4 Easy Habits to Improve Employee Performance and Culture with Veronica LaFemina
When I first started working with nonprofit organizations, I thought that the shared mission would instantly create a positive work environment. But it takes more than a shared purpose. There’s more that goes into creating a positive culture, and that’s why I invited Veronica LaFemina, non-profit executive strategic advisor, to talk about it on today’s episode of Learning for Good.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
02:50 Veronica’s career path that led her to become a strategic advisor to non-profit executives
6:40 Discover the crucial role organizational culture plays in the success of nonprofit initiatives and the performance of their staff
09:47 Understand the main elements of organizational culture and how defining an identity, clarity, process, and vibe fosters a healthy work culture
15:31 The one element of organizational culture that impacts employee performance the most
19:24 Develop four essential habits for improving culture: clarity, internal communication, training, and accountability
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The Importance of Organizational Culture in Non-profit Organizations
In the non-profit industry people tend to think that if they’re uniting around a mission and purpose, people will feel fulfilled and connected to that. But, in reality, you can have a really great mission in a toxic environment. It takes more than a shared purpose to have a positive work environment. So, in this blog post, we’ll talk about the importance of organizational culture in non-profit organizations.
In episode 27 of the Learning for Good Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with Veronica LaFemina, who shared what she’s learned about creating and maintaining a positive culture that improves employee performance in a non-profit organization.
Veronica is the founder and CEO of LaFemina & Co, a woman-owned consulting collective dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations, associations, and social good companies do good better.
She partners with organizations and their leaders to go beyond what looks good on paper to focus on what works well in real life.
If organizational culture is something you’ve been struggling with, you are in the right place.
This blog post will help you with actionable tips and expert knowledge to improve the culture at your organization for employee hiring, performance, and retention.
Why Should We Pay Attention to Organizational Culture?
“Culture matters because people want to work in an organization that they believe in.” - Veronica LaFemina (Click to tweet)
Culture is one of those really tough words out there. If you do a Google search on what parts of culture are really important, you will get so many answers back.
According to Veronica, we all know that culture matters, but translating it into why it matters and what kind of impact that can have in our organizations can feel overwhelming.
As she said in episode 27, “Culture matters because people want to work in an organization that they believe in.”
In the non-profit sector, organizational culture can have a huge impact for two key reasons.
1. Organizational culture is one of the most important strategic objectives for non-profit organizations
“In the non-profit sector, one of the biggest differentiators we have, and the biggest opportunity to attract new talent and to keep employees on, is by having cultures where people feel valued.
We can't always compete on salary. We can't always compete on benefits with the for-profit sector. But culture is one of the biggest differentiators that our sector's organizations can use to attract top-level talent as they are coming out of school or from the for-profit sector.”
2. Organizational culture can help set you apart from the crowd
“There are probably many organizations that do what you do. So how you do it matters – not just your processes and ways of doing it, but how it feels and the integrity and values you bring to the table.
Organizational culture is a way forward for our industry to really think about how we do what we do, and ensure that we are continuing to make it better – and not creating new problems because of challenging or toxic cultures.”
Core Components of Organizational Culture
Now, you might be wondering, how do you foster a positive culture in your organization? Where can we even start?
Veronica breaks organizational culture into four core components.
The first one is IDENTITY. Who are we and what do we believe in?
“Sometimes, organizations have a vision, mission, and values on paper, but they haven't spent the time to really define who they are, and if it’s still relevant to this day.” - Veronica LaFemina (Click to tweet)
Here are some important questions to ask:
Is this something that was defined by a board of directors 50 years ago, and that no longer applies today?
Is it still true to the modern version of this organization?
As Veronica says, “More organizations need to be spending time on that identity work on a regular basis. It is one of the places where there's the biggest gap in understanding between what leadership believes and what the rest of the organization or supporters believe.”
The next one is CLARITY. What do we focus on and why?
“Oftentimes, our mission statements are very broad and you can execute that work in any combination of ways.”
If an organization has evolved over the past several decades, you may have staff who still have clarity around whatever the strategy was 15 years ago, and aren't necessarily connected to what the leadership wants the strategy to be now.
Clear communication is key to ensure the message is not only being delivered to all levels of the organization but also understood.
Then, we move on to PROCESS. How do we do this?
During this episode of Learning for Good, Veronica brought up some key questions to define and refine your processes, such as:
What are the ways that we work with our constituents or stakeholders?
What kind of experience do we want to provide for people who are serving in the community?
How do we use technology?
How do we use our business model or operating systems to do the work that we do?
Then finally, there's the VIBE. How does it feel to work here?
How does it feel to be a client, stakeholder, or beneficiary?
“A lot of times vibe is an area that organizations shy away from because they either don't want to know what their staff think, or they may think that everybody feels the same.” - Veronica LaFemina
According to Veronica, when we are promoting diverse environments, where we embrace people's differing perspectives, differing lived experiences, and differing desires for what culture looks like at work, we have to be asking those questions to get a clearer perspective.
