Episode 27: Julie Wheeler Breaks Down What Company Culture Really Means

It comes back to transparency and reinforcing what the organization's all about. No business owner ever starts a business for no reason and no purpose, with no values.

Yeah.

And the trick is to make sure that you're reinforcing those with the employees that they're aware of.

We're talking about one of the most misunderstood parts of running a business today.

Culture.

And if you think it's all about pizza parties or posters on the walls, you have it wrong. And I am so excited to talk to Julie Wheeler from Clarity hr, because we're going to talk about what culture really means for your business and why fractional HR can be so important. So, Julie, thank you for being on the podcast again today.

Thank you for inviting me.

So let's start by resetting the definition. When you say culture, what do you mean and what don't you mean?

All right, so Chrissy has been around me for a while. I am not a fluff machine. No fluff. So, no, I'm no fluff. I absolutely believe in rewarding employees, in rewarding great performance, rewarding great behavior. But I am not all about fun games and pizza parties and ping pong tables and all of those things that have the bad connotation regarding culture comes. Those things come to mind. Right. I think that. That. I think employees are smarter than that, and I think they resent employers that don't realize that they're smarter than that. So culture is all about creating an environment that employees want to come to where they feel safe, where they understand what's expected of them.

That's.

That's your culture. So what. What employers do in the furtherance of culture is mission critical.

Yeah.

You want employees to feel safe and you want them to want to come to work. I have had those jobs where on Sunday nights I'm literally sick because I do not want to grace the doors on Monday morning. And I think that most people have had that. And you don't ever want to be that organization that makes some people sick on Sunday night. You want to be the organization where people are anxious to get to work Monday and contribute and be a good part of the team, have good co workers, enjoy being present.

So, first, red flag. If you're dreading going to work as the business owner on Monday, chances are you have. You have a culture issue you need to think about.

Absolutely. And you have a staff that's feeling exactly the same way, whether you want to believe it or not. Oh.

So why does culture matter so much? You know, even or especially in smaller companies have 1550 employees. Why is culture so important?

Culture is tough in the smaller organizations. And it's tough because it's a very intimate space. When, when you have fewer employees, there's a greater expectation on the business owner by the employees. They want that business owner to be present. They want them to know who they are and what they do. They want to be appreciated, they want to be respected. And it's far more obvious in a small space if the owner is not present in the organization. If the owner comes in but hides in their corner office and never comes out, that is a non verbal way of communicating to the employees that they're not important to the owner. And in a small organization, it's a very bad message to send. Employees find that to be a very negative environment. They want to be able to come to the owner and say, look what I did. And they're so excited that they've produced a good result for a client or for the organization and they want to be recognized for that. They don't need a pizza, they don't need a spot bonus. They don't need an Amazon gift card. They need that owner to say, wow, that is phenomenal. Thank you so much for taking such good care of us. That's what they really want deep down inside. That's what they really want. Yeah.

Encouragement and shared value.

Absolutely.

So what are some early signs that culture might be going off the rails? Even if things, I mean, they look okay on paper, we haven't had a high. We don't have high turnover. It's not like people are leaving. So what's, what are some of those early warning signs?

Low morale on a consistent basis. Okay. So, you know, everybody has a bad day. I've come in and I've said good morning to my team and I've had somebody go morning. It's like, I think everybody has that these wants or we didn't get enough sleep last night. I don't take that personally, but if that happens on a regular basis, I have a problem. There's something going on that I need to recognize and talk to that employee about right away. What's going on? Is there something that you need that I'm not giving you? Are you hitting a wall? Is there something going on? And you know, they don't need to tell me their personal life story, but if there's something going on in your personal life that's affecting you, let me know that. Because otherwise I'm really super self conscious and I really think that I've done something to upset you. So you know, just let me know. I'm happy to let you work through a personal situation on your own if you don't need any support here. But, but I just want to make sure it's not something that I can correct for you. So even just letting employees know that you're there for them, to support them no matter what the situation, can make a huge difference. Again, making the employee feel safe is a huge, huge thing. A very good colleague of mine does many, many, many presentations on how important feeling safe in the workplace is. And he's looking at it from formerly dei, but an acceptance perspective. But that all goes together to build your culture. All of it just from basic support systems to resources to do your job. Nothing's more defeating to an employee than to say to them, I need you to produce 1500 widgets today. And the employees say, but the machine's only capable of producing 11 or 1000 widgets today. And the boss says, I don't care. I want you to produce 1500 widgets today. How defeating is that? Right? So you've got to provide the resources the employees need to get the outcomes that you're expecting. And if you're not doing that, you're setting them up for failure, and they know that. Again, never underestimate the intelligence of your employees, no matter the industry that you're in.

