Key #1: Build a Better Culture

If you want to retain those employees in whom you have invested time, capital, and relationships, you must first improve your entire corporate culture. What does that mean? It could mean:

• looking at your corporate hierarchy structure. Is it vertical or horizontal? Vertical structures tend to result in decreased communication (due to increased layers of middle management), poor employee empowerment (due to the ubiquitous need for approval from higher-ups) and general lack of day-to-day knowledge by higher-ups of corporate functioning (which results from the old "management by walking around" phenomenon). Horizontal structures tend to do the opposite, and decrease friction and power struggles between management and employees due to increased visibility and accountability.
• improving employee input and communication mechanisms. Do your employees have an avenue for direct communication with their management and leadership? Where do they go with legitimate concerns or innovative ideas?
• analyzing middle management's tendencies toward micro-managing. If you want employees that feel respected and valued, middle management needs to understand that micro-managing results in the opposite effect.
• remember that all investments that improve the quality of life for your employees are surefire winning investments. Work supports life, not vice versa. Employees that lead balanced, healthy lives come to work happier and are more productive.
• forget about downsizing as a profit management tactic. First off, downsizing sends a direct message to ALL employees (not just the ones that are let go) that they are expendable commodities. Second, downsizing has never had any positive effect on company morale. Eliminating jobs rather than eliminating problems in capital management processes is plain dumb.

Key #2: Empower Your Employees

Empowerment is an oft-discussed but seldom understood concept. Management consultants, motivational speakers and the like discuss empowerment in motivational terms. However, all long-term motivation is intrinsic anyway, so the notion of empowerment as a motivational tool is nonsensical. Empowerment can be more accurately defined as the ability of employees to make decisions that affect the outcomes of their jobs. What kind of decisions are we talking about?

• decisions about hiring practices
• decisions about how to deal with customer service issues
• decisions about local management practices
• decisions on how to manage overtime
• decisions about physical working conditions

And so on. Empowered employees make quicker decisions, are more confident in their abilities to get the job done right, increase customer satisfaction, and decrease corporate costs associated with remediation work (work that has to be duplicated due to employee mistakes, which results from lack of accountability).

Empowered employees engage in innovation rather than problem-solving. Innovation involves a continuous improvement in the status-quo, whereas problem-solving always results from failure. Someone makes a mistake, causing a decrease in the status-quo, and time and energy is spent fixing the problem, which results in the previous level of production. Empowered employees innovate due to increased freedom, satisfaction, and personal accountability. To this end, it is crucial that your company invest in advanced personal development opportunities for your employees rather than boring, remedial training. The former promotes innovation, the latter problem-solving.

The biggest benefit to empowering your employees is the loyalty it generates. Human tendency is to value those who value our contributions, and empowered employees certainly feel valued and respected by their employer.

Key #3: Improve Your Relationship Skills

The bottom line in any corporate culture is that relationships make or break a company. Relationship skills are an overlooked aspect of corporate culture. With respect to relationships and relationship skills, does your company:

• have numerous exemplars among its ranks that display your ideal "corporate" personality traits (genuineness, empathy, sense of humor, family values, etc)
• value people more than outcomes?
• actively invest in advanced development opportunities for your employees? (seminars on relationship building, etc)
• have chief executives of all kinds that are readily accessible and easily approached?
• listen more than it talks? (most people believe communication is about improvements in one area and not the other, which is crazy)
• listen and incorporate customer and client feedback readily?

The better the relationship skills among your employees and management, the better your corporate culture. In any area of corporate productivity, an improvement in relationship skills and process will readily increase profitability.