Often leadership has a different perspective on what the vibe is to the rest of the staff and different departments may have entirely different perspectives altogether.
Combining those factors is very important.
It is also important to differentiate between what is SPOKEN and UNSPOKEN.
This can happen when you say your organization’s values include integrity, teamwork, and flexibility but in reality, there’s this unspoken culture that you have to stay until after the boss leaves, or being committed looks like answering your email at crazy hours.
“That is where we start to see big gaps in what our intended culture is and what we're reinforcing. That has a huge effect on employee performance and retention.” - Veronica LaFemina
So, after defining your organization’s culture and values, I’d look into the ways you’re reinforcing them as well.
The Element of Organizational Culture that Impacts Employee Performance the Most
It’s tricky to say which one element of organizational culture impacts employee performance the most, but I asked Veronica this question on the podcast.
According to Veronica’s experience, “when there is a gap in understanding or a gap between the spoken and unspoken in any of the core components of culture, that has the potential to greatly affect performance.” (Click to tweet)
Here’s an example with identity, clarity, and process:
“If we aren't clear on the organization's identity it becomes very difficult to create clarity around what good and effective performance looks like. Performance measurement turns into a box checking task, or “who's the boss' favorite” instead of really reflecting what we want the culture of the organization to be.”
This is an area where accountability comes up a lot.
“Accountability is one of the hardest things to get right. Often, we get excited about wanting to put some kind of new performance management system in place – whether that's at the individual level, the team level, or the organization level – and we either lose our stamina or get lost in the details.”
We loved the idea, but then when we get into the practical reality, it feels so difficult to do that measurement in a way that reflects whether or not something is good and rewards the behaviors we want to reward.
We need to examine what our accountability systems will be, stick with them, and be willing to adjust them if we realize we're incentivizing bad behavior.
This is an area where it can be really tricky. It can disincentivize other staff from wanting to perform well because they are seeing that unspoken rules or bad behavior are being rewarded over doing good work.
During our conversation, Veronica was kind enough to share four easy habits you can start implementing today to improve employee performance and overall organizational culture.
4 Easy Habits to Improve Employee Performance and Organizational Culture
1. Clarity
“Spend the time to gain and give clarity at all levels of your organization. At the executive team or the CEO level, get very clear on what the change is, what the strategy is, and what that means for the organization.
Dedicate time on a weekly or monthly basis to ensuring that the vision you all have is in alignment with one another and that you can easily spread that message. If you, at the executive team level, are in a different understanding of what the go forward looks like, it's very unlikely the rest of the organization is going to be aligned.
If you're a team leader, continue to be clear with your team on what their purpose is. Be clear on your expectations and make sure that they’re not just communicated but they’re understood.”
2. Internal Communications
“Investing in internal communications is essential. If you are an organization that already has an internal communications capacity, or has been thinking about starting one, it's not just about adding staff. It needs to be somebody's job to care about the fact that everyone on the team knows what's up. But also create the rhythms and behaviors around what internal communications look like.
It's not just shouting out announcements, it's about creating real feedback opportunities, ensuring that different parts of the organization are hearing from each other, and creating a culture where communicating well is just as important as ticking the box.”
3. Training Managers
Don’t forget to help your managers be the leaders you need them to be.
“That can look like working with your training team to ensure that managers are getting trained on how to communicate and how to ask their team good questions. Getting them engaged and involved. We don't spend enough time ensuring that managers can really step up and be the leaders we need, and we don't give them the correct tools either.
That then becomes a reinforcement for the fact that we actually aren't invested in the culture because we haven't spent the time with all of these supervisors to help them really scale the messages and be ambassadors of culture to the rest of the organization.”
4. Personal Accountability
“This one starts as an everyday habit and then can become (and should become) an organizational habit over time.
As leaders, we may sometimes say, we'll get to that later. And then a staff person reminds us four months later that we never got back to them on that question, or that we have been skipping some projects that we said were important.
Whatever the case may be, we have to get better at what's called our say-do ratios.
By practicing personal accountability, we make it okay for the team to clearly communicate to us what they can do and when they can get it done by and then we can hold them accountable for that.
If we aren't taking action, our staff aren’t incentivized to deliver on what they said they were going to because we have shown them that we don’t care enough to do it ourselves.
No matter what part of the organization you are in, start observing what you say you're going to do, and then when you did it, and if you did it at all. That kind of behavior can then help us build better accountability systems.”
You want the organizational culture to be the thing that makes you stand out when you're recruiting and onboarding staff, but also in the effort to retain staff.
We know that non-profits have a great mission. You have a higher purpose that people are connecting to and feeling great about. But the culture is how people are going to feel while they're doing that work.
To hear the full conversation, tune into Episode 27 of the Learning For Good Podcast.