Episode 86: Is Your Company Culture Failing You?

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Written By Kerri Roberts

Episode Description:

Your values are only as strong as your hardest day.

Culture isn’t built on t-shirts, swag, or pretty mission statements - it’s tested in the fire. In this week’s episode of Don’t Waste the Chaos, Kerri Roberts calls out performative cultures, hollow values, and leadership that only looks good on paper. Backed by hard data and lived client experience, she lays out how to stop wasting money on surface-level “perks” and start building a culture that drives retention, engagement, and performance - especially under pressure.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your values truly hold when business gets hard, this episode is your wake-up call.

Tune in to hear: 

  1. Spot fake values before they destroy your credibility. Learn why misaligned culture breeds cynicism, mistrust, and entitlement.

  2. Uncover your real core values. Kerri walks you through the exercise every leader should use (no AI-generated fluff).

  3. See how values-based performance reviews change the game. One client boosted employee satisfaction and engagement by 18% year-over-year with a simple review process.

  4. Follow the numbers. Engaged employees are:

    • 3.7× more likely to be engaged when recognition is part of culture (Forbes)

    • 43% more productive when organizations enable engagement/flexibility (Forbes)

    • 21% more profitable and 147% stronger in performance when engagement is high (Forbes)

  5. Walk away with tools that actually work. From embedding values in hiring to running manager training that sticks, Kerri shows you how to make culture visible and measurable.

Resources Mentioned

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Full Transcript:

Kerri Roberts (00:01)

Your values are only as strong as your hardest day. This week, let's audit how your culture holds up under pressure. Welcome back to another episode of Don't Waste the Chaos, where we jump into business, leadership, wellness, and more, the way that business impacts your day-to-day life. I'm excited to jump into this topic because, in my opinion, when we talk about employee culture or company culture, it feels soft.

Right? Like I'm thinking that in general most people think about t-shirts and koozie cups and ping pong tables and hacky sack and I've been in organizations who I would say First of all, everyone has a culture. We all know it's by default or by design I've been in organizations where the culture is no one cares about you as a human This is a black and white institution and you need to follow the work instructions and the processes and move along and if you don't someone else will I've been there

And then I've been in other organizations that just wasted a ton of freaking time, money, talent, treasures on fluff, but like didn't have clarity and expectations and goals and would treat people disrespectfully, but then like throw a killer party. So what we wanna do is thread the needle. We wanna land in between that. And I wanna explain why performative culture matters.

People are fatigued from just pretty statements that don't hold water. And so I wanna jump into that. And if you've been around long enough, you know that I'm a data-driven HR strategist, not a glitter ball party planner. So I focus on aligning behaviors and metrics. I don't focus on stickers and slogans. And so we're gonna jump in today. I wanna give you the real case for culture and why authentic culture matters. And really...

Employee engagement pays off. Employees who believe an organization reflects their values are 3.7 times more likely to be engaged. And here's what engagement translates into. If you're asleep at the wheel, it translates into higher productivity, higher employee satisfaction, and lower turnover. Employees who believe an organization reflects their own personal values, 3.7 times more likely to be engaged. That's huge.

We're gonna get higher productivity out of those people, higher employee satisfaction out of those people, and we're gonna have lower turnover and the right kind of people staying. So let's talk about the way it ties into performance. Organizations with engaged employees are typically up to 43 % more productive. That's huge. A ton of organizations, including Inc and Sherm and Forbes have put out data on this. Similarly, internal data shows up to 20.

or excuse me, 202 % greater performance. That's internal data that I've seen. And I've also seen it equates to lower turnover somewhere around 13.9 % turnover versus a 48.4 % turnover with unengaged workforces. And I'm also seeing significantly better shareholder returns when it comes to employee engagement and a solid culture.

