Rebranding Corporate Culture: Importance of Creating a Positive and Efficient Workplace to Achieve Business Growth with Amanda HarNess

Positive work culture is an avenue for greatness. It attracts talent, drives engagement, and impacts happiness. Culture is as influential as your business strategy because it either builds up or undermines your objectives. A multitude of factors plays in developing workplace culture, including leadership, management, philosophies, people, work environment, communication, values, and so much more. Most of us let our workplace culture form naturally, but what we don’t know is that there should be a system to follow. Not defining your workplace culture is a mistake, and we must end that. Today Amanda HarNess would shift some perspectives and swerve us in the right direction. Don’t miss this out because, in this session, she will talk about rebranding the company culture to create a unique business that harnesses the correct morals and mindsets. Now, let’s take a deep dive and discover more. --- Listen to the podcast here: Rebranding Corporate Culture: Importance of Creating a Positive and Efficient Workplace to Achieve Business Growth with Amanda HarNess Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Right now, we're in a time where a lot of things are changing, a lot of our attitudes about work and everything are shifting. There comes times in all of our lives that we need to shift our own attitudes. A lot of people refer to this as a rebranding. We're shifting our focus, shifting our businesses. Today, my guest, Amanda HarNess, is an entrepreneur who recently rebranded her business. Her business was called Kinetic Spark and now is Business Excelerated. --- Amanda, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much for joining in. First of all, tell us a little bit about the nature of your business, because you address a lot of these issues with work culture that we've been observing for quite some time now. I'm a business growth accelerator, and I'm a fractional COO. When you're in an operation seat, you're looking at a number of different things inside of a business. Not only are you looking at their day-to-day, how are their systems and processes, and how are they operating on a daily basis, but also, who is operating in the business. Without the people, we don't have the business.Share on X I do put a strong emphasis on how are we optimizing our people from a performance standpoint, engagement, how are we looking at things from a top-down approach when it comes to the trickle down effect of leadership, and taking a look at how we're communicating the long-term vision of the business, getting people engaged and invested in that, and carrying that over into the type of culture you're also building at the organization. How long have you been at this business? I have 11 years of experience in operations, but I've owned my own business for just under two years now. You've encountered a lot of businesses that are trying to expand and trying to set up the right culture. My question is, are most of your clients, most of the people you've historically worked with, focused on the expansion or focused on the culture? Does it tend to be a little bit of both? I think it tends to be a little bit of both. There is a little bit of a misconstrued perception of what it means to have a company culture. There is some reeducation that happens while we're working together or even just some adjustments and modifications. If we're making a number of changes in the business, oftentimes, that changes the culture. An example of culture that I like to use is not just we have ping pong tables and pajama Fridays. That might be part of culture, but that isn't culture in and of itself. Rebranding Corporate Culture: Culture is the norms of the business, how you agree to interact together with your clients. An example would be if a business is a hub-and-spoke type of model where you've got leadership in the middle, and everything has to go through them. All the spokes are all the people. The culture of that business is really reliant on the owner being the primary decision-maker, and there isn't a lot delegated to anyone else on the team to make their own decisions. That fosters a culture of people not feeling like they can have initiation for themselves or make their own decisions. They have to go to leadership for that. Another example might be whether or not leadership values the opinions of their employees. You can solicit feedback from your employees. Ultimately, as the leader, you're still the decision-maker as to whether or not you do anything with those opinions, but you can still take them into account, or are you just a C-suite where conversations only happen at the top. You guys make the decisions, and you just tell everyone else what they're doing. We can go on about opinions, whether which one's right, and which one's better, and whatever, but really it's just a matter of what culture works best for the people that are in it and for the type of growth or vision you have for your business. When a business is looking to expand its operations -- and I'm sure you work with a lot of people going from that startup stage to where they're starting to grow, grow more employees, grow a bigger client-base -- how often does a business need to completely shift their culture at that point in time? I don't know that I've ever had a business completely shift their culture. The longer the business -- if it's a legacy business, has been around for a long time -- then things are the way they are just because they're that way. You hear answers like, "Well, we've always done it that way." There might be some bigger cultural swings that happen in an older business just because they've gotten a lot more comfortable with one way of doing things. I don't know that there would ever be a complete cultural shift, because the owners and leadership started a business for a certain reason. They're going back to their why. Rebranding Corporate Culture: Culture has a lot to do with your why. They've obviously attracted a certain type of person to come in and be part of the team. That person has some kind of alignment in culture. Even if these businesses haven't sat down and fully defined in black and white what their culture is, they have grown their business and attracted members of a team, maybe indirectly. They've been attracted because of the culture, or they've built a certain way of being because of a culture. It's not necessarily a full shift but maybe a more clear and specific definition. How often do you observe aspects of a culture, whether it be the culture itself or the way that culture is applied, being a main factor in limiting a business' ability to thrive, expand, and grow like a lot of them are trying to do when they work with you? Sometimes, it can get in the way. Sometimes, it's not even really the culture; it's more just habits. That can be tied to culture, but people just get in the habit. They get in the habit of always making the decisions, or of always asking for feedback, or always turning to an external adviser before they make a decision or make a big move. It's really just what I think people get comfortable with. When I'm coming in, and I'm suggesting or recommending a shift in something, a modification, some kind of transformation, they can feel like a big change. Change doesn't always have to be uncomfortable though. I do try to make sure that it's not always unclear, scary, or uncomfortable, unsettling. Rebranding Corporate Culture: When someone is in the habit of doing things a certain way, it does take a little bit longer to maybe warm up to the idea of doing things a different way. Sometimes, that’s a little bit less culture but more just comfort with change. That brings up an interesting question about habits in general, because I think this applies to both business as well as our lives in general. We all get into habits. We all have habits that put us into ruts sometimes. What do you think is the right frequency or cadence in which any of us, anyone listening out there, should go about reevaluating their habits, even if it's not prompted by something else? They say, "Okay. I do this every day. I do this every week. Why? Let me see if it's still working for me." I guess it just depends, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If things are working for you, then why change it? When you go to reassess your habits and routines, just how you've done things, I would take a look more at your goals, whether those are personal or professional, but are the things I'm doing daily working in the direction or moving the needle toward that? If they're not, then it's time to maybe reassess your habits. If it is, then keep doing what you're doing. You said something there that, sometimes, very easily seen change can prompt someone to want to take a pause and look. Forcing yourself to maybe make sure that your everyday is moving the needle toward those goals is a little more intentional than just waiting for something to prompt you.Share on X That's mostly what I would look at. Are these serving me? Are they getting you where you want to go? One interesting thing I think about habits as well is that we’ve all been in a situation where we’ve encountered the person whose habits are so entrenched, they’re afraid of change, they’ve done the same thing, they’re so afraid of something different. What do you think is the best way to prevent that from happening to make sure that you don’t get in a situation where, “Okay, yes. Maybe these habits are serving me. They’re serving me now. I want to continue them,” they become so entrenched that it’s scary, the idea of ever changing it? I don't think everything needs to change. I think some habits are good for us to always stay the same. That's what creates a level of comfort. 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