Management Consulting: Building a community that will nurture and grow your company's culture

According to the Harvard Business Review, employees who are happy are 53 percent more likely to stay with a company than individuals who are unhappy.

As management, building a strong community within your business can have very powerful rewards. Not only can it make your employees happier, but it can also give them the desire to work together more effectively. Community members work differently together. They help clean up a mess, even if they didn’t make it. They have an emotional commitment that no person is left behind. They are a team working towards the good of the company.

And ultimately will improve productivity and drive profitability and asset value.

But how do you build a community within your business? What does it take?

After the vision and mission statements are written and the values and market position have been identified, many organizations believe that these components will simply integrate themselves into the business. They may do a few simple tasks such as placing posters on the wall, or hand out pledge cards around the office. But then its back to business, assuming no further steps need to be taken.

But growing a community takes a whole lot more. In many ways a team community within your business is like that of a garden. The culture needs a place to live and grow.

The first step is deciding what you are going to plant. Here is where you define your culture, and plan for how your community will look in the future. Next, you must go out and buy the plants and tools. This is the investment process; finding the right people and helping them learn about your business and your philosophies.

At this point it’s important to grow your investment in a healthy community. Just like a garden needs water and nutrients to grow, a community needs the same healthy environment to thrive. A community will grow in any environment, both good and bad, so it’s important to put forth a positive and effective force for growth.

So, what is a community? A community has a variety of characteristics:

=> A community is a group of people committed to and working toward a common, higher purpose.
=> A community has common interests.
=> A community has agreed upon goals and is interdependent.
=> A community is interactive with one another.
=> A community is dependent upon each other. It is only as good as the sum of its parts.
=> A community is a group of people who have a common culture.
=> A community thrives in a positive environment that drives productivity.
=> A community focuses on its strengths and leverages those strengths to accomplish its mission.

Above all, a community is deeply connected. When one person in the community is in trouble, others in the community reach out, support and assist in the progress of the member in trouble.

And that can be a very powerful thing within your business.

Renie Cavallari is CEO of Aspire Marketing, a strategic marketing and global training and consulting company that provides innovative products and services designed to help companies optimize revenues and increase profitability. Aspire provides extraordinary results for clients through the implementation of high impact marketing, customer service, sales-oriented training and consulting solutions. Visit Aspire Marketing to sign up for her newsletter and have access to her white papers on business success.