Well, and I sometimes see pushback when people talk about safety and feeling safe in the workplace and psychological safety. And I think there's this misconception that everybody thinks that it means that it has to be fluffy, it has to be all touchy feely as opposed to sometimes it's just having a direct conversation and being honest and transparent. When I hear safety, I hear transparency. Do you kind of see that sometimes with people where they're like, oh my gosh, why do they all have to feel safe? Like, it's just, they do. They have to, they have to feel like they can come to you with an issue. They need to feel like they can come to you when things are good and when things are a challenge. Is that kind of where we're going with this too?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Transparency is huge. And, and I think that a lot we, we've gotten a little bit sideways with pushing the, the DEI politically correct because people can be very afraid to say anything in the process.

Afraid to say the wrong thing. So that. I'm not going to say anything.

Exactly.

We have those business owners that we coach that are just, I don't even want to talk to my employees. I'm Afraid. I'm afraid of them.

Yes. I. I hear the same thing. And we have to be transparent. We absolutely have to be. And you know, it wouldn't be the first time that I've had a business owner come to me and say, we must hire someone of this race or we must hire someone of this gender. And I look at them and say, we are going to hire the best person for this position. Make no mistake, as long as I am in charge of this. And they look at me and say, well, I honestly believe that if you do the right things for the right reasons, you're fine. If you follow that mantra in your business, do the right things for the right reasons, and at least you're gonna have a business case for why you made the decision that you made. So I absolutely. Transparency is critical. If my employees ever were afraid to come to me on something, which, as you well know, they aren't.

No, they're not.

But if one of them, that's a huge red flag that I've got a culture problem. Yeah.

So let's talk about how clarity helps build and support culture. So where does HR come in? And how does clarity help small businesses kind of build their culture and not just enforce their policies? I think oftentimes, I think HR is just here to enforce the rules when really we're here to help shape so.

Well, interesting. Very recently, CEO went viral.

Yes.

For saying I saw her. Yes, yes, I was. I found that fascinating that she would not have traffic cops in her organization, that HR is just a hall monitor, that HR just doesn't provide any value. And obviously I'm going to beg to differ for obvious reasons. But I think that in a way she's right in that younger, unexperienced, or very little experienced HR professionals can absolutely be misconstrued as home monitors. Right. Because they're there, they know the policy, it's black and white and they're going to enforce it. I saw a lot of that coming out of a super large organization in a city that I used to live and work in. And the majority of their HR team was very policy driven, black and white. Good HR people have conversation with the business owners, talk about what are your goals, what do you want to accomplish, what is the mission of the organization, what are your values? And how are we going to create an environment that reinforces those values in that mission within your organization that are clear and your employees understand and we can build a productive, happy workforce around that. If the employer says we don't have a mission, we don't have a vision, we don't have a mission. We have no purpose. We have no purpose. I'm going to challenge them on that and we're going to have a long talk about that. We, in our organization, there is absolutely no question what we do and why we do it and what our values are. And everything in our organization is based on that. Our day to day, it's reinforced on a regular basis. Community service, excellence, teamwork, these things are all done, reinforced on a daily basis by our leadership team and by our owner. We are constantly doing community service events. And so I am going to say to that business owner, do your employees know what you expect of them? Do they understand what their purpose is in achieving the overall purpose of the organization and the mission? Let's get that taken care of. Let's get solid job descriptions. Let's show them how they fit in. Let's show them how important their work is. Now, how do you hold them accountable to that? Yeah, because it's great to tell them what you expect, but if you don't reinforce that with accountability, you have a problem.

Yeah.

Managers, how do you talk to your employees? How do you communicate? Do you coach? Do you mentor? Or are you micromanaging?

Yeah.

Do you understand the difference between a performance improvement plan and a disciplinary action? Let's talk about how we fill out that paperwork. Let's talk about how we have those conversations with the employees. So again, it comes back to transparency and reinforcing what the organization's all about. No business owner ever starts a business for no reason and no purpose, with no values.

