What is Your Culture?

I think culture is the most important factor in determining the success of an company. I am not alone in this belief and a lot of attention is now being paid to culture in business.

I work in a company that has no unified culture. Or maybe our culture is that everyone does whatever they want. Whatever our culture is, it is not working. We cannot seem to implement change and make that change a standard. We have tried many times and it just does not work and I think it all starts at the top of the company.

The owner of my company is not a consistent person. He comes up with hair brained ideas one day and then forgets about them the next. I will give him credit for coming up with ideas, I just wish he would filter them before passing them on. I don't think he has the ability to really take a look at an idea and determine if it is appropriate for the business or not. Some of his ideas would be OK for his personal life, but are ridiculous for a business.

A great example of this is that every year, he treat all of the ladies in the office to something for Administrative Assistants Day. Every lady in the company gets treated. Last week he rented a limousine and took them all out for lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town. He then took them to have drinks at two other restaurants. When they returned to the office, there were nice flower arrangements waiting for each one of them. This is great, except not all of the women in the company are administrative assistants.

He took our purchasing manager on this lunch. He took our engineering intern on this trip. And he took women who have men that work in the same position, but did nothing for the men. This to me is just plain crazy and may even be asking for a discrimination lawsuit. It is not like he hid the limo from the men. They all saw it and some of them even made some comments about it. As a matter of fact, some of the women wondered why they were going to lunch with him. None of them declined the invitation though.

The Queen was outraged that he did this. She said that most of those women should be embarrassed for going on the lunch since they are not administrative assistants. She said it was demeaning and I agree. This is just one of the crazy ideas he comes up with that he does not completely think through. Now, I have to figure out a way to tell him that he should not do this anymore. I feel it is necessary to protect the company and repair our culture.

Today, all of the hourly employees got a notice in their paychecks that said unless they have prior approval from their supervisor they will not get paid for the time that they clock in and out. Instead, the accounting department will change their time to their designated start and end times. I think this is totally wrong and plan to have a talk with our Vice President tomorrow. I think it send the wrong message to our employees. It is a rule that penalizes the employees who have lazy managers. Managers should be reviewing all of their employees time sheets to see if they are showing up and leaving on time. If they are not, their manager should have a conversation with them to correct the bad behavior. This is just another bad move that is damaging our company culture.