04/22/2020

Culture Can Save Your Company

It will make you stronger after the COVID-19 crisis

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, corporate culture was abuzz, with an increasing number of stakeholders on all fronts—large institutional shareholders, customers, employees—demanding companies take measures to ensure workforce diversity, integrity and sustainability. Everyone agreed: culture was—and continues to be—a key driver of long-term value.

But the health pandemic has forced a great deal of companies to shutter or cut their workforce by significant margins. In fact, our most recent polling of chief executives during the first few days of April shows that nearly 30 percent of companies had already furloughed or laid off workers in March due to the crisis, and another 30 percent was considering doing so in April. Adding to that other actions taken such as cutting wages or reducing salaries, and the concept of culture has become somewhat of an after-thought for many.

But Bill Higgs, former CEO of Mustang Engineering, author of Culture Code Champions: 7 Steps to Scale & Succeed in Your Business and founder of the popular Culture Code Champions podcast, says CEOs who want to come out of this crisis stronger and leaner than before should get their heads out of the accounting books and return their focus to their culture and employees.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Chief Executive.