Three Ways to Cultivate and Preserve Company Culture

The biggest threat to company culture is inconsistency. Healthy organizations grow through shared vision and clearly communicated goals and rewards. 

By Justin Wetherill

Company culture affects every element of business, whether directly or indirectly. Creating and maintaining a healthy culture should be listed among any company’s top priorities. However, in the franchising industry, challenges lie in effectively casting and implementing vision for a healthy workplace and customer experience across multiple markets. 

Franchising is fueled by growth, oftentimes at a rapid pace. In biology, culture is defined as maintaining conditions suitable for growth. This is a great reminder of why it is so necessary for leadership to grasp its importance in our industry. If you want to grow, pay attention to culture.

We all know the feeling of burnout, but as leaders, it’s our job to equip our employees to thrive in the office. Think about the health of your organization by gauging how excited your teams are to come into work. Excitement is not fueled by obligation, but rather by vision. 

In the world of franchising, culture barriers lie across state lines and in the reality that business stakes are in the hands of a variety of licensees and individual storeowners. The vision may be great in the home office and within corporate leadership, but how can a growing franchise enterprise keep culture healthy and vision alive amidst the challenge of launching in new markets and expansive hiring? 

In our field, our goal is to take a relatively traumatic experience and make it hassle-free, both for our teams and our customers. Going to work every day not with a title but as a solution to our customers’ problems allows us to operate from vision, rather than a bottom line. Since 2009, we’ve grown from one Central Florida location to now more than 140 stores across the United States and Canada. Our teams are healthy and our brand is growing.

Here are three ways to build and preserve company culture and consistent experiences across all franchises. 

Key No. 1: Communication cultivates a healthy culture

A healthy company culture catalyzes a chain reaction of healthy business transactions in stores and across markets, which translates into a higher-quality customer experience. Great customer relations allow for business to flourish, thus proving the bottom-line value of a healthy culture. If you can communicate expectations and track performance among your employees who interact at the consumer level, rewarding them along the way, your team will take individual ownership of the company-wide goals and deliver on them, believing their work matters. 

Start with clear expectations. The foundation of any healthy company culture is crystal clear expectations. If your team is unaware of performance standards, vision flounders. Your company becomes a fragile structure, with an inconsistent and misaligned foundation. 

As a leader, you can build a fun, timeless company culture by communicating vision from the start. Establish your hopes and dreams for your company and find ways to inspire similar dreams in every stakeholder at the highest and lowest levels. 

If you conduct a quick Internet search for Google’s company culture, you will find images of lounges, nap stations, gaming centers and more. You might be thinking, “How do they get work done in such a fun environment?” Google established clear performance expectations in advance, and now they embrace a culture of freedom and creativity, knowing that performance will not suffer at the expense of a healthy and fun workplace. 

However, it is important to remember that freedom is difficult to manage without methods of accountability. When expectations are clear and performance measures are in place, you empower employees to be in control of their performance, and save time and energy as a leader by not having to micromanage your teams. 

Ask yourself, have I set clear expectations and what metrics do I use to measure the engagement of my teams? 

Empower employees with incentives and rewards. If employees perform at or above communicated standards, they should be rewarded with opportunities for growth and advancement within the organization. This will look different depending on the industry you are a part of and an individual’s role within your company. However, the end goal is to have a company culture so empowering that it makes employees think, “This organization is great, and I would love to make it greater.” Teams that embody a vision beyond a bottom line are unique and powerful. 

How can you reward your employees? Is your team aware of incentives in place?

Key No. 2: Align your brand with the right franchisees

Growth does not have to affect culture. For a franchise company, growth can pose a threat to culture if corporate leadership does not take steps to preserve core values and vision across multiple markets. A corporate team may be too big to control the micro-level culture of each franchise team, but by aligning yourself with the right licensees and supporting them, you instill vision within them and create consistency across markets. Be selective in the franchising licensee process and choose people who not only have resources, but also share common vision and values. This will preserve culture as markets grow and the brand spreads. 

Cultivate fun company culture and maintain awareness of company goals through face-to-face gatherings for employees, such as an annual company retreat or summit. These events are great opportunities for a group of people with a shared passion to rally around a common goal and inspire one another. This is also a good time for feedback to corporate leadership and franchise level collaboration. 

How are you creating opportunities for your teams to spend time together?

Key No. 3 Sharing success

Everyone must commit to success. When troubles come, a shared vision and healthy culture will dictate how resilient the team will be. It all goes back to having a shared goal: if each party commits to success, takes responsibility for himself and uses the tools at his disposal, failure is an opportunity to overcome together. 

If one licensee is underperforming, most often responsibility is shared between corporate leadership and the licensee. When both parties commit to success in times of hardship, culture is inspired through that support. The effect goes beyond the leadership-licensee relationship and into the individual team level. 

Are you supporting your teams on an individual level?

Grow together

The biggest threat to company culture is inconsistency. A healthy culture will never thrive with inconsistent management, goals and performance tracking. Know your people, invest in them and commit to their success. The bottom line can only take organizations so far in the growth process. Healthy organizations grow through shared vision and clearly communicated goals and rewards. Are you inspiring your teams to grow with you?

Justin Wetherill is founder of uBreakiFix. Find him at fransocial.franchise.org.