“Leading change” is all well and good, but . . . the devil’s in the details.
If you’re serious about creating an incredible culture, you can’t stop at the high-level ideas; you have to delve into the tools and tactics that support your aim. Fortunately, our contributors are as prolific of writers about the “how” as they are about the “why.”
Like the previous section, most of the advice in this one is free or nearly free to put into practice. In fact, as the article on compensation points out, there’s only a correlation between salary and employee satisfaction up to a point. After that, money’s not much of a motivating factor.
Another thing that some of our contributors also seem to despise: ping pong tables. Not that they’re necessarily against them, but they hate when people use them in place of meaningful efforts. (Really hate them. As in, we had to edit out a lot of “ping pong tables” throughout this book.)
Instead, the tools and tactics outlined here are more along the lines of “praise someone publicly” or “allow anonymous feedback.” If those seem simplistic, perhaps that’s the point: entrepreneurial culture as a whole has gotten so focused on the perks of a great workplace—and especially in startup culture—that it’s neglected attending to the basics, like the trinity of respect, credibility, and fairness the CEO of Great Place to Work Michael Bush spoke about.
Additionally, not all businesses can readily afford the “paid” vacations or other such real costs earlier contributors spoke about. Plenty of small business owners sweat about meeting payroll on Friday, never mind taking the entire company on a retreat.
That’s one of the reasons why the lion’s share of this section focuses on low- to no-cost ways to shape your culture. They’re things virtually every entrepreneur can do at every size and in every industry.
They’ve made it easy. It’s up to you to do the hard part of putting it to work.