Collaborative Solutions was recently named among the top 20 2016 Best-of-the-Best professional service organizations by SPI research, and it got me thinking about what’s led us to this point. A strong industry, smart leadership, and efficient systems have played a role, but the biggest factor was the company culture.
Below are the top five tips that might help your company build an unbeatable culture.
- Encourage Collaboration
Collaboration is absolutely critical in maintaining corporate culture. Helping one another is extremely important, whether it’s with a customer challenge, a technical question or even something simple like trouble with a timesheet.
Foster collaboration from the start. Assign new employees a mentor on day one and teach them to rely on their fellow employees for support and advice. In order to further encourage collaboration, offer tools that make it simple like SalesForce Chatter, SharePoint and Skype, which all foster knowledge transfer and group learning.
- Check your Ego at the Door
In a fast-paced cloud consulting environment, innovation is key. How does your organization innovate? From the top down or the bottom up? The best ideas come from employees who are on the ground with customers every day. Encourage their ideas and innovation with an employee bonus structure.
With an open-door policy at the leadership level, employees know their ideas will be heard and that they can count on the support and resources they need to fully develop new ideas and innovations.
- Ask for Referrals
One of the single best ways to maintain an awesome company culture is to grow based on referrals. New hires who become stars are often those who come with “one degree” of separation.
How can you build a team of top talent? Put programs in place to encourage referrals. Collaborative Solutions offers a referral reward program to promote referrals, and we put “culture fit” high on the list of criteria we screen for during our interview process.
- Focus on Excellent Customer Outcomes
Talented consultants want to work for a proven winner. Focusing on excellent outcomes, no matter your business, will elevate your company and lead the best and brightest to join your team.
- Offer Efficient Onboarding and Invest in Learning and Development
The happiest employees are those who come up to speed quickly and are immediately able to contribute to customer success. Your onboarding process should support this. When new employees come on board, they should quickly move through an effective onboarding process to get access to the tools and information they need to be successful.
After onboarding, keeping employees happy long-term requires continuous learning and development to help your team grow into their roles and advance in their careers. Your company will want to invest considerably in a learning and development program to ensure that you continuously build your team’s knowledge and abilities through targeted training and professional development.
Bob Maller is president and chief culture officer at Collaborative Solutions, a leading global finance and HR transformation consultancy that leverages world-class cloud solutions to help deliver successful outcomes for its customers. For more information, visit www.collaborativesolutions.com.
