Here’s Our Talent Culture and Performance Strategy. What’s Yours?

At Realize, we spend a lot of time thinking about people and culture. We firmly believe that people are the foundation and heart of all organizations regardless of size or sector – they’re the ones running, building, innovating, giving loyalty, and bringing in money for your company. People and culture are integral aspects of our consulting practice along with being at the core of our internal operations. In fact, we’ve written a few articles on these topics including 3 key ways employee engagement can bolster culture as well as leadership succession planning.

The keystone of our efforts in building our own empowering and resilient organizational culture is our Talent Culture and Performance Strategy. This living document sets the foundation that informs the multitude of small decisions that engage our employees, define who we are, and drive our culture forward. In addition, it’s also an essential part of our recruiting process as we use it to gauge the cultural fit of all prospective hires.

Our Talent Culture and Performance Strategy

We’re proud to share our own Realize Talent Culture and Performance Strategy. Inside, you’ll see that we cover 8 key foundational blocks to our culture:

• Values that define and drive us
• High performance
• Impact and accountability
• Context, not control
• Highly aligned and mutually accountable
• Living wage and benefits
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Promotion, development, and recognition

We have found this strategy incredibly useful and are excited to share it far and wide. As you’re reading, here are some questions to consider: What’s your talent, culture, and performance strategy? Is it down on paper? Do your employees understand it? How did it affect your behaviour today?

If you haven’t already come across this article, check out this Harvard Business Review article titled How Netflix Reinvented HR. Our Talent Culture and Performance Strategy was inspired largely by Netflix’s deck of slides that are embedded in the article. Here’s a small – but mighty – excerpt to give you a taste:

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause.

Netflix