 During my morning hike today, I was approached by a woman walking in the opposite direction. She animatedly gestured and warned me, “There is a dangerous snake in the drainage ditch up ahead of you. Be sure to go around the standing water and avoid the snake!” I walked on ahead and came to the standing water. As I walked around it, my eyes were glued to the drainage ditch, scanning the water. I walked to the end of the water but didn’t see a snake. Then, I noticed a slight movement to in my peripheral vision, making me snap my head toward the left. It was the snake, slithering up a tree that was no more than two feet from me! I jumped backwards with a startle. I was glad that the snake was minding its own business and no harm came to me.
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 Last week, I flew from Dallas/Fort Worth to St Louis for my nephew’s graduation. I left on Wednesday morning on American Airlines and used a mobile boarding pass. On Saturday, I presciently got to the airport three hours before my departure, hoping to go standby on an earlier flight. However, I couldn’t get a boarding pass; neither the app on my phone nor the kiosk at the airport recognized my record locator. I went to the ticket counter, and discovered that my ticket had been cancelled because American Airlines had no record of me getting on the plane in Dallas/Fort Worth, three days previous. Improving your company culture is simple but not easy. Culture transformation is a result of embedding your core values in everything you do. So, that’s the simple part – just tweaking what you already do. But sometimes the execution that gets tricky. It’s best to identify a handful of small, low-cost items that you can do quickly to improve your culture and get started. A journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step. And, remember that improving your culture improves employee retention, productivity and profitability. It’s an investment that pays big dividends.
Here are six surprisingly low-cost hacks that can help you kickstart a culture transformation.  Who hasn’t seen the video of a passenger being brutally dragged off an over-booked United Airlines flight on April 9th? The incident became a public relations disaster, and has adversely affected both United’s stock price and revenue and cost the CEO a promotion to chairman. In contrast, American Airlines had a similar customer service snafu last weekend regarding a mother of twin toddlers who tried to bring a stroller onto the airplane. The company moved swiftly to right the situation and avoid any negative consequences.
The contrasting tales show how culture affects the bottom line. The fact is, there will be customer service snafus, even in the best companies. Human beings work in companies, and human beings are imperfect and make mistakes from time to time. The proof of an organization’s culture is in the way it recovers from the service failure. In the customer service business, it’s called “service recovery.” How you recover from a service failure reflects the values and culture of the business.  Company culture is trending news in all industries. Recently, both Uber and United Airlines have been cited in the news as having culture problems. Why is culture so important? The bottom line is that culture affects a company’s bottom line!
Many studies have proven that a strong, positive company culture produces beneficial financial results. Even exacting academics who cannot bring themselves to proclaim culture as the “cure-all for what ails you” nevertheless admit that it matters. For every CFO who might be skeptical about the benefit of focusing on company culture, here are four impressive research studies that prove that culture affects your financial success: This helpful article in Prime Women, "The Secret to Having a Productive Day", written by me, and is adapted from a section of my book Your Company Culture Ecosystem: Growing a Vibrant Business. You can buy a copy on Amazon and Barnes & Noble-- Link for my book here.  Kristin Robertson, CEO of Brio Leadership, is dedicated to increasing the number of employees who are excited to go to work on Monday mornings. Services include executive coaching, leadership development classes and company culture consulting. Don’t forget to get a copy of Kristin Robertson’s new book, Your Company Culture Ecosystem, available on Amazon.
 Interesting article on company culture. Note especially the comments about the importance of leadership in building a culture! You can read the article here! Kristin Robertson, CEO of Brio Leadership, is dedicated to increasing the number of employees who are excited to go to work on Monday mornings. Services include executive coaching, leadership development classes and company culture consulting. Don’t forget to get a copy of Kristin Robertson’s new book, Your Company Culture Ecosystem, available on Amazon.
Building trust in their organizations is a concern for many leaders today. organizations Trust increases productivity, employee engagement and energy at work, while reducing burnout and stress. In this article the author lists nine steps to building trust that include recognizing excellent performance, providing reasonably challenging goals, offer autonomy in doing work and many more! Being an armchair scientist, I appreciated Zak's research on the link between the neurochemical ocytocin and trust. You can read the article here.  Kristin Robertson, CEO of Brio Leadership, is dedicated to increasing the number of employees who are excited to go to work on Monday mornings. Services include executive coaching, leadership development classes and company culture consulting. Don’t forget to get a copy of Kristin Robertson’s new book, Your Company Culture Ecosystem, available on Amazon.
 What office doesn’t have a kitchen in it? It’s inconceivable to design a modern office without a special room or corner that holds a refrigerator, microwave and coffee pot. And that is because of the universal human desire to share food in a communal setting. For millennia, human beings have gathered around food for nurturance, conversation and community. Sharing food at a common table is such a basic human need that scientists give it a fancy name: “commensality”. Commensality has been shown to bond people together and to create intimacy that can’t be achieved in any other way. The act of sharing food is so powerful that leaders should consider how to use food routines to embed and symbolize their corporate culture.
Usually when we think of building a positive company culture, we think of sharing noble ideas: values, vision, common purpose, goals, people policies and practices. These are intangible means to building a culture, appealing to team members’ hearts and mind. What about involving the physical body in symbols of a positive culture? If a leader really wants to embed a culture in team members, food is a vehicle to consider. Food ingested into the body becomes nutrition for cells, organs, bones and muscles. In addition, food is related in our experience to pleasure, nurturance, socialization and inclusion. In designing impactful routines that will bond a team and translate into symbols of the culture, food traditions are paramount.  Are you tired of being told to work smarter, when you don’t know how? “I can’t work any more hours than I am right now!” is a refrain I hear too often from my clients. It seems that everyone is trying to deal with increasing workloads, reduced staffing levels and a tight budget. I wanted to find out what the latest research is discovering about how to enhance productivity. Here are some surprisingly new – and a few not-so- new – ideas from recent research on productivity enhancers. In this article, I cite several authors, but my favorite book of late is Chris Bailey’s The Productivity Project. Over the course of a year, Bailey researched and personally experimented with many productivity systems and published the results in this book. It’s a fun and informative read.
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