Speaker 1: a positive workplace culture has become some kind of a buzzword in today's disruptive working world. We talk about high fluctuation with employees, we talk about skills shortage and we talk about the difficulty in managing and developing high engaged workforces. So in today's video we are going to discuss on why it is so important to build a positive culture and also how to actually do that. Hi I'm Ann Koopman and I'm a leadership coach for emerging leaders and an expert for team development and on this channel I share my top tips for these topics and update new videos regularly. So make sure that you subscribe below to not miss out on any future videos. So when it comes to culture there are a few myths and dilemmas that we're facing when we want to try and look at how to build a more positive culture. My friend and author Shane Hatton has just described it in his book Let's Talk Culture and he talks about the three dilemmas being what is culture and who is responsible for culture and how to actually build a positive culture. Before we get into that let's talk about why a positive workplace culture is so important. Well it does boost creativity and productivity because it fosters a psychological safe environment where your employees can be themselves, show up as themselves and try new things without being scared of failure or of any kind of negative consequences. And if we feel safe we can think more creatively and we can work much better and be more productive. A positive workplace culture also makes sure that you maintain a high retention of your employees and also higher job satisfaction for everyone that works in your organization. And lastly it will reduce stress in your employees and foster their well-being. So what is culture? Well if you google it you will find so many different definitions and it could be from how we do things around here, the behaviors, the values of an organization, how people treat each other. If you ask employees they might say it's what we say to one another, how we collaborate, it's a common understanding of how we do things. And so there's going to be lots of different definitions and it might be quite tricky to even pinpoint what it actually means. But what we do know is that culture shows up in the way that we act and show up and behave towards one another. It's all our little actions and behaviors in the workplace that creates the feeling and the experience of the culture. And that's what we want to focus on. How do the different people in your organizations, from direct contributors, media management, to executive management, how does everyone experience culture? And depending on where they sit in your organization they for sure will experience culture slightly different. But it's important to understand what's the overlap and what's the overall experience that people have in this organization. So if culture means how we communicate with one another, how we perform our work, or how we collaborate and treat one another, then who is responsible for building a culture? Well it's everyone. Everyone on how they show up is responsible for building and creating a positive workplace culture. Of course you as a leader or even the higher management of an organization shares a big responsibility because you lead by example and you are the people that actually are able to speak up when you observe behavior that is not in alignment with the culture, when you observe behavior that is toxic. So when leaders actually ignore the toxic behavior of the high performance, they are contributing and are responsible for the toxic culture that is infesting your organization. If you walk by something without saying something then you show that you accept it. So as a leader you are responsible to speak up if something is not in alignment with the culture that you want to create. And looking at the third question on how do we build culture, there's one important thing and mindset shift that I want you to make today. Traditionally you might think that okay we'll just define some values for our organization and that's how we build a culture. However just a nice set of values does not translate into the behaviors and the culture that you want to create. First and foremost your employees are going to have emotions that they feel in the workplace that is dependent on how they show up at work, how people communicate with them and interact with them. And these emotions are going to drive their behaviors. So if you want to define the values that are important for you, you do have to start at the emotions. So instead of first focusing on a cognitive culture which would define behaviors, values, rules and norms that you might have, we actually want to start by defining the emotional culture of our organization first. Because emotions will drive the behaviors. The issue here is as highlighted in a Harvard Business Review article called Manage Your Emotional Culture, companies do usually not pay attention to how their employees are feeling. They're ignoring this vital part of what it means to be human and what it means to show up at work every day. These organizations might not realize how essential emotions are to building and forming an everyday culture in your organization. Studies show that there is a significant impact of your emotions and how these impact your performance, your well-being and your ability to communicate and collaborate at work. And important here to note is also that just because you might have not defined an emotional culture yet, every organization, every team for sure has one. There is always an emotional culture already there. You might have not defined it or worked on it yet. And for that to understand, it's also important to know that emotions are contagious. So the way that you show up as a leader, the way that you enter a room, will have a direct impact on how the people in the room are going to feel. If you walk in smiling, you will lift the emotions in the room. So it's so important to think about intentionally how do we want to feel and how do we want our employees to feel to build the cultures and therefore the behaviors that we want. So if we want to build our emotional culture, we got to identify the emotions first of how we want our employees to feel to do their best work. Then we also want to look at how do we want them not to feel. What would be the emotions that might get in the way of them doing their best work? Then it's important to reflect on how would you notice such emotion? How would that show up? In what behaviors would you see that they're either feeling the positive emotions or feeling those unwanted emotions? So what would that look like? And now from there, in the last step, you can define the behaviors that will get your organization, your employees to feel those positive emotions. How do you interact with another? How do you communicate? How do you show up with one another? And from here you can then define the values and from there you can define the norms and rules in your organization. This does of course take a little bit of time and effort and commitment, but just starting by being more intentional on the emotions that you want your employees to feel and what behaviors would help trigger those positive emotions, you will already be one step closer in building a positive workplace culture. Of course it's not enough to just focus on our emotions. We also need to make sure that we build a psychological safe environment so that we have an environment of trust, of open communication and a strengths-based environment where everyone is appreciated and welcomed for who they are. So building a really inclusive workforce and work organization where everyone is seen and appreciated and celebrated for what they bring to the table. Let me know what your thoughts are. I know this is a bit of a new way of thinking, but focusing on emotions first is vital in understanding human behavior because we are all driven by our emotions in the end. If you would like to learn more, make sure you subscribe because I will be publishing more videos around this content. Bye.