The tricky business of creating a corporate culture that attracts the best and the brightest

Everyone dreams of working at Facebook or Google and enjoying their insane perks and hip culture.
 
 But what if you’re not a funky tech giant dishing out free gourmet food, massage credits and allowing employees to bring pets to work? And what if you won’t be providing free bikes on a work campus that feels like Disneyland’s Main Street, and free computer accessories from vending machines, any time soon?
 
 How do you compete? Could you still attract the best and the brightest to your company?

Companies today grapple with the challenges of employee engagement and retention.
 
 Skills shortage, millennials’ apparent aversion to work, changing attitudes to work and work-life integration, an ocean of sea-change stories de-popularising the high-flying corporate dream: today’s workplace landscape is very different from bygone eras when people simply took on a job and were loyal to one company for life, or focused on climbing the corporate ladder vertically to the top.
 
 How do you make workers happy and get them to stay:

• when the pay package alone is not a key attractant any more;
• when they clash with managers or colleagues,
• when they feel overworked and underappreciated,
• when they’re sick of the politics of getting ahead,
• when they feel there isn’t enough creative or intellectual stimulation, and
• when recruiters gleefully entice your best talent with alternatives via LinkedIn every few months?

Do Google and Facebook operate in a different universe? Don’t they have these problems too?
 
 This article is not meant to stress you out. Yes, there are huge problems related to work satisfaction in the world today. And no, you are not powerless to do something about it.
 
 Take heart — and take notes — from those who have successfully done something about it.
 
 For example, when technopreneur Brian Robertson realised that the structure of a traditional organisational hierarchy was preventing employees from maximising both business outcomes and work satisfaction, he created and evolved holacracy, a social technology that distributed autonomy and allowed order to emerge without managers, bureaucracy and “messy human dynamics.”
 
 Does it work?
 
 A year after online shoe and clothing store Zappos adopted holacracy, it projected a 77.9 percent increase in operating profit of $97 million for 2015. An enthusiastic early adopter of this workplace culture, CEO Tony Hsieh believes it is the system for obtaining the goal of what Reinventing Organisations author Frederic Laloux calls ‘teal’, an organisation characterised by “self-management, bringing one’s “whole” self to work, and having a purpose beyond making money.”
 
 This brave new organisational approach would be most interesting to companies that seriously consider changing their corporate culture to attract and retain millennials, who are already a significant segment of the workforce and will make up 75% of it within the next decade.
 
 Business.com suggests that the key to attracting and keeping millennials is to provide meaningful work, competitive compensation and benefits, high-achieving likeminded people to work with, engaging onboarding and ongoing training, and flexibility around the 9-to-5 day. Forbes eloquently suggests the powerful paradigm shift that “Millennials no longer work for you; they work with you.”
 
 However, the parable of the party cautions that such changes in organisational culture could backfire if not implemented in alignment with your true values — if you threw a party where you offered snacks, drinks, and games that everyone out there seems to want, instead of your favourite ones, you’ll soon find that your true friends would leave and you won’t even enjoy your own party because it does not “reflect your unique ethos and culture”.
 
 So the good news is, you don’t have to be Google or Facebook.
 
 Or Zappos, for that matter — they were already successful when they adopted holacracy, if being bought by Amazon for US$1.2 billion is any indication of value. In 2009.
 
 What you could absolutely do is a gem that is already mentioned above: self-management. Whether you are a human resource manager or an employee, realise that workplace satisfaction and corporate culture are not exclusively outside-in phenomenon.
 
 For every employee at Zappos who leaves because it is viewed as a social experiment that “created chaos and uncertainty”, there is another who enthuses, “My worst day at Zappos is still better than my best day anywhere else.”
 
 Evolving self-management increases inner clarity and control to make better choices that are right for you, and could strangely put you in a better position to influence the corporate culture of where you are, and to manage your workforce better to increase employee retention.
 
 In any case, getting stressed about employee retention is, to paraphrase a quotable quote, a misuse of imagination that may be preventing you from seeing the big picture of workplace success; I leave you with another quotable quote in this regard:
 
 “What happens if we train them and they leave?
 What happens if we don’t and they stay?”