Describe the culture in your business?
1. Empowerment
We encourage our people to embrace an ‘anything is possible’ mentality, and that if they apply themselves through hard work and an eagerness to learn, there is no limit to what they can achieve.
2. Togetherness
We work hard at creating a fair and equitable environment where everyone has the opportunity to grow and succeed.
We believe we have big business thinking with a small business care factor that allows us to create a professional, fair and nurturing environment that brings everyone together.
3. Excellence
We strive to be the masters of our craft and be the best we can be. We do what we say we will do and take responsibility for our roles, actions and impact.
Together, we aim to redefine the standards in our industry.
What impact does culture have on your business’s success?
Business guru Peter Drucker has a famous quote which sums up how important culture is:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
Without its people, a service-based businesses such as real estate would be almost non-existent.
It doesn’t matter how good your branding or technology is if your team isn’t happy.
Culture and how your people feel while working in your organisation is such an essential ingredient.
Culture is at the centre of everything we do.
What do you do day-to-day to maintain a positive culture in your business?
In many ways, I feel I am the ‘chief reminder officer’.
It is imperative to frequently remind those in the organisation of where we are going and what sort of organisation we want to be.
We need to achieve individual and collective goals.
Positive energy plays a big part in a sales environment, and as a leader, it is important to lead by example and exhibit the energy you are looking for from your team.
Something simple that has worked for me over the past decade is walking the office floor, connecting with everyone and genuinely asking them how they are.
If I sense there are some dark clouds in someone’s life, I will immediately make a time to take them for a coffee and check in on a deeper level.
Sometimes, if you feel someone is not themselves and you leave it for a week or two, it can be too late.
What you don’t confront you validate is OK to continue to happen.
Genuine care and consistent communication with your team play a huge part in maintaining a positive culture within your business.
How do you approach teaching your business’ culture to newcomers?
One of the most important aspects of ensuring new people entering your organisation clearly understand what you expect from them culturally is having a strong onboarding strategy.
We have a team of people that are responsible for onboarding new team members, and we consistently look to improve this process.
We want to make the experience for new team members as memorable as possible.
Throughout the onboarding process, we connect newcomers with existing team members to create peer-to-peer support, along with a 90-day check-in plan with leaders in the business.
Explain a time internal culture felt ‘off track’ and how you corrected it?
Maintaining a good culture is a lot like weeding your garden.
It has to be worked on regularly or, like weeds, bad habits begin to form, and a bad culture will creep into your business. It’s similar to what occurs in sporting teams.
The strength of a business’s culture is tested most in tough times as everything seems like it is under a microscope.
When the market hasn’t been at its best and results seem a lot harder to come by, I use consistent communication, high energy and genuine care to help lift the team’s spirits and get them to buy into the overarching plan of what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are going to reach our goals.
