278 | Aligning Culture: Fostering Engagement Through the Employee Journey

In this episode of the Lead Culture podcast, Jenni Catron discusses the importance of building a strong organizational culture through the Lead Culture Framework. She emphasizes the need for a structured culture plan that aligns with the employee journey, from hiring to departures. The conversation covers the significance of systems in fostering clarity and engagement, the stages of the employee journey, and practical steps for integrating culture into HR processes. Jenni encourages leaders to be intentional in reinforcing their values and creating a meaningful experience for their teams.

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Transcript

Jenni Catron (00:03.032)
Hey, leaders, welcome to the Lead Culture podcast. We're a part of the Art of Leadership Network. I'm your host, Jenny Catron, CEO of the 4sight Group, a company dedicated to helping leaders develop thriving teams. Each week, I'll be your guide as we explore practical strategies to equip you with the tools you need to lead with clarity, confidence,

and build unstoppable momentum in your organization. My mission is to be your trusted coach, empowering you to master the art of self leadership. So you'll learn to lead yourself well, so you can lead others better. Each week, we take a deep dive on a leadership or a culture topic. You'll hear stories from amazing guests and leaders like you who are committed.

to leading well. So let's dive in and keep learning on this leadership journey together. Well, today we are in part four of five episodes of the podcast where I'm taking you through the five parts of the Lead Culture Framework. This is the framework that I outlined in my new book, Culture Matters, a framework for helping your team grow, thrive, and.

be unstoppable. The book releases on February 11th, so it is just around the corner. If you are listening to this as this episode comes out, we've got like one more week before book launch. But my hope in doing this set of five episodes around the framework is that I want to give you a glimpse into what culture can be and how it will equip you to make culture your priority for 2025.

I think sometimes we understand the importance of culture, but we wrestle with knowing how to build it, right? Like we know when it's great, we know when it's bad, but sometimes we don't know exactly what to do to help us improve it. And that's what I'm outlining in the lead culture framework that I share in the book. I walk you through, like basically give you the playbook for building your culture. So today we're in part

Jenni Catron (02:25.422)
and we're talking about the phase three. So that doesn't really line up. This is the fourth episode in the series, but we're actually talking about phase three today and we're gonna do phase four and five in next week's episode. But we're gonna talk about building your culture plan. So, so far we've talked about the first phase is assessing, assessing your culture, just what's true. Where are we now? What's our reality? Part two, phase two is defining what do we aspire to?

Who are we? What do we look like at our best? How will we work together to achieve our mission? We need to define that. We need to get really clear on our culture, who we are and how we work together to achieve our mission. And so that distinctiveness, that clarity is what starts to unlock your team. But you've got to build a plan now. You've like every other key initiative in your organization. You need a plan to go from where you are to where you want to be.

I'm strategic planning girl at heart. That's why this, the, the lead culture framework is kind of your, your culture operating system. It's your plan for building the culture that you want. So let's talk about this. Culture is the system that fosters the values, beliefs, and behaviors of a group, right? Culture is those values, beliefs, and behaviors. It's how you work together. So if you're not designing the system,

you'll default to one, right? You default to a system and it's likely an ineffective one. Like if you aren't designing it on purpose, you're defaulting to something. So that might be one of the most important revelations you need in order to make your culture great is that your culture needs a system. But the idea that culture is a system is a little counterintuitive, isn't it? Because culture is about people.

And as soon as we start talking about people and systems, it conjures up feelings of corporate bureaucracy or heartless leadership. We've all been there, right? Remember when I said along the way that clarity is the chief indicator of the health of a culture. Clarity, clarity, clarity. We talked about that a lot in the defined stage or phase. Systems provide clarity, right? Systems provide clarity. When there's a system, it tells you what to do. You know what's expected.