When it comes to person organization fit, value congruence fosters trust, corporate citizenship and retention. And so this is all pulling this together. Now let's talk about the dangers of misalignment in this area. If you've got stated values that have no real backing, that breeds cynicism and mistrust. And one of the organizations I was in, they had the best of intentions.

and their value statement was beautiful and I can still recite it to this day, which means it was on every wall. The corporate executives had it in their emails. It was reinforced in meetings, but it didn't have any real backing. It's not the way people were performing. It's not the way people were treating each other inside of that organization. So there was a ton of cynicism. There was a ton of mistrust and there was a healthy, healthy...

dose of entitlement, which I think a lot of us are concerned with as business owners and leaders, misalignment leads to confusion, division, disengagement, toxic behaviors. So I want to invite you to audit your culture. This is something that you need to do. You know I'm a huge proponent of HR audits in general, and that dives into a lot of different things, but this is one aspect that we're going to talk about today.

So the first thing that I'm gonna ask that you do is revisit your core values. If you don't have them, first and foremost, even if you're a small organization, you've got four to five employees, I need you to have core values. You've got core values, you just haven't maybe articulated them. So let me run you through a quick example of how to establish your core values. So ⁓ if you have any other leaders in your organization or somebody who's leading alongside you, or maybe even just your assistant,

sit down and think about a couple of your employees that you could not do business without. And maybe it's, if you're super small, maybe it's all of your employees. And think about the character traits of those employees. What is it that's making them indispensable to you? Are they just insanely reliable? Are they positive? Do they believe in the purpose of your organization? Are they... ⁓

Are they proactive versus responsive? You know, just think through the character traits of those people that you were like, if I could clone them, I would. And I don't know if I can do this without them. Write down those behaviors, as many as you can. And try to think of a couple of different people. And then you can either throw it into word cloud online or just eyeball it or throw it in an Excel document and do tally marks. But we want to see the character traits that show up again and again across your favorite, your top, your can't live without employees.

Those are the values that you want in your organization. So we're creating values that we're going to hire to all the way to fire to, right? So we're gonna add it into our recruitment process. We're going to add it into our onboarding. We're going to add it into our performance management, our performance reviews. And then we're also going to discipline up against it or terminate up against it if you aren't living the values. That's the way we're really going to build out the values and then interweave them.

throughout the life of our organization. So that's if you don't have them yet. And if you've built them because AI told you what good values are, maybe do the exercise anyway. If you already had core values and you're like, no, I really believe in these, are they still meaningful? If you wrote them five to 10 years ago, are they still meaningful and relevant to you today? Do they guide real behavior or are they fluffy and random?

Or are they wishful thinking, pie in the sky type of things? I would use engagement surveys, retention data, performance metrics, and feedback to test up against this. Are the behaviors of your employee population matching the language in your core values? And then ask yourself the tough question, where are we out of alignment with what we say that we value as an organization? And I want you to get gut level honest here.

If you're not being honest with yourself, you're actually going to break trust with yourself and then you're not going to show up in a confident way. So you've got to be honest. Are we living by these? Am I living by these as the senior leader, as the business owner, as a mid-level manager? Am I living by the core values? And if you're an employee listening to this episode and you're like, yeah, I don't believe in the values of the organization I work at or they don't have values, press pause, take a beat.

Figure out if you should be there. If you're not aligned, either give the feedback to your business owner, make meaningful impact yourself and help them get this going, or find an organization in which you do align. But if you're the leader and you're the business owner, real alignment happens when leaders are modeling the behavior, especially under stress. That question I asked at the beginning of the episode rings true, or the statement I guess I made, your values are only as strong as your hardest day.

So how do your values, how do they hold up under pressure? This is really important. So when you're under stress, what do the values then become? That we don't care about work-life balance anymore when we're under stress, when we're not hitting our financials? Do we start getting snippy with one another? Do we treat each other with less respect? So testing the values out on your hardest days, how decisions are actually made, how crisis is managed, how people are treated when you're under stress.

