If You Don’t Intentionally Build Culture, You’ll Accidentally Lose It

Erin Stahla, Co-owner of Stahla Services, a nationwide provider of restroom, shower, and ADA trailer rentals again joins Enterprise Radio. Erin will discuss the importance of being intentional when building company culture.

Listen to host Eric Dye & guest Erin Stahla discuss the following:

(Host Eric Dye):  What does “building culture intentionally” actually look like day-to-day — especially for a small but growing team?

(Guest Erin Stahla):  Man, yeah, I think it’s different in a lot of cases, but there’s a few different things that really show through in multiple businesses. Sometimes it looks like a team meeting, a phone call, or an in person conversation, but just making sure that you’re building culture intentionally is something that you have to make sure the team understands that culture is important to you. It’s important to the team. It’s important to maybe that department that you’re leading and as soon as they understand that culture is important, you have to start setting out what does culture mean to your company and to your team. It’s making sure that they understand what the goals are for the company and the core values specifically in which to reach those goals. So setting up guidelines and goals, those are two really big ones in the culture and you’re really just the person. Each person is a culture setter and that can either be negative or positive. There’s typically no neutral culture setters that you’re either like you’re on one spectrum or the other, so quickly identifying if somebody’s a positive culture center or a negative one and leaning in to those people that or are just organically positive and wanting to help you build that culture is such a big move.

(Host Eric Dye):  Would you recommend establishing company core values and if so, why?

(Guest Erin Stahla):  Oh, absolutely. Huge proponent for core values. It’s something that we use very strategically and often to build the culture. It’s kind of the language and the wording that we have surrounded our culture with. So for us we have three main core values and it’s something that we we hire off of. We fire off of. We have conversations, training or disciplinary based off of those. When we’re onboarding, we onboard people with those core values. When we do 30-60-90 day reviews, we do core values review and it’s just something that hey, are we actually acting out these core values? They have to be true. They have to be who we are, if there’s not a set of goals that we hope to really achieve someday, it has to be who we are, what we live and breathe every day, and the people that are on board with those core values are gonna go far and fast with you. And you’ll be able to identify that much more quickly by establishing core values and linking those to your culture directly.

(Host Eric Dye):  In your experience, what are early warning signs that a company’s culture is starting to slip?

(Guest Erin Stahla): Yeah, this can be kind of a scary moment. So I think, well, one of the more frustrating answers I think is you just start to get a feeling. I think many leaders, owners have just started to get a feeling before and it’s hard to describe where you just think that you just at some point you know there’s been a shift and it’s not towards something better. You wake up just knowing that hey, we’ve got to take action on this, so hopefully you don’t get to that point, but I know.