Creating a Great Place to Work

It’s become almost an industry itself – judging organizational culture and creating lists of great places to work. The most recent I’ve read is from Glassdoor, as reported in FAST Company Online this morning. The findings and lists are worth reading, but perhaps not surprisingly, I want to talk about how we as leaders can impact these ratings.

So let’s do exactly that.

Quoting from the article, here are the top six themes, Glassdoor found from the top rated companies:

• Mission: a sense of purpose in coming into work
• Collegiality: working with awesome people
• Challenging work: being stimulated by the work to be done
• Meaningful advancement: the promise of growth
• Confidence in senior leaders: a sense of trust–and transparency–with management
• Perks: good pay, free food, a beer cart or two.

Read this list with your leadership hat on and you will see that if you are a senior leader, you have impact on all six. More importantly though is the message if you are leaders from somewhere else. Whether you lead from the shop floor, the phone room, or any middle to upper middle level, you can directly impact the first four, and influence the fifth one, from your perspective as a manager, too.

Read this list as an employee, and my guess is that is your list, too – attributes describing where you want to work.

So your job as a leader, if you want to create a great place to work (and why wouldn’t you?), is to focus on:

• Giving people (and helping them see) the purpose in working in your organization. Help people see the biggest and most powerful picture for their work.
• Selecting and cultivating a great team of people that others want to work with.
• Creating challenging and stimulating work for all team members
• Leading for growth, so there will be opportunities for people to grow their roles and contributions moving forward.
• Being trustworthy and offering greater trust to your team members.

I know that this list isn’t simple, yet all of these are things that you can do regardless of your organizational level. To not focus on these is to deny your ability to make the difference you were hired to make.

My message?

As a leader, stop wishing you could have a better workplace. Start creating it today. The steps are clear and in front of you, and they are yours for the taking.

Greater results, higher productivity, less turnover, more job satisfaction, and more fun await.