Yeah.

And the trick is to make sure that you're reinforcing those with the employees, that they're aware of them. And it doesn't mean you have to hang big signs on the wall that people won't read or that they'll see and say, yeah, right, sure, that's what we do. And I've seen that a million times. Right. You got the big signs all over the organization and the employers are like, yeah, right. We don't do that.

Can we really do teamwork? No, we don't.

No, we don. Yeah, yeah, You've got to be. You've got to have those values and that mission achievable and recognizable and really reinforce the fact that those are important to the organization. And you can do that in a multitude of ways. But we do it by building structure around them, by making sure that they're visible, that we reinforce them on a regular basis, that employees again, feel safe, that they understand why they're there, what the expectation is, how they're going to be held accountable. And so they feel comfortable coming in every day. They know what's expected of them. Sometimes that's my biggest hurdle with an employer is that they, they, they're afraid to set expectations. Yeah. And I ask them, well, if your board of directors or your investors or your husband or wife that is counting on this business to put food on the table, if you don't understand their expectations, how do you feel?

Yeah.

What if you think that's a great.

Question, I mean, great perspective.

How do you feel if nobody sets expectations for you? And the answer is that if we're flying blind, anybody in any situation, a player on the field, if they're given no direction, if there's no expectations that run either way you want, we don't care, throw the ball to whoever you want. Not going to work just doesn't work. So you've got to be that coach. You've got to help people understand why they're there, what their purpose is, how you're going to hold them accountable, exactly what that expectation is, and then reward them at the end of the game if they meet those expectations. And that reward can be a multitude of different things, but those are all strategies that we put in place. We help the owner strategize, put together, and help people feel successful in the organization.

So we're in a time where employees want purpose, they want flexibility, they want trust. And then we're also in a place where we've got probably a lot of new managers coming into. You know, we promote people because they were good at their, their job. So now we're going to make them a manager of people. They may have no people skills, but they're going to be in charge of a team. How does what you do at clarity, how does HR help facilitate dealing with the new managers and at the same time helping build a culture that retains people. How do you do that together?

Well, obviously HR has an open door policy. So employees don't just have one, one place to stop in and say, hey, this isn't working for me. They have multiple points that they can go to depending on their comfort level and who they're comfortable talking to. We really work with coaching those managers. I am not a believer in throwing somebody into a new management or leadership position without having some pretty serious conversations about what their comfort level is with that. Where they feel they may need professional training, where they feel that they need coaching and mentoring, who they feel most comfortable getting that coaching and mentoring From I, gosh, I went into an organization that was growing so fast and the managers really became managers because of their tenure. Yeah, some of them never wanted to.

Be a manager, which happens all the time.

It happens all the time. Extremely common at this point. I would say that one of those people a few years later is one of the best managers in the organization because she was a sponge and she came to me on a regular basis, said, what do you think I should do about this? How do you think I should handle this? So we provide that coaching, we provide that support. We really don't tell a new manager. I tell a manager, please, before you have a conversation where you could make a mistake, come and role play it with me. Yeah, let's. Let's have a conversation. Or I have the conversation with the employee and they watch. And sometimes they said, wow, Julie, you got pretty direct. Yeah, I did. Because sometimes you need to get direct it. And managers are often afraid to get direct because again, they're afraid of what they might say that could get the organization sued. The horror stories are out there everywhere, right?

Yes.

So they're petrified of what to say. And sometimes just allowing them to shadow you through some of these conversations helps tremendously. It helps them develop guardrails and understand where those limits are and what they can say and what they can't say. So that's usually overcoming that fear is a big hurdle. And once we get past that and we can start talking about developmental coaching of employees and when we give up, when we say, okay, we're giving it our all and the employee isn't, now what do we do? And we have that conversation. So it's not something that's going to happen overnight. It's not. There's no guarantee as to how long that kind of learning can take, but we can do it if the person wants it. If the person wants to be in that kind of a role, we can certainly coach them and help them to get there.

