By Eitan Sharir

As HR leaders, you want to achieve high performance results, of course. So you invest in developing your employees and help them learn the right skills to perform better in their jobs, just as other leaders of industry do. The truth is, more corporate dollars are spent on employee development than any other area, aside from salaries, equipment and facilities.

But are you spending your dollars in the right way? Are you really getting the return on investment that you need to create sustainable, high performance results? Do your employees feel rewarded by your investment in their development? Or do they grudgingly comply because they feel they have to?

The latest research reveals that while a healthy corporate culture is directly tied to performance and results, it is essential to achieving the expected return from your investment in employee training and development. Troublingly, culture remains an element that many organizations neglect, despite the increasing base of evidence that confirms its direct correlation to economic performance.

It is now indisputable that corporate culture affects the return on your training investment. However, did you know that your corporate culture could also be affecting your economic performance by serving as either a reward or a punishment for your employees? Moreover, it could be the reason you are able to attract and retain top talent – or why you lose your high performers shortly after the honeymoon of a new hire.

Corporate Culture as a Reward

The most successful organizations understand that investing in creating a culture of excellence is the key to achieving the long-term results that sustain success. Essential to success is attracting and retaining top performers and ensuring that they feel aligned with the performance of the company, and are aligned to a shared vision.

I first learned the true power of a culture of excellence through one of my own early corporate positions, with Unilever in South Africa. I remember feeling so proud to work for that company because they acknowledged our contributions, respected our opinions, and invested in our development.

I felt such ownership that when I used to go to friends’ houses for dinner on the weekends, I would go into the kitchen to see if they were using Sunlight dishwashing liquid. If they weren’t, I would give them a lecture on how Sunlight was the product they should use, how it contained real lemon juice and how it was superior to other products.

My friends were entertained by my presentation and by my passion and enthusiasm for my company’s products, but the point is that I was so proud to work for the company, that the company’s products became my products. I felt ownership for what the company stood for and because of that feeling of ownership, I felt compelled to share the corporate and product message whenever I could, much like when people are so moved by a film that they are compelled to tell all their friends that they must see the movie themselves.

This type of culture is the highest reward a company can bestow on an employee. Every employee feels valued, respected, and essential to the success of the company. They think, “This company is mine, and because it’s mine, how can I not give 100%? How can I not tell the world, and how can I not help the company to improve?”

Within these types of cultural environments, top performers do not stay just because of the monetary rewards. In fact, they will often refuse higher paying offers because they feel so committed and engaged to the organization.

When Corporate Culture Becomes a Punishment

On the other hand, most of us have also had some experience with a company where the organizational culture actually functions as a punishment. You dread going to work in the morning. You get up later and later, and when you finally arrive at work, you feel a pit sink deep in your stomach just by opening the front door.

An environment that creates this feeling of dread is not nurturing or stimulating. Instead, it saps energy, takes rather than gives, and runs employees down. There is not a fair exchange of energy between what the employees are giving and what they are getting, and we are not talking about salary.

A punishing corporate culture suffers a deficit in collaboration, cooperation and true leadership. Employees feel no ownership or attachment and find no meaning in what they do. It’s just a job. In effect, they feel punished and, for most, the only reason they remain is because of the need for survival.

In these punishing environments, the first people to leave are the top performers, the employees who are most confident and marketable because they have more options. For these top performers, money and security are no longer motivating issues. I’ve seen top-producing employees, managers and executives leave companies despite receiving high financial rewards. They left because the environment became unworkable and the experience was unrewarding. Sometimes high performers left simply because the culture was toxic and, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t change it.

These unfortunate companies lost major talent that is difficult to replace and were left with only mediocre employees, leaving them in an even more vulnerable position.

Corporate Culture Is the Operating System of Your Business

Think of corporate culture as the operating system of your business. When your corporate culture is not optimized, is neither positive nor constructive, your employees may appear to be professionally committed, but, in reality, they are not fully engaged. Employees who are not fully engaged will not be focused at work, nor will they give 100 per cent of their energy to achieving their performance goals or to achieving the company vision.

Many organizations, with good intentions, send these same employees to team building and motivational courses, hoping that the training programs will “fix” them, only to find out that when they come back to work, not much has changed.  These employees remain unhappy with their managers, still have issues with team members, and will continue to underperform. Without a healthy corporate culture, your employees won’t have the right mindset in place, and you will not get the return on employee investment you were looking for.

Do You Have an Unrewarding Corporate Culture?

You may now be wondering where your company’s corporate culture stands—are you rewarding and retaining top talent, or punishing your employees and losing your high performers to the competition? While there are examples of organizations at both extreme ends of the scale, in reality most organizations fall somewhere in between and have an “average” or “mediocre” corporate culture.

This culture could be impacting your company’s ability to attract and retain top talent, achieve a strong return from your training and development investment, and create sustainable high performance results. Below are four of the main indicators of a punishing corporate culture:

Distractions: Your employees are distracted and your managers are spending a lot of time dealing with small issues and problems when they should be focusing on your vision and goals.

Silos and Conflict: People are not working well together and each department is guarding its own turf instead of working towards their goals. They mistakenly believe that this is the way to provide the results your company has promised the customers.

Arrogance and Egos: There are a lot of egos strutting around believing they already know it all and are above everyone else. This indicates that people are closed off and aren’t open to hearing ideas and suggestions that might be better than their own and that could improve the business.

Lack of Accountability: Your employees are not taking full responsibility for their goals and their role in the company. Instead of focusing on improvement, they make excuses for poor performance and incomplete assignments, and lament that they aren’t paid enough.

Investing in Culture Rewards Everyone

While the trend is still to spend money on skills training when there are performance concerns, by building a culture of excellence you build the type of organization where top performers want to be. Moreover, by rewarding these top performers, you will have committed and engaged employees who feel ownership in their roles—and who will, in turn, reward your organization with their dedication and efforts in meeting and exceeding your corporate objectives.

Instead of dealing with distractions, silos, egos and lack of accountability, your culture of  excellence will reflect the following characteristics:

Focused on a common purpose and goals: Employees are focused on your shared corporate goals. What they are working on is meaningful and significant, and becomes the driving force behind everything that they do.

Mastery of their roles: Employees become experts in their specific roles, and appreciative of the roles other serve, which in turn, give you an edge on the competition.

Resilience to change: Employees develop the flexibility and resilience to contend with change, challenge and uncertainty. Even when there are obstacles that may seem impossible to overcome, the motivation to achieve the organizational vision is higher than the urge to avoid the discomfort. With clarity of purpose and a strong desire to succeed, they surpass the barriers and move forward.

Highly collaborative teams: There is no room for a silo mentality where teams closely guard their expertise, projects and knowledge. Because your teams are working toward a common organizational vision, they feel they are on the same side. And because this collaboration is encouraged and rewarded, there is no reason to protect individual roles, projects or expertise.

Pioneer mentality: There is no room for mediocrity. Instead, teams are focused on creating something that has never been created before, breaking records and achieving unprecedented results.

The impact of a culture of excellence lasts for many years.  In my own case, more than 20 years after my experience at Unilever, I still choose Sunlight dishwashing liquid and many other of their, or as I like to see it, “my,” products.

The bottom line is this—investing in your corporate culture could be one of the biggest rewards you give to your employees and your organization. In fact, top organizations recognize the connection between a culture of excellence and success, and never stop investing in improving their corporate cultures.

Eitan Sharir is a Vancouver, BC-based corporate culture consultant, leadership coach and founder of Dynamic Achievement Group (www.eitansharir.com).

(PeopleTalk Summer 2013)