Because we can't just say like, well, that's a hard day. Because what is it actually like in your organization? I'm telling you, there are unwritten rules of how to operate inside of your organization anyway, that people either are telling you or aren't telling you behind your back. People see how you operate under stress. I know that when I feel like things are getting done, I start to micromanage and I clamp down. Where are you at with this? Where are you at with this? Where are you at with this? Or, ⁓

I start just doing things and then I'll be like, hey, since I didn't hear a response from you, I did X, Y, and Z. That's how I respond when I'm under stress. And I just need to own that and be honest with my team about that. So let's talk about making meaningful, visible change in this area, especially in tough times. We want to embed values in performance management. So I said we want to put it in our interview process.

We want to make sure our values are clear and evident in our onboarding once we've found the right people that we're onboarding that align with our values. But when it comes to performance management, this is key. We need to use values-based reviews, not just output metrics, not just lagging indicators. Values-based reviews are going to be important. We want to recognize people for how much or how they behave, just as much as how much they produce. And this is huge. And right now, I've got an individual

on my team, she's newer and she's literally someone who's a values alignment for me. And then the production will come later, but she is a very clear values alignment and that's why the hire happened. And then we'll get to the productivity and the production later as she learns and she grows. But this is just important, as important to me. Now I've got to get the results too and it's up to me to train to it.

but this is so important to me. We need to recognize people for how they behave, just as much as how they produce. Recognition can be formal or it can be informal. So when it comes to formal, we can literally do awards and reward and recognition that way, or it can be a part of compensation and promotion criteria, which is what I recommend. You start hitting these metrics, we set milestones, and there's money behind it.

Not everyone's money motivated, but a lot of people are. And especially in, I mean, anytime, most of us want to make more money, but especially now when things are tight, right? Living is hard. It's expensive out there. And so it doesn't matter where you live, it's expensive. And cost of living is going up. Cost of living adjustment or allowance every year is just falling under 4%. So if you're not giving that 4 % increase every single year to your employees, then they're getting a pay cut.

So these are all things we have to take into consideration when it means making our values and our culture meaningful and visible, especially during tough times. I would recommend you think about dashboards or values tracking systems to keep values present and in an ongoing dialogue and not just posters on walls or pretty pictures. You can review and reinforce through coaching, through feedback loops, and through continuous performance check-ins.

All of those things are great. If you don't have an annual performance review, start there. I know a lot of organizations, and I've done episodes on this before, organizations are like, we give real-time feedback, so we don't do performance reviews. And I tell you, when I get into those clients and I do an employee satisfaction and engagement survey, one of the first things that comes up is I've never gotten a performance review. And it's funny, right? Because if you ask your employees, do they enjoy a performance review? Most generally, no.

I mean, most generally they'd say no, but if you're doing it well and you're not surprising them, it's just a formal time to sit down, then all you're doing is reinforcing the fact that yes, you do give great real-time feedback, but it's a formal opportunity to sit down and address it. So let's talk about some data. I want to give you a hypothetical here or an anonymized ⁓ client example because I know that a story is helpful. So I had a client who is in the construction.

world and they did not have formal performance reviews. And they were like, you know, in general, we've got blue collar workers. I don't think that people are really wanting that. They just want to make more money. And so I was like, okay, so how are we measuring people to make more money right now? Like how do we determine if they're eligible for a raise? And it was so abstract. Well, you know, we, you know,

If we see that they're doing a good job, it's like, how are you seeing if they do a good job? How intentional are you being about visiting the job site or looking at their cost per job data? Well, not great, but we feel like we've got a pretty good pulse on it. OK, can I challenge you to implement performance reviews? And we did. We put together performance reviews, and we did both values-based and then outcomes-based. And

At first, their employees were like nervous, which they thought they would. And we sat down and just explained like why we were doing this. And the top performing employees loved it. You're high performers. I mean, maybe if you schedule three hours and they don't get to work during that time, they're going to be a little annoyed with you. But if you sit down and you have a 30 minute to maybe one hour performance review with them, they're going to be like, yep, yep, yep, glad you're finally measuring performance. So I'm not the only one carrying everybody's weight around here.

