L. Bart Adams

Several months ago, we started using employee engagement surveys with our employees. It measures employee engagement along 12 different elements. It has been an eye-opening experience to review the results with our management team and learn where our employees believe we are coming up short. It has led to some great discussions and resolutions to improve our management practices.

In my opinion, employee engagement is a way to measure your company's culture. Culture is difficult to define objectively. Conversely, I believe we can each subjectively judge whether a company has a good culture.  We know it when we see it.  With employee engagement surveys, we can more easily quantify, on an ongoing basis, how our company culture is doing.

Our survey showed that as a management team, we struggle in the area of praise and recognition.  This result was surprising to me because this is something I focus on continually with the management team. However, as is often the case, this leadership practice is not cascading down through each department.

We read articles about praise and recognition and discussed these at length as a management team. We used it as a theme for our weekly meetings for a month.  Since there are 12 elements, we will continue this practice using one per month as a theme for our management meetings.

We plan to conduct this survey on a biannual basis to measure our engagement and, in turn, our culture. It will be interesting to see how if and how we improved.

Several months ago, I started writing a weekly newsletter for my employees. In it, I would include a brief statement from me about the status of the farm, upcoming events, and good news. Along with employee birthdays and work anniversaries, I had “Stories of Our Values.”  The stories include employees who exemplify our values. I felt like reinforcing the values with public praise by sharing these stories would also increase our teamwork and camaraderie. I was wrong. I found out that their coworkers were putting down many of the employees we recognized. Therefore, those recognized were left feeling worse and less valued as a team members. As soon as I heard about this, I removed this section of the newsletter.

It turns out in the Hispanic culture that they are good team players, so long as the team gets the praise and recognition. Recognition of individual members of the group appears to lead to jealousy and resentment. The unpraised employee seems to take it personally when someone else received recognition as not good enough. In their culture, this does not motivate them to do better, to receive praise themselves. It leads them to lash out at those receiving the recognition to bring them back down.

What have we learned from this experience? Each culture has its preferred form of praise and recognition. We have now changed our practice of public appreciation to praise in private by their supervisors and managers. I have also started recognizing teams in the weekly newsletters to reinforce our values. Ironically, one of our values is teamwork.

Our business culture comprises the many cultures of our employees. (In our case, about 70% Hispanic, 3% Cambodian, 27% Caucasian.) Each of these employees brings something different to their teams and, in turn, the farm as a whole. As leaders, it is our responsibility to learn how our values, vision, and purpose can be communicated and executed within each culture to form the business culture we are seeking.

Earlier this year, I participated in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business program. It was a 20-week course, where I spent about one day per week in a workshop setting with other business owners. We learned about how to operate our businesses better and develop a growth plan. We were assigned to present a “Cultural Artifact” from our company in one of the sessions. A picture, story, or another item that defined or played a role in our culture.

There were a lot of exciting and meaningful artifacts presented, from pizza dough balls to specialized hand tools. For my business, I chose a $10 gift card for our company store.

How has a gift card become part of our culture? Well, it’s been a tool to reinforce our values. Each week in our team meeting, I ask my managers for stories of our values, which are:

• “Above and Beyond” – Dedicated and hard-working
• “Continuous Improvement” – Making it better
• “Teamwork” – Working together

If the managers share a story of an employee or employees who have exemplified one of the values, I give them a gift card to give to that employee.  Some examples are an employee who comes in on their day off to cover for another employee who called in sick or an employee who stays late to clean up and organize their work area or equipment. We also use this card for employee birthdays, or when we see other positive behaviors, we want to reinforce them.

As a team, we have been doing this practice for over two years.  It seems to be working well, but I have noticed that most of the stories my team shares only involve the “Above and Beyond” or “Continuous Improvement” values. I see teamwork throughout the farm daily. Why are we not rewarding these values? How are we missing these values in action?  A couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany. With the gift card, we have been rewarding individual efforts, not team efforts. Our managers are looking for persons who are excelling, not teams. So, I made a slight change to the weekly stories of our values. From now on, we will have a pizza party or buy donuts for examples of excellent teamwork. The managers are currently looking for team efforts along with individual accomplishments.

Maybe our new “Cultural Artifact” will be a slice of pizza or donut box. Time will tell.