The top performing American companies are showing every other company how it's done, but not all of them are listening. A company's culture is the Undiscovered Country for many CEOs, who are invariably trying to squeeze more productivity out of their work force but without doing anything radically different than before.

This, of course, is a short cut to disaster, since the latest Gallup results show that more than 70% of American workers are disengaged from their work. Therefore, those CEOs who try the same old thing over and over again are depending on employees who largely don't care about their job and are looking for a new place to work to increase their productivity with no additional motivation. And those disengaged employees are often ruining the workplace environment for the employees who do care.

Retention problems, anyone?

Forbes Magazine last year published an article on the Four Ingredients for a Winning Company Culture, the four being 1- Put Core Values First ( I would add "and live them daily."), 2 -  Empower your employees to manage their schedules, 3 - Give them free lunches, and 4 - Don’t hire employees — look for owners.

The first two points are discussed more frequently than the last two, but the last two offer an interesting chance to find a PLOT where innovative thinking takes the place of worn-out business practices. Let's start with Number Three.

Where is the Profit Left On the Table in a free lunch?  Forbes says in their ensuing comments that

A lot of readers will probably see this and think, “I can’t afford to do this.” But let’s do the math:
20 days a month x $12/day= $240/month per employee.
Now, do the math on replacing an employee who is poached by another company.  I know it costs me way more than $10,000 to replace, rehire, find and onboard alone — not to mention the lost hours of productivity when people leave and buy their own lunch.

 
Replacing a full-time employee can be a crippling and unnecessary loss of profit, as Forbes makes plain. So what if you could find another program that an employee could use that would cost substantially less than the free lunch? If we do the math on the PLOT that Forbes mentions, even if they do not call it that, it has an ROI over 300%.  When the company is spending $240 per employee per month, this totals $2880 per year, but helps avoid spending $10,000 or more, hence an ROI of somewhere over 300%. So what would happen if you could achieve a similar results for a third of that $2880? Or a fourth, or fifth? This is the very essence of Profits Left on the Table. find new methods of attracting and retaining employees by monetizing programs that currently have NO ROI. As the Triangle of Recovered Revenues says, it begins with "Innovate."

As for Forbes' Point Number 4, Look For Owners, look for people who are personally invested in the company. In other words, look for people who "Engage." Following the 80/20 Rule, hiring somebody just because you need a body has an 80% or greater failure rate. Instead, have a culture that attracts the best, have a compensation package that is innovative and attractive. Finding the most talented people to fill your company inevitably leads to the third step in the Triangle: Produce. A talented, engaged work force leads to much higher productivity and, therefore, Profits that had previously been Left On the Table.



Forbes' Path to a Winning Company Culture