That's how your top performers are going to look at it. And they're gonna buy into your culture. And if they don't, they're not truly a top performer. They might be putting numbers on the board, but they're not truly a top performer because we need people aligned with your culture and your values. But they're gonna be down for it. They're gonna be excited about it. And I saw employee satisfaction and engagement data go up 18 % from year over year at this organization. And we did such minimal things. We put job descriptions in place.

We put transparent pay bands in place, and we put performance reviews in place, and we articulated what their values were and integrated those across the board. We did some other things. We put in an HR payroll system. We did some things in the background, but those were the main things. And the data showed that people loved that. That breaks down the silos. That breaks down the duplication. It breaks down the hesitation to speak up by putting this down on paper.

You can use engagement and retention data to expose misalignment. Like if there's high turnover in teams who said innovation was a core value, then that means they weren't getting to innovate as much as they wanted to, so they were leaving. I mean, there's tons of ways that we can look at data and make actionable responses and put action plans in place to address them. So one of the things ⁓ that we did in that organization was we did a kickoff meeting before performance reviews.

to kind of stifle the fear that we saw happening because sure the high performers were like, yeah, whatever, tell me how I'm doing and give me a freaking raise and a systematic approach. But everyone else, there was like a low murmur in the organization of why are we doing this? Are they trying to push people out? Or are we falling upon hard times and this is a way to weed people out? So the first thing we did is we met with managers and we trained the managers on the criteria. I recommend a five point Likert scale.

A three point scale on performance reviews, that's a no go for me. I'm never going to encourage a client to do that because everyone's going to get a two. If the scale is a one, two, three, everyone's going to get a two, sometimes a three, sometimes a one, but mostly everyone's going to get a two and we've got no good actionable data. So we do it on a five point scale and that starts to pull apart the high performers to the underperformers. And so that's what I recommend. But first and foremost, we sat down with the management team.

and I said, we are gonna go through a mock performance review right here together. First, I explained the five points scale and I put not just like exceeding expectations, outstanding, meeting expectations, underperforming, poor fit. I didn't just give those words. I put in there exactly what it would mean, three to five sentences of what it looks like. Exceeding expectations to outstanding, the difference of those are,

takes initiative themselves, takes on new projects that will positively impact the company's bottom line, go to for most people in the organization for getting questions answered, I map it out. What does it look like to be outstanding? What does it look like to exceed expectations? What does it look like to meet expectations? So what does it mean to be unacceptable? I literally put sentences to it to map it out, to help the managers understand like visually, okay.

What am I looking at here? And then help an employee receive their rating and have a better understanding of how they can get to the next level rating, the next performance review cycle. So it level sets. So we went through this training and then we went through every single employee in there for this first round. And I know this takes a while. And this wasn't a small organization. It was over 40 people. I mean, considerably small, but over 40 people. And we sat down and after we did the initial training, I had them all do the performance reviews.

And then I did not administer them, them give feedback as managers. And then we sat back down for another meeting and I said, okay, what were the overall ratings for your people? What was the average rating? Did this person get a one, a two, a three, a four or five on average on this performance review? And then I challenged them on it. Okay, so on average, their meeting expectations. So.

in accountability and on timeliness and on utilization of technology and on this and the values and on this on results, they're meeting expectations in the majority of those areas. And you know what? Sometimes the answer is yes, they are. But the cool thing is you get all the managers in the room for this calibration session and another manager will be like, are you kidding? That person sucks to work with. No one on my team likes to work with them. Or I've got the accounting manager and they're like, yeah, that person never turns expense reports in on time. So they're able to kind of collaborate together.

and do a calibration session to make sure that we are all truly holding ourselves accountable to the ratings. And then we're able to go to the employee population and say, here's what we've done. We've created the reviews based on X, and Z. We've trained the managers on X, and Z. We've done a calibration session where we did X, and Z. And you know what?

the employees were ready for performance reviews at that time because they were like, okay, this isn't just something that somebody pulled down off of AI and thinks it's a good idea. This is how they did it. And now I want to participate, like give me my feedback. And that was really, really helpful in that organization and you can do it too. It's just gonna take a little bit of time, but would you rather spend the time and get better in this area or keep kicking this can down the road and keep having subpar performance or high?

value employees that aren't getting rewarded for what they're actually bringing to the table and you're constantly worried they're gonna leave. And so you keep throwing money at them but you have no real idea if you're equitable or not. Like let's stop that and let's actually do something about it. So one of the things that I can do in my organization is I talked about this manager training. I have something that's called the essentials. These are our project-based work inside of Saltline Advisors which is my advisory firm.

