Cultivating a corporate culture

Corporate culture (noun): 1) A company’s values and customs: the values, customs, and traditions of a particular company, usually a large corporation; 2) Atmosphere in large companies: the professional atmosphere that prevails in large corporations generally, reflected in people's dress, conduct and ways of communicating.

While the definition seems to pertain to a large company, that does not have to be the case. You can establish a corporate culture in a two man shop. A recent column derided an article that, basically, suggested that you treat your employees like fraternity brothers; involving them in your decision making processes, allowing them to ‘feel’ their way about their jobs and relationships within the company. In the trades, especially in the field, this is a recipe for disaster at best, and mutiny at worst. If you don’t think so, read last month’s column about firing employees.

Being in business today is probably more difficult than at any previous time in our history. The era of big, overreaching government intrusion into the private sector at unprecedented levels has created barriers to just about every independent business. The so-called “Affordable Health Care Act” is only the latest in a series of legislative issues, both local and national, which continue to make being an independent contractor an exercise in patience and fortitude.

With that in mind, there are some things you can do to help keep you sane and profitable in the marketplace. 

Getting up to speed

Since hiring employees (one or many) is the real baseline of a business, doing it right is where we will start. While the article mentioned at the outset of this column did not actually fit the mold of a trade shop employee/employer scenario, it did offer a sliver of good information as to how to put together a winning team for your business. Whether you are a one man shop, mid-sized company or larger operation, the base of the pyramid in your company profile is your work force. 

We’ve done the ‘there are no good people left to hire’ scenario. We’ve gone through many different educational viewpoints, programs and vocational schools. Columns describing new directions methods and approaches have beaten this subject into submission. Where the rubber meets the road for you, the businessman, is getting the job done by any means necessary.

Once you have won a bid and signed a contract, you must perform. Manning a project has gotten to be a cause for great nail-biting and gnashing of teeth due to the lack of enough ‘quality’ people available to hire. You send a crew out to get a project going and hope that they will: a) Get it all going smoothly, and b) All be there the next day! This scenario is, unfortunately, NOT an exaggeration.

Finding, hiring and keeping good employees has become the Holy Grail of our trade in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Making a culture to fit your company

Small and mid-sized companies generally reflect the personalities of their owners. That isn’t a scientific fact, but it is mostly true. Finding, hiring and keeping good people should, then, be something that the owners/operators are intimately involved in. Make your culture one that reflects you, your values and your goals. When owners are perceived as the ‘guys in the office’ there is an immediate assumption of separation between the guys who get dirty and the guys who write the paychecks. Even if this is true, it is something that you need to downplay in order to foment a cohesive bond with your employees. Hiring people that you like and whose work ethic, personal outlook and interaction with their fellow employees meshes, make it much more likely that the employee will be able to assimilate into the culture of your company.

Properly vetting a new employee is not always easy to do on the fly, but not doing it soon after hiring can cost you. If you have more work than you can man, and need to throw bodies at a project, perhaps taking a step back and regrouping is a better way to keep your sanity and your bottom line.  Finding, vetting and hiring someone with the right qualifications is paramount, but right under that criteria is how that person ‘fits’ into the ebb and flow of your company’s culture.

Hiring people that are competent and comfortable with the company makes for a tighter workforce. Having people who care about what they do and the wellbeing of the company that they work for is the gold standard. Employees such as that are less likely to do things that hurt your company, and more likely to go that extra mile to help out in unexpected or difficult situations (i.e., staying around after hours to help restock inventory, staying at the job after quitting time to wait for a delivery or even having a beverage with you and/or the dispatcher, or offering to do that unpopular job when you are in a bind).

After all is said and done, you are in the contracting business; it’s tough enough as it is. Making and keeping a good, cohesive, complimentary workforce that not only understands that, but actively makes it their goal to help the company is the real aim here.

The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author is a retired third generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping. He can be reached at [email protected].