视频：为什么公司文化是喂养和谷物业务成功的关键

source: Elise Schafer

Every feed and grain company has a文化，whether intentional or not. Those with poor company culture may experience high employee turnover, high rates ofsafety incidentsor low customer satisfaction.

Addressing a company's culture can help improve those negative outcomes, but how do leaders turn their culture around or establish a new one? Erin Mies, co-founder ofPeople Spark Consulting, shares helpful tips on building positive company culture in this饲料和谷物聊天, and reveals that frontline supervisors play a big role in how individuals view their company culture.

Transcription of Feed & Grain Chat withErin Mies, co-founder of People Spark Consulting。

Elise Schafer, editor, Feed & Grain:Welcome to饲料和谷物聊天。I'm your host Elise Schafer, editor ofFeed & Grainmagazine.

这个版本的饲料和谷物聊天is brought to you by WATT Global media and Feedandgrain.com. Feedandgrain.com is your source for the latest news, product and equipment information for the grain handling and feed manufacturing industries.

Today I'm joined on Zoom by Erin Mies, co-founder of People Spark Consulting, a human resources consulting company that works with food and agricultural companies. Erin has 15 years of experience coaching and consulting leaders and specializes in talent acquisition and international HR. Thank you for joining me today, Erin!

Erin Mies, co-founder, People Spark Consulting:Pleasure to be here, Elise, thank you.

Schafer:Great. Now, today we're going to talk about company culture, and I think this is a concept that some people struggle with. Can you just define culture for anyone who doesn't know if they have a company culture or what it is?

米斯：当然。当我们看着它时，每个组织都有一个文化，无论您是故意想要的，还是是一个刚刚发生的组织，您都有一个文化，这确实是一种高潮。

我看的一个结果。Sometimes when it feels like it's something where it's difficult to impact or influence, when I step back and think about it as the outcome of behaviors — the outcome of experiences and situations — that helps put it more within the scope of something that I can actually impact and do something about.

Schafer:那么，对于没有强大公司文化的组织，有哪些风险或症状是什么？

米斯：当然。当我想到的组织可能没有强大的公司文化时，当我们与这些组织中的领导人交谈时，他们真的很沮丧。他们的组织中正在发生的挑剔的事情感到沮丧，他们对员工不在乎感到沮丧。他们感到沮丧，因为他们不能向人们提供反馈，他们无法保留他们，而且很多时候，组织内部正在发生的事情都更加表面上。当我们看文化时，我们喜欢将其分解为您组织中预期的行为。

您想看到什么发生，今天发生了什么？因为这是我们总体上影响文化的最佳方法，就是通过我们想要的东西清楚而有意，然后理解我们从哪里开始。

One thing, I think a fascinating study that's out there demonstrates that culture — the difference between a lousy culture and one that is a really strong culture — actually vary more within an organization, but are different maybe beyond, because of each individual team leader. And they're more different within an organization than they are from my organization to the next one.

Schafer:因此，如果领导层认识到缺乏良好的公司文化，他们定义自己的第一步是什么？

米斯：The first thing that that we would recommend, and then certainly, that we start off with our clients specifically on, is defining what you want within your business. Sometimes you'll hear talking about values within that. We'd like to break it down even further than that into those individual behaviors — the things that you want to see happening.

So, in your business, if you want to see that leaders are giving clear feedback, everybody knows how their work is connected to the business outcome, that might be a behavior that you identify that's important to your culture. You may also identify that, you know what, if I see somebody doing something unsafe or if I see an unsafe situation, I want my employees to feel like they can go ahead and they can speak up safely, that they can do something about it and they can act on that. Those are the types of things that we would want those leaders to be defining upfront that can help shape what that culture is that they want within their organization.

Schafer:因此，您有点触及了它们，但是还有其他黄金规则或非商品需要成为每个公司文化的一部分吗？

米斯：Yeah. With leaders, considering this around what they want for their organization, I would say to make it sound like you. Bring it to your level around what you want to see. It doesn't have to be something kind of nice and fancy that can be painted up on your conference room wall. It can very easily be, you know what, in our [company] we want to just speak up — we want to be able to speak up and speak what's on our mind and on our heart and that is totally appropriate.

A lot of times we will see it with our clients that are in the ag space, a focus on service. Specifically, with our customers having strong relationships with our customers where we know everybody who's coming into our business by name. We know a little bit about their business overall, so that we can not just help them for today's order, but we can be thinking about what additionally they may need in the future.

Another one that we often see is something around integrity and safety, where I'm speaking up when I see something unsafe. Taking action if I see a need for caring for another one of my team members, or I see something potentially unsafe — a condition or an action — happening within the business.

Schafer:现在，一线主管在使员工使用新的公司文化中扮演什么角色？

米斯：是的，这也是我早些时候提到的，是一线主管对组织内部的文化产生重大影响。而且，如果您考虑每个主管与团队之间的这种关系，那么您的员工正在通过与该主管的这种关系体验文化，而不是与您所说的文化相比，您要说的是您的整个组织。

Frontline supervisors, if you have a business that has multiple locations, you may feel and see and experience that culture very differently between each one of those locations because of that relationship with the supervisor and employees. And so that's to be expected.

And the best thing that leaders of the organization can do for those leaders is to be really clear around what those behaviors look like for the culture that you're trying to build, so that your leaders see how it's interpreted and expected to be interpreted. They're not left to try to interpret what integrity means in their in their individual locations, which could look quite different.

Schafer:Now, in the feed and grain industry, mergers and acquisitions, and these turbulent transitional periods are very common. How does having a defined company culture help organizations navigate these changes?

米斯：I love this question. With understanding what your culture is — one, I think that this helps make the decision-making part of those mergers and acquisitions a lot clearer.

如果您正在寻找潜在的合并或收购目标，并且当您了解更多有关其业务的知识，并且他们的文化与您的文化有很大不同，那么至少它会给您足够的信息，如果我们知道我们知道，如果我们知道，如果我们知道现在，这将涉及更多的变更管理，因为我们的文化截然不同。

What I think it can also do, as well, is provide a helpful North Star, in a way, that these are the types of things that are really important for us to maintain through our larger organization if we're acquiring another business, or even if we're merging with another. Because if there's a merger, what you're also going to want to consider is how would we define what we want our culture to look like as a merged entity vs. how is it today.

对于那个合并的领导团队来说，这可能是一个非常有用的练习您的性能指标，如何确定人们是否扮演角色或角色正在改变。正如您提到的那样，这可能是一项非常非常动荡的活动中有用的北极星。

Schafer:Thank you, Erin, for your time today and your insights into company culture. If you'd like more information about what you learned today, visitPeoplesParkConsulting.com。That's all for this edition of饲料和谷物聊天。谢谢大家的观看，我们下次再见！

-Elise Schafer