We've got fractional work where we can be your outsourced HR person, or we can do projects. We can do one product a month for you, or we can do one project one time ever. But this is for culture that sticks. Your leaders need tools, not slogans, right? And so our essential manager training series is data-informed behavior-focused modules. And this starts at $2,500 as the investment, and it includes one to three tailored 60-minute sessions.

Think about giving feedback with confidence or leading through change or performance conversations that stick or custom built for your goal like what I just talked about with that construction client where I literally taught them the performance review standards, taught them how to calibrate and then afterward we gave another session on how to give actionable feedback. And so that was a three part training series that we did for them and it worked wonders. And so.

If you want to see value in your organization, after your little culture test that I talked about earlier, and let me just run through that again. Let me go up to my notes. When it comes to your core values, are they still meaningful? Do they guide real behavior? Or are they wishful thinking? So after you run through that and you're like, let me think about this.

My culture is showing some misalignment. You can fix it by building leadership skills that reinforce your values when it comes to under pressure, times when you're under pressure. Training Primes managers to be the real standard bearers. Your culture lives or dies in their every interaction. I wanna say no pressure, but like pressure. If you're in a management position, if you're getting paid for that, if you've got the title, if you've got the autonomy, then as a manager,

That comes with a little extra pressure, right? And if you're a business owner or senior leader listening to this and you're like, I can't put that on my managers, it's probably because you're not paying them adequately. You're not giving them proper feedback on their performance or you don't have their roles documented well enough. So you're afraid that they're going to leave. So you feel held hostage. So address this with them first and then expect them to hold their people accountable to it. You can do this. And if you feel like you can't, my organization can come along and help.

Listen, culture only matters when it's tested. It's easy to say who we are and how we show up when everything's going well, when revenue is high, when our clients are happy. But culture is tested regularly, right? We've got, like business is not easy. It's a roller coaster and culture only matters when it's tested. Values must be lived out at every level. They must be audited and then they must be reinforced through behavior and accountability. So.

Take your engagement data or your performance reviews, if you've got either one of those, what are they telling you about your values? And where in your core values are you a little hollow? Ask yourself, if they're just a poster or did you build something that lasts through the hardest time? I want you to explore this for yourself and I want you to think about how this applies to your personal mindset as the business owner.

as the leader or as an employee. If your organization has a ton of promise but doesn't have these things in place, send this episode over to a leader in your organization and say like, hey, I love it here, but we might wanna consider this. This is gonna help us level up. Or if you're a business owner or you're a leader, take some time to reflect. I would actually take this episode, send it over to your management team, your supervisor staff, your frontline leaders, your supervisors, your team leads.

and have them listen to it and then get in a room and talk about what they thought. Do a little culture audit, ask yourself these questions, score yourself, and then address it. You want real data-backed change when it comes to this. You can't just say we're gonna do better. Because then how? Time's still busy, you haven't done better so far, and like, bless your heart, I get it. Life is hard, it's busy, you're always working.

And if you're an owner who's like, definitely can't add one more thing, you're probably not managing your time appropriately. And you need to do a time audit because you need to prioritize things like this or you are stunting your own growth. Your revenue is less than it could be than if you had an engaged, satisfied workforce. Listen, I know that leading people can feel like chaos and finding the time to delegate to yourself or to others to go through processes like this.

can feel like chaos too because you've got so many things on your plate. But the work is worth it. So don't waste the chaos. Embrace it. Until next time.

Kerri Roberts https://saltandlightadvisors.com
Next

Episode 85: This Tiny HR Mistake Could Burn Your Whole Business Down