Jenni Catron (04:48.938)
And as author and researcher, Brene Brown has famously said, she has said, clear is kind. So building your people operating system is truly one of the kindest things you can do for your team. It provides the clarity they need to succeed. The system brings consistency for how you live out who you are and how you work together to achieve your mission, right? It provides the clarity and the consistency that helps us know how to...

all of us on the team know how to live in to that culture. See, here's some things we need to be mindful of. Lack of a system is why your team members are disengaged. Lack of a system is why your values were an episodic exercise that didn't take root. Lack of a system is why your hiring is ineffective. Lack of a system is why you can't get momentum for your strategy. Lack of a system...

is why there's no consistency in your communication. Lack of a system is why there's confusion in roles and responsibilities. Lack of a system is why you scramble to pull together an agenda for your staff meeting. So, and we could probably add a lot of things to that list, right? But systems create stability, systems create consistency, systems provide clarity.

So now that we've done the work to assess our culture, we did that a couple episodes ago, and then you've defined what you aspire to, it's time to build the system that brings your ideal culture to life. Remember last week in the definition phase, we talked about defining what you aspire to. What's that ideal culture when you think about your team and what you're hoping for? What's that ideal culture?

So the purpose behind this work is to effectively serve and support the people on your team. That's why we're doing the work. People are the point. We're not building a system for the system sake. It's not just to create a system. We're building a system to support the team. And if we're not clear about the point of the system, the system will become the point and the bureaucracy that you fear will become your reality. So we've got to make sure we're keeping this in

Jenni Catron (07:05.58)
like in context, right? Like the system is for serving the people. So for this reason, the system that we're going to build in this phase of the work is built around the employee, the employee's journey with your organization. Every person on your team goes on a journey with your organization and there's a beginning and an end, right? Like nothing's forever. We want team members to stay for a really long time, but

They're going to be here for some of them will be here for a year or two. Others will be here for decades, but regardless of tenure, although our intention is that the system increases the length of everybody's journey on the team. Every employee is going on a journey with your organization. So the question you have to ask is what kind of journey are you creating? What kind of journey are you creating for your employees? Is it is it haphazard and chaotic? And it leaves them exhausted.

Or is it purposeful and exhilarating and it brings out the best in them? Like you might even pause and like think about that for a moment. Like what is the experience like for our employees right now? Like what is the experience they're having with our organization? Because employees are giving the best hours of their day to, for the work that they're doing in your organization.

So your goal is to make that time incredibly meaningful and valuable, right? Your goal is saying, how can I help make that meaningful and valuable for them and also help them contribute in a way that helps us achieve our mission? So the plan that you're going to build for your culture is built around understanding the, I've defined as six stages to the employee journey. Now you might define more.

just by way of what you do in your organization. But I believe that there are at least these six stages that you should be looking at to help you determine how do we reinforce that definition of culture, what we aspire to, so that we begin to live into the culture we've defined. So here are the six stages, and then I'm gonna talk about them just a little bit.

Jenni Catron (09:18.904)
There's a lot more here than we have time to kind of capture in this episode. So what I want you to do is I want you to think about these six stages and then I want you to kind of do a bit of an audit of, okay, how are we doing in each of those? we weaker? Are we stronger? What might we do to ensure that our team members are having a consistent experience at each stage in their journey with us as an organization? Because that insight

is going to help you unlock what do we need to do to support our teams well. And I'll give you a little checklist at the end to give you a few things to think about. So here are the six stages as I've defined them. Interviewing, right? Interviewing and hiring. How are people, how are we bringing people onto our team? Are we interviewing them for...

a sense of their alignment with our values and the culture that we've defined. See, the clearer your culture is, the more that you'll be able to assess for that even as you're interviewing people, right? You'll be able to pay attention to, do I see them modeling some of the values that we hold? You can ask questions that help you get maybe some idea of, them to give you explanations of a situation where they...

put others first, or if you have a high hospitality culture, and there's a value around hospitality, you might be looking for how hospitable are they just in the process, right? So whatever your values are, look for ways that you're gonna test for those in the interviewing process. And then secondly, the second stage of their journey is onboarding. So let's assume they make it through the interviewing stage.

you've interviewed for alignment with your culture, you feel really good about that, and now you're bringing them on board. Well, now you need to make sure you don't take for granted that they understand your culture. You actually are really deliberate and purposeful to catch them up to your culture. So this means finding mechanisms or finding ways to make sure you're not just throwing the employee handbook at them.

