects employees

A culture built principally around rewards for individual or group performance pits individuals and teams against each other, often in ways that create class systems, in-fighting, and divisive loyalties. The winners in such cultures find meaning in their rewards. The rest are left wondering what the point is for them and their employer.

A passive, benign, and inert business culture leaves the business subject to the aggregate confusion that results when each individual employee’s quirks, tendencies, and potentially questionable morality and ethics are accommodated.

The most beneficial business cultures are those that unite employees around an ambition, make them feel emotionally connected, and surround them with people who share their ambition, feelings, and behavior.

4 factors in transforming your culture

By consistently and intentionally conveying a meaningful ambition and evoking a set of unique and positive emotions, businesses can transform the meaningful outcome of every aspect of the work experience:

The physical environment – the aesthetics and functionality of the workplace;
The policies and procedures – the actual rules of the company as well as the way in which employees experience them;
The attitudes and behavior of fellow employees – the feelings evoked when dealing with superiors, peers, and reports;
The moment of contact – the nature of company/employee and employee/outside world interactions.

A Meaningful Workplace culture is based on the way employees experience these factors – what meaning is conveyed and how they are left feeling.

This excerpt is the sixth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

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Tag: Culture