Culture Club

Is your concern over hip, tech culture hiding incompetence in your sales force?

Google ruined it for everyone. As Silicon Valley spilt forth in technological warfare, giants emerged. Companies like Google began receiving heightened attention. What is their secret? How do they do it? As it turns out, they have napping pods. You can literally take a nap at work. Or, you can get lunch from the onsite staff of gourmet chefs. If naps and fine foods are below you, then maybe you can spend some extra time in their “think tanks” over lunch to get some real highfalutin innovating done. Google, whether it is intentional or not, has become the modern employee’s standard of culture.

“Culture” has become a buzz word in the modern working world. So much so that it is already becoming a cliché of itself. Whether you’re a tech start-up, first time entrepreneur or the high level manager of a supercharged corporate sales organization, you eventually have to identify what kind of culture you will have for your organization. This realization typically comes through a series of unavoidable failures or waves of undefined turnover.

Have you ever stopped and wondered why the emphasis on culture is so heavy? Burdensome, even? At surface glance, culture is just good or just okay. It’s just work, right? There was a time when the answer was yes.

Culture is defined by a broad array of factors that are rapidly changing. At one point it meant paying your employees fairly for their work or not putting your workers in harm’s way. Good culture could have been replacing the asbestos in your walls, or not smashing Jim the accountant in the face with a stapler for fudging the ledger, thus neutering him in front of his peers. At some point, culture crossed the line of creating balance and equality and turned into entitlement and celebrated incompetence. Sadly, it’s now out of the employer’s hands.

Employees’ expectations around culture are being shaped way before they enter the workplace or even college. Bloomberg estimates that 53% of employers feel that their new hires have a strong sense of entitlement and lack professionalism and work ethic (http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/what-do-u-s-college-graduates-lack-professionalism.html). The fast paced growth of technological influence that exists before a potential employee hits the classroom is equaled in the workplace. The impact is only made worse by economic compensation models that leave culture as the defining factor in whether you are managing a “great place to work”. Work loads are fast paced, schizophrenic and hands off (more mentally taxing than anything). Yet the pay scales are relatively low in burgeoning, sales based technology companies.

The pressure is on both sides. Technology puts the world at people’s fingertips, giving them the expectation of immediate gratification in the classroom, yet compensation models are mediocre. What does this produce? A class of entitled, self-(de)motivated college graduates who expect a “cool” place to work in exchange for below industry standard pay.

You love it though. You love it and you don’t even know it. You know why you love it? You spend so much of your time getting the right energy drinks in the vending machines, ordering the fancy low gravity IKEA chairs for the “think tank” and keeping the dress code as non-utilitarian as possible. Why? Because it’s what is expected. And while you nurture that expectation, you are blinded by what the real problem is. Blatant incompetence and subpar work ethic of a generation of know-it-alls whose attention can’t be kept for more than a handful of quick seconds.

Where do you draw the line? This isn’t to say you can’t have unique, youthful and quirky culture. When you create collaboration between the bright young minds of your organization, great innovation can be achieved. Also, there is no hard proof that wearing a suit everyday breeds higher levels of productivity. There is something to be said for work ethic. When you refine your culture, refine it with hard nosed, focused contributors in mind. Create an environment that writhes in innovation but doesn’t allow your mediocre, less competent team members hide behind the curtain of culture. Tailoring your culture to qualified, top performers sets the standard for others to follow.

And then maybe, just maybe, you can stock your break room with the proper, hippest energy drinks.