Smart staffing can lead to higher profits and happier customers! Build a winning culture to find quality employees and keep them engaged?  

Savvy hiring and development of employees are essential. These are things our talent team pays close attention to here at ClearVision. Finding and developing the right people makes building and retaining a winning team much easier. What we look for is people who fit with our culture, and that’s something any organization can do! It doesn’t cost any money to identify the right fit, nor is it expensive to build a culture! In fact, you already have one whether you’re actively cultivating it or not. 

Where culture comes from 

David Friedfeld, president and co-owner of ClearVision Optical, tells a story about culture. He talks about speaking with someone whose organization spent over $100,000 developing a culture. 

“We spent all this money building this culture, and no one acts like it,” she explained to David. “You don’t even have a handbook, but everyone here honors the values we spent over $100,000 coming up with.” 

It’s something he likes to reflect on because it shows that culture doesn’t come from a company spending big on developing a list of buzzwords for your business card. It comes from the people you hire, the team you develop, and the way everyone at your organization treats each other and your customers. 

What you should aim for is making it a consistent culture, keeping in mind that culture is how you act. One way to guarantee a good culture is to understand what your employees are looking for—if they’re happy, they’ll act like it! 

Building a winning culture for free 

A lot has changed over the more than 70 years ClearVision has been around, but a few things that are always important to employees are feeling secure in their job, knowing they can grow in an organization, and receiving reasonable compensation and benefits. 

You might ask how it’s possible to pay employees what they feel is reasonable compensation and benefits. Everything we do here, from our generous maternal leave policy to our family-friendly two-hour passes, is paid for by internal production. By improving our output, we can pay for our team and the benefits that are important to them. 

But you don’t improve output with the wave of a magic wand. You make it work by offering employees appreciation and recognition. For example, we have what we call “kudos.” You send a message with a hashtag, #kudos, and those messages are all collected. You send kudos when somebody in the company does something fun or outstanding. It’s always another employee who sends these. David himself was shocked by how powerful these kudos can be: He didn’t realize it until he saw people printing those kudos and putting them on their desks. 

We also encourage people to make decisions. We understand that sometimes people are going to make a mistake. But they will learn from that. And if we make sure they understand that, they’ll feel more empowered to do their jobs and be productive. 

Our motto is centered on treating people how you want to be treated. And the company takes that motto seriously. When you identify the winning culture you want to build and do it in a consistent and employee-centric way, you’ll be amazed at the results!