Jenni Catron (11:32.594)
And you know, the values are in there and every the language you've defined around culture is in there, which is good. And actually you need that document. We talk about that more deeply in the book that you do need an employee handbook. You do need to make sure your handbook reflects your values and the culture that you aspire to. So you want to make sure all that language is in there. But if you just give an employee the handbook and you don't tell them the stories and you don't tell the why, they're not going to get it. They're not going to fully catch it. So in one organization that I led, we had a class called Culture Shock.

that if you were brand new to the team, you would be, for six months, you would go to lunch once a month with one of our executive team members, and that team member would take you through one of our values. They would tell you the stories, they would let you ask questions, they would share stories of team members who've lived out that value and how we celebrated it. So you would get, and this was a small team, so we could afford to do this, you'd get.

small group time with one of our executive leaders and they would walk you through our value. So you'd hear personally from them of why the value mattered so much and how it impacts our culture. So you can do things like that. You can find other ways to do that. You could create a course where, you you have employees, hear more detail around the values, but the more you can spend intentional time, maybe it's somebody from your culture team.

who meets with new employees and just shares the values and is a champion of this is what we do and this is why it matters. This is how we work together. So you want to be really intentional to say here's our system for onboarding people, not just to the codes and keys they need for their job, but also to our culture, making sure that's purposely a part of your onboarding process.

The third stage in the employee journey is meeting rhythms and communication tools. So you likely have some kind of meeting cadence. And so for this employee, what meetings are they a part of? And where in those meetings do you reinforce your culture? Now you might reinforce that by talking about your values. You might reinforce it by sharing stories of impact. You need to define how are we reinforcing our culture

Jenni Catron (13:52.664)
who we are and how we work together. How are we reinforcing that in our meeting rhythms? Now that might just be five minutes at the top of a meeting. It doesn't have to take the whole meeting, but you want to consistently, when you have the team together, make sure you are reminding them of what we look like at our best. This is what we aspire to. This is who we want to be. So you might create opportunities where you're doing shout outs in staff meeting where maybe even other team members are celebrating.

coworkers who have lived out of value. You can find all kinds of fun and creative ways to do that. I give you some of those in the book. But finding ways to reinforce your culture in your regular meeting rhythms is really, really critical. The fourth stage are performance plans and reviews. Now I'm making an assumption you have these. If you don't, you should. Because what we want to do, this is part of our clarity work, is we want to make sure every person on the team knows how to win.

Like what's their plan for success for the next six months or 12 months? I like six month performance plans, but at least do 12 month plans. And you want them to set goals that they're working towards. Those goals are aligned with organizational goals. And so there's clarity around how are they contributing to our overarching goals? And then you're having discussions and reviews with them to say, hey, how'd you do? Where do you need help?

or you're celebrating when they achieve the goal. And in those performance plans and reviews, I personally think you should also be evaluating how they're demonstrating our values, right? That one of the things you're evaluating your team on is how they are modeling and living out the culture. And so in your performance reviews, and again, in the book, I give you some ideas around this. You want those performance reviews built so that you're also

making sure that they're in alignment with culture. The fifth stage is training and development. So your team members need continual training and development. We want to constantly be investing in our team. We want to be ensuring that we are helping equip them to keep growing, to keep learning, and to keep living into our values. So part of your training and development is also looking for, is there a value that's a little bit weak?

Jenni Catron (16:13.622)
Or is there a behavior that we need to be better at? For example, I'm working with an organization right now and they have some strategic initiatives that are requiring greater collaboration throughout the organization. And what we noticed is that the team needs better skills for collaboration. It's not that they don't want to collaborate. It's that sometimes they don't know exactly how. So part of our training and development for the year ahead,

is doing some workshops around collaboration and what are good collaboration skills, how do we do it? So you might identify that, here's a gap for us kind of broadly as an organization. And we need to make sure we're purposely training and developing the team to help them keep living into what we aspire to as a team. And then the sixth one is departures. The sixth stage is departures in that people will leave.

