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For the good of your business, invest in your culture

Read on for four reasons culture is critical for today's companies, with advice from Laszlo Bock.

2 min read

Management

For the good of your business, invest in your culture

Alex Kotliarskyi/Unsplash

When Laszlo Bock talks about work culture, people listen. We all need to listen.

Bock is Google’s former senior vice president of people operations and is co-founder and CEO at Humu.

His recent LinkedIn post describes the direct impact your work culture has on your business. “Failures of culture—from Wells Fargo to Volkswagen—have been the single biggest destroyers of value in the last five years,” he writes.

I’d add companies like Uber and Google to the list of companies whose work cultures have destroyed value in the last two years.

The good news is that business leaders are aware of the positive impact that a healthy work culture has on my big three: results and profits, employee engagement and customer service.

Deloitte’s 2016 Global Human Capital Trends report found that 87% of business leaders believe that the quality of their work culture is important. Only 28% of business leaders surveyed believe that they understand their current culture well. A paltry 19% of these executives believe they have the “right” culture (!).

Bock describes three reasons why culture is so critically important today. These converging realities — transparency, the data of culture’s impact on business success and advances in people technology — allow us all to understand exactly how respectful and inspiring work cultures are in organizations around the globe.

In today’s three-minute video episode just for SmartBrief readers, I add a fourth reason — and explain why these four issues require immediate attention in every business.

Subscribe to my free twice-a-month newsletter. Subscribers enjoy free resources including a preview of my Amazon best-seller, “The Culture Engine,” which helps team and company leaders create a powerful, purposeful, positive, productive work environment.

And, subscribe to my YouTube channel, where you’ll find more short, crisp, and clear episodes of my “Culture Leadership Charge” video series.

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