Well. And I would say too, from the business owner's perspective, for me, oftentimes I think when we hire a manager or we put leadership in place where maybe we didn't have it before because we're growing, there's that expectation too of like, well, we're just gonna, they're not gonna make any mistakes. The manager's just gonna be perfect. And I think it's important to set those expectations. And you do a really good job with talking business owner and then being able to talk to their management level of saying, look, this is a moving target. There's going to be moments where we're not going to be perfect about it, and that's, that's how we learn. So let's kind of continue to, to work through this. Let's not live in a silo. Let's not be completely paralyzed. Because that's something that I see oftentimes in organizations where it's a new manager. I think you see it too. I'm petrified that I'm going to make a mistake, so I'm just not going to do anything. In which case we deal with continued poor performance or an issue that could have been handled very quickly, and instead it goes on for three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, and then you're having a very different conversation with an employee over performance and a manager over their ability to lead and manage. So I appreciate the work that you do and kind of working with that middle space and like you have to deal with the business owner, the executive director, and then also dealing with their middle management to kind of make sure that they're, they're where they need to be and they're, they're developing and making good decisions. Because so much of what we do is also coaching the leadership team, not just the, the lower management team.

Well, and sometimes you have to let people make mistakes.

Yes.

I mean, I have watched an organization that I have said over and over and over again, you need to let this person go. This person is toxic. You need to let this person go. This person. But we can't. They're so. Well, we need to get past this hurdle. We need to get past this hurdle. We need to get past this.

You don't understand, Julie, how important they are.

Right, Exactly. No, I don't understand. They need to go and it turns into a major workers comp. Short term disability fraud case. It can turn into some pretty ugly stuff. And sometimes you just have to let it happen because that's sometimes how people learn. And it's sad and it's hard as a consultant, it's hard to see that happen and let that happen. But, you know, it goes back to, you're paying for the expertise, you probably want to take it. And sometimes we do better at listening and sometimes we do need to make the mistakes and learn the hard way. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a pain point that you have to, you know, you have to get past.

So if someone feels like their culture's slipping or it's already off track, what's the first step that you would tell them to begin their reset.

Honestly, they need to talk to their people, they need to get a renewed focus on their employees, on their teams, and start having conversations.

Do they need a third party sometimes to do that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Never hurts to have a third party in the room that doesn't know. You know, unfortunately, too many times those conversations can go down rabbit holes and we don't really care why the widget didn't get made. You know, we want to talk about, is the equipment faulty? Is there a problem? What is the root of the issue?

You can keep things on track too.

Absolutely, absolutely. And a lot of times people get very defensive in those conversations, especially business owners that, you know, know they're working 15, 16, 18, 20 hours a day and they feel like the employees are telling them that they're not good enough, that they haven't done enough, that they're. And it's, it immediately invokes a defensive reaction. And that's really not what the meeting is meant to do. The meeting is meant to say, let's give our people a voice and let's take a little bit of that burden off the business owner and listen to what your people are saying and maybe, just maybe they're going to have some really good ideas for how to improve that. You didn't have to work 15, 16, 18 hours today to figure out on your own, let's work as a team. And you start to build that team environment just by doing that, just by listening, picking up on maybe a couple good ideas that could help smooth the way, implement them. Even if you're absolutely positive it's not going to work. Try it, try it. Give your employees a voice. Start being transparent. Start being present. I had a CEO at one time that was a fractional CEO and so he kind of come and went, came and went, and you know, people saw him and didn't see him. And I said, I just looked at him. He said, I just don't understand why I'm not being listened to. I said, presence is power and you're not present. If you're not present and you're not available, you're going to be disregarded. You need to understand the business. So it's not just a matter of understanding that top level stuff. It's understanding what's going on on the floor and where those, those issues present themselves that prevent people from reaching that productivity that you're expecting.

So last question. What is something that business leaders can do to get 1% better in their business today?

They need to walk the floor and they need to talk to their people. Absolutely. There's nothing like going out on a manufacturing floor and start walking around, just saying hi and waiting. How's your day? How are things going? Equipment operating properly? You see any safety issues I need to be aware of? Anything I can do to help you. All right. Have a great day and keep going. That provides more goodwill than you can ever imagine. And the more that we concentrate on making sure that we're present and we're listening, the better we are going to be able to develop the culture in the organization and make people feel safe and comfortable coming to work.

I love what you said. When you said that presence is power, that was good.

It's true. It's. It's true. If you can't. If your employees can't see you, you don't exist. It's just that simple.

Yeah. Julie, thank you for your time today. Thanks for talking about culture and that it's not just an HR function. It's a significant part of business strategy. If you'd like to learn more about clarity, we'll link everything in the show notes. So thank you.

Thank you.