ENTREPRENEUR VOICES SPOTLIGHT: INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL BUSH
CEO of Great Place to Work
Better Culture = Better Business
Michael Bush is the CEO of a great place to work.
Literally.
Each year, Fortune magazine partners with the research company Great Place to Work to create Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. Why? Because Great Place to Work has been collecting data and refining its analyses for over 20 years.
In those two decades, Great Place to Work has surveyed over 100 million employees on everything from career opportunities to discrimination to peer respect. If anyone knows what it takes to create a great company culture, these people do.
Entrepreneur: Michael, what does it take to create a great place to work?
Bush: For entrepreneurs, it really starts with the first hire an entrepreneur makes. You go from being an individual to a two-person organization. That’s when the values start to get created.
Entrepreneur: That’s a great point. When we say “culture,” we often think of a group of employees, but you’re saying it’s important to be aware of culture even when it’s just the entrepreneur and someone answering the phone, right?
Bush: That’s right. An entrepreneur already has a set of things that they believe in. There are certain things they are willing to do to grow their business and certain things they’re not willing to do. All of those things come from a certain set of beliefs or values that they have. Those form the initial values of the company.
So many entrepreneurs hire someone or find a partner and bring them on board thinking they’re magical—the yin to their yang. More often than not, those partnerships fall apart or those first hires quit or get fired. When you talk to these entrepreneurs and examine their experience from the perspective of values, you often see the partnership or employment fell apart because of a difference in values.
Entrepreneur: It sounds like you would argue that an entrepreneur knowing their values and looking for people who fit in with those—i.e., someone who is culturally aligned—is critical even before the very first person they bring on board.
Bush: Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who find the people who share their values and work with them to grow the company. They may not have defined their values at that point, but they innately know that this person does business the way they like to do business.
But if you want a high performance culture, you have to know what your values are. You have to write them down and share them with people. When you hire, it’s as important to hire based on those values as it is to hire for people’s skills and competence.
Entrepreneur: Hiring the right people is something that crops up again and again in discussions on culture. Obviously, Great Place to Work has the numbers to underscore the importance of that. But what about once you hire the right person? Does culture take care of itself?
Bush: Once you hire them, you have to build on those values. We’ve identified the three factors every great place to work shares: respect, credibility, and fairness.
People need to feel that they’re being respected by their coworkers and their managers. They need to believe that people are telling the truth and being transparent. They need to know that there are no favorites. When those things are true, people bring all of themselves to work. They bring their enthusiasm, their ideas, and their passion. That’s when you get innovation: when people can bring all that they are to work.
We have the evidence that shows that when people are in a high trust environment—that is, when there is respect, credibility, and fairness—there is a demonstrable difference in performance. Companies with a high sense of trust outperform their peers in virtually every hard metric you analyze.
However, our research shows us that in organizations, you often have pockets of people who feel that they are not respected like everyone else. They don’t feel that company leadership is telling them the truth. They do feel that some people are treated better than others. They don’t feel that they’re accepted in the workplace. That company may be a great place to work for some people, but not for all people. For whatever reason, the values of the company aren’t being experienced by these particular people.
That’s why it’s so important that leaders continually assess their culture. They need to ensure that everyone is experiencing a high-trust environment. Otherwise, they will never benefit from all that that employee has to offer.
Entrepreneur: What I love about your evidence is that you can quantify the idea that superior culture leads to superior profit—that doing the right thing for your people aligns with doing well financially. Culture is not a philanthropic exercise but a strategic advantage.
Bush: That’s right.
A few research and academic institutions have analyzed all the companies on the S&P 500 over the last 20 years. The companies on our list of the best places to work outperformed the S&P by a factor of three-to-one.
Entrepreneur: Wow! Three-to-one! That number tells the tale, doesn’t it?
Bush: There was a Fortune article in March of 2017 where the founder of the mutual fund Parnassus Endeavor, Jerry Dodson, talks about the millions of dollars his fund has made investing in the companies on our “100 Best Places to Work For” list with Fortune.
Entrepreneur: What’s your advice to entrepreneurs defining the values for their companies?
Bush: One of the things we see is when a business owner states that the company values are one thing, but when you talk to their employees, you find that the leaders don’t follow those values. The entrepreneur has defined aspirational values—something that they would like to be true or that sound good—but those stated values don’t reflect the entrepreneur’s real values.
At that point, you have a credibility issue. What you say and what you do are two different things. Without credibility, you don’t have a high-trust environment. Without that, you won’t have employees who bring all of themselves to work.
Take time to discover your values. Think about what’s important to you. Look at what other people are doing and how strongly you agree or disagree with it. Talk to your friends and family about what they see as important to you. Show them the values you’ve written and ask them if that’s been their experience with you.
Many entrepreneurs will meet someone and feel like they have a real connection with them. They might skip over sharing their values with that person because they feel that they know them so well. Maybe it’s even a long-time friend or family member. In those cases, there’s actually an even bigger need to write those values down. Personal relationships can sometimes blind you to the differences you have.
Be careful when you’re defining your values that you’re not trying to do a beautiful job to shape someone else’s image of you: “Look at my values! Don’t they look good? This means I’m a good person.”
Really, you want some values that are controversial. For the people who have a problem with those values, it will push them away; you can discover early on that they’re not a good fit for your company. But for the people who do share those values, it will make them want to be part of your company even more.
Entrepreneur: Michael, let’s fast forward a few years. Say an entrepreneur wasn’t intentional about their culture and things have gotten away from them. How do you fix a dysfunctional culture?
Bush: It happens quite frequently. Entrepreneurs are busy getting started, getting their cash flow worked out, hiring people, and securing office space. The idea of defining company culture may not even be on their list of the million things they have to do. So culture gets put to the side where it sits until it becomes a major issue that has to be addressed. Then, it becomes something that has to be “fixed.”
First, I’d advise the entrepreneur to make sure they were looking at this topic through the right lens: culture isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed but an opportunity they’re not taking advantage of. Without a high-trust culture, they’re wasting an enormous amount of talent, innovation, productivity, and leadership. They need to know how things stand by surveying their employees. They need the facts of what their people’s experiences at work are.
Once they know where they are, then they have to compare the entrepreneur’s honest values with the reality of their company. What aspects are out of alignment? Why don’t they have an environment of respect, credibility, and fairness?
What we often find are those pockets of unfairness where there’s one culture for the sales team but another culture for the back office or one culture for managers and another culture for the line-workers. That limits your growth and potential. When we work with companies to develop an action plan on these issues, I can tell you one of the recommendations that always make it into the top three: listening. Employees at all levels want to know that they have a voice that is heard.
That’s how you make a great place to work for all.