And sometimes they will leave on their own. Sometimes they will leave because we've had to move them on. And we need to understand how do we handle departures? Cause here's what happens in a lot of organizations is that we don't have a clear system for departures. And so if something is, it's very amicable. It was just, you know, they got a great opportunity. They're moving on, but they're big cheerleader of the organization and everything's, you know, we're sad to see them go, but everybody's kind of, you know, it's kind of, it's okay.

Well, we celebrate those and we honor that person and we thank them for their service and we go on about our day. But if a team member leaves, if there's a departure and maybe it was a performance issue or some other reason that they had to move on by their choice or ours and it's a little sensitive or tenuous, then a lot of times we just go dark.

And what happens is the rest of the staff don't understand, like again, lack of clarity. They're like, what happened? Why is this person leaving? They don't know that there were all different issues going on behind the scenes. And so it erodes trust with leadership because all of a sudden we've gone quiet and there's inconsistency in how we manage departures. And so what you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a process and you've articulated the process ahead of time, because for many departures,

Jenni Catron (18:36.556)
The why isn't appropriate for everybody to know, right? There are some things, you know, like if I move on and it's because, you know, maybe I wasn't meeting my job expectations or I had a big, I just wasn't aligned with leadership and we kind of mutually decided it wasn't a good fit for me. I don't necessarily want the rest of the staff to know all of the ins and outs of my circumstances, right? I want a little privacy in that.

And so sometimes out of wanting to honor the departing individual, we are, we're not giving information to the rest of the team. And again, I understand that. So this is why ahead of departures, we need a system so that our team understand, Hey, when somebody moves on, if they move on, and you, here's what you can trust that if somebody's not meeting performance expectations, because in stage four, we did our performance reviews and our plans were consistent with that expectation of what.

you know what we're supposed to be doing and then we're having good conversations around that. If for some reason you're not meeting expectations, then we have a plan for how we're going to coach and develop you through that. And then if that still doesn't come like if we still don't resolve the issue, then you know it's likely that you'll get moved on. But here's what you can expect and you know, so you've got to define this. You need your HR professionals to help you define it, but you need to ensure and communicate to your team. There is always a system. There's always a process.

for how exits are decided. again, not every detail of every situation needs to be known to the team, but what the team needs is they need to know that there is a process, that there's a consistent process in how we make decisions for when people move on. And so what you're looking for is you wanna make sure that team members recognize we're still living by our values. The things that are important, the things we say we aspire to, the culture, who we are and how we work together,

even when there's departures, we're being consistent with our values. So none of those stages probably were revolutionary, right? And you probably have some systems for some of those stages. But I want you to consider whether you've ever thought of these stages as a means to build culture, because a lot of times we just see them as HR compliance components.

Jenni Catron (20:59.904)
And so I want you to see these stages as essential to your culture operating system. Each of these stages needs to be infused with your defined and preferred culture. At each stage, you're clarifying who you are and how you work together to achieve your mission. And this is where you start in building your culture plan is you say, okay, we've defined who we are and how we work together. We've defined the values that really kind of shape how we work together.

Now we take that, that definition of culture that we have for who we are, we take that and we look at the employee journey grid and we say, okay, how is it showing up at each of these six stages? Where is, how are we reinforcing the culture we aspire to at each of these stages? And my encouragement to you would be start simple. Like, so just maybe look at each of those stages, look at what you already have. Where can you make a few tweaks? You're like, you know what? We already do this thing, but we could be more purposeful to include our values there.

Or, you know what, it's just, we just need to ask, add one question to our whole interview process. And that would really help us test for culture. So looking at each of those stages and just making a simple adjustment that starts to lean into how your employee journey is reinforcing the culture you aspire to. And if you do that, then you can keep building on it. So there's a tool in the book called the employee journey grid.

where it's literally a grid that kind of walks you through those six stages, gives you some ideas around that. And it's one of those things that it's a living breathing document, right? Like you look at it and you go, okay, what are we doing now? Okay, what can we do in six months? What can we do in a year? So you keep building on it rather than feeling overwhelmed by it. Simple and consistent is the best way to think about building your culture plan. What can we simply and consistently do to reinforce who we are and how we work together?

