The effects leadership, culture and wellbeing have on success!

Clan – this is a collaborative, friendly culture. There are often strong bonds between colleagues who show loyalty to each other. This kind of culture is sometimes compared to a large family.

Adhocracy – coming from the words ad-hoc, this is a very dynamic and fast-paced culture, where innovation, moderate risk taking, and employee autonomy is encouraged, to give the organisation agility and flexibility to respond to the external environment.

Market – this is quite a competitive culture where the name of the game is to get things done, a very results focused organisation where gaining market share and making more profit focus is the sole vision for the organisation.

Hierarchy – Often seen in large organisations which is led by procedures and processes and risk taking is not encouraged. Leaders are tasked with ensuring employees stick to these procedures rigidly to avoid costly mistakes and errors, although this culture is needed in certain organisations such as health care, military, and aviation to ensure people’s safety is maintained, generally these organisations tend to be slower to adapt to the ever changing external environment.

Within most organisations there is a mixture of all the above cultures and the ones that tend to flourish are the ones which put people first regardless of the overall culture! This might seem obvious but all too often the people element of an organisation is forgotten, yes most have a Human Resources (HR) department but very few actually focus on people as people!

Which leads onto wellbeing.

Employee wellbeing is nothing new, in 1893 George Cadbury bought 120 acres of land to build a model village for their employees to help alleviate the evils of modern, cramped living conditions.

Within this model village there were parks and recreation areas, and employees were encouraged to use these spaces to enhance their health and fitness. The Cadburys knew that if they have fit and health employees then this would help them have a thriving business and this is still true today.

Simple measure you can do today to start moving your organisation towards having a wellbeing culture!

– Small things matter – saying hello, asking people how they are and genuinely listening to the answer, when in conversations with colleagues – turn off alerts/notifications on phone/PC so that you don’t get distracted. I often turn off my screen when making calls if I can’t get away from my desk so I focus on the person on the other end of the phone, even though they can’t see you, they know they’ve lost your attention.

– Find out more about each person, what are their hobbies/interests outside of work, often people have so many more skills than we ever give them credit for and maybe some of these might help to enhance the organisations success if they are given the opportunity to demonstrate these skills.

– Allow for creative thinking and expression! We are all equally creative, however as we become adults many of us stop using this skill, creativity or being child-like not only is it stress relieving but can also generate some amazing ideas & solutions to challenges. Set small weekly/monthly challenges to stimulate everyone’s creative muscle.

– Show appreciation daily! Openly celebrate the small wins!

– Lead by example – if you are telling your colleagues to take a lunch break away from their desk, yet every lunch break you sit at your desk!! Guess what, it won’t happen!

And that’s just some ideas, imagine what you could achieve with a full strategy.