Certain organizations understand that it is critical to transform themselves by only accepting great performance. There are four common characteristics that are shared by world class organizations in any industry. they are:
1.) Talent Management/Employee Best Practices: These organizations understand that pay is only one of many motivational tactics they can use to gain their employees’ loyalty. They run reward and recognition programs, and provide formal coaching and mentoring. They treat their partners like they were part of their organization, offer conflict resolution solutions through HR, and exhibit best-of-breed recruiting, on-boarding, retention and compassionate outplacement programs. They implement 360-degree performance reviews, and leverage human capital audits to match each employee’s core competencies with their job responsibilities to unleash their people’s untapped talents.
2.) A Strong Moral Compass: These organizations foster civility throughout their culture, aggressively encourage team-building, leverage inclusion, and promote a sense of collective employee social conscious/corporate capitalism by endorsing volunteer work. They offer their employees flexible work schedules and job-sharing rotation options, provide great benefits, and conduct women/minority/disabled employee promotional initiatives. They recycle, practice green initiatives, and stay ahead of EEOC compliance regulations.
3) Focus on the Future: They aggressively build and defend their intellectual capital portfolio (patents, copyrights, and trademarks), and create employee idea generation programs to solicit all the very best ideas from their people. At their core they constantly seek out ways to transform themselves from good to great. They ensure the survival of their business through business continuity efforts and succession planning, constantly assess Merge & Acquisition strategies for opportunities.
Further, they develop a culture of adapting and excelling in times of constant change by leveraging a wealth of problem -solving strategies. They embrace change and encourage their people to take calculated risks and try to fail greatly. They focus on the trends and developments in their own industries as well as technological advancements and marketing, sales, operations, and customer care “best practices.”
4.) Communications: these organizations excel at communicating both internally and externally. their success in communicating all begins with their people, by holding regularly scheduled town hall meetings, management round tables, breakfast with the CEO, and management by walking around. they use intranets, webinars, daily/weekly emails, and fireside chats to keep all of their people knowledgeable. They assess performance constantly and not once a year.they embrace 360-degree reviews to have direct reports evaluate bosses and peers evaluate people they work with in other departments. These organizations are not afraid of sharing information with partners, vendors, suppliers, shareholders…even competitors! They communicate on a constant basis with their clients through client road shows, surveys, “mystery” shopping of their locations, customer care engagement etc.
the bottom line is, it is no longer a viable survival strategy to continue using command-control, top-down dictatorial run structures and accepting “just good enough” is no longer an option to ensure an organization’s future survival.