So let me give you just a couple of questions that you can use. There's actually a section in the book at every chapter called the clarity check, where I give you just questions for you to ponder to help you kind of go, okay, hey, how are we doing? Where do we have some gaps? So here's one of the clarity checks from this chapter. Yes or no to our interview process is clear and consistent. Yes or no. We have an onboarding plan that ensures culture alignment. Yes or no. Our meeting rhythms.

Jenni Catron (23:24.11)
positively contribute to our culture, yes or no. We have a consistent process for writing performance plans, yes or no. We have a consistent process for facilitating performance reviews, yes or no. We provide consistent training and leadership development for all our team members, yes or no. And we have a clear and consistent process for departing employees, yes or no.

And that's just a great little checklist to go, okay, where are we? And what might we need to do to make sure our culture is showing up in all of these stages of the employee journey? Because here's what I want you to hear. And I've probably said it before, because I'll repeat myself all the time, but how you show up, how you look at your employee journey.

and the processes you put in place to reinforce those systems, it keeps building, it keeps snowballing. So I want you to be intentional with what is that employee journey and how can we make sure that every stage we're reinforcing who we are and how we work together. All right, my friends, I hope that gave you some things to think about today.

plan that you want to build for your culture is really just about helping reinforce the best of who you are, right? You want to keep reinforcing who are we and how do we work together? And so the plan is the starting point and it's not another operating system. I want you to look at your culture plan as something that you're infusing into what you already do. So many times we will think about, gosh, it's another system I need to incorporate. Well, yes and.

I want you to actually, as you're building your culture plan, I want you to think about how do I build onto the things that we're already doing? Not that I'm trying to create a whole nother thing that we have to do, but what are we already doing and how do we do it more intentionally to reinforce our culture? That's what I want you to think about. Okay, you can pre-order Culture Matters at culturemattersbook.com. And I really would love for you to do this. If you've not done this yet, this would be a huge favor for me.

Jenni Catron (25:49.164)
because pre-orders really help set books up for success. help publishers know how many to print. They help retailers know how many to stock. And so the more intentional we are and the better job we do of getting books pre-ordered, the more momentum and opportunity the book has. So that's just the reality of it. It is me just saying very honestly, you would help me significantly if you pre-ordered the book. So if you think this is a book that would be valuable to your team,

Definitely pre-order it because it matters it actually like makes a big difference. You can go to culture matters book.com and There you can plug in your order information if you've ordered at Amazon or Barnes and Noble wherever you get books You'll come back to culture matters book.com. You'll put in your order number and then it's gonna unlock the first three chapters So you can start digging in and reading a minute immediately. You're gonna get a masterclass a workbook

be added to our Culture Champion Network, which is a fun group of leaders like you that I am just connecting with, and we're talking all things culture together. And then you can also get our Culture Matters Summit recording, which happened last week. So if you didn't get a chance to be a part of that, you can still get the recording. And so I'd love for you to do that. If you would like...

bulk orders in that you're thinking, you know what, want to get a copy of this for my entire team, or I want to get enough copies for a cult, my culture team that I want to build. If you will just email me at Jenny Katrin at get foresight.com J E N N I C A T R O N at get foresight, G E T the number four S I G H T.com. you'll just email me Jenny Catron at get 4sight.com. Let me know how many books you want and we will get a bulk order placed for you.

so that you can get copies for your entire team. All right, my friends, I'm really grateful that you value this conversation like I do. I really do think that people are the point and we get the remarkable privilege of stewarding the talent of the people that God has entrusted us to lead. And there is so much joy and fulfillment in that. So let's keep leading well. Let's keep reinforcing the significance of investing in.

Jenni Catron (28:03.756)
the people on our teams and let's build some great cultures.