How Is Your Culture?

Written by: Andrew Jason

Photo by Hillary Ehlen

Feature photo: Pat Traynor, Andy Scott and David Hunnicutt. David Hunnicutt was the CEO of WELCOA (the Wellness Council of America) for 20 years. This organization worked with corporate partners on building healthy and high improving workplaces. Hunnicutt and the Dakota Medical Foundation team developed P5 Performance.

What if you had a way of tangibly measuring your culture?

What if you had a step by step plan to improve purpose, performance, people and the other essentials of running a business?

What if you could get all that help for free?

Do we have your attention yet?

David Hunnicutt, Pat Traynor, Andy Scott and the rest of the team at Dakota Medical Foundation are out to create better workplaces one “P” at a time. With their new P5 Performance, they are creating step-by-step data driven ways of measuring and improving your company culture.

“What the P5 initiative is all about is creating healthy, high performing cultures,” said Hunnicutt, a renowned industry leader. “The interesting thing about culture is, when you walk into a business – small business, medium sized business or large business – you can feel the culture. It’s palpable. There are some places that are toxic and there are some places where you say, ‘I would love to work here.’ But you can feel it.

“The interesting thing is that you can build culture. That’s what this is all about. How do you create a culture? If you look at the science and what the great businesses have done to create a healthy, high performing culture, you need to do five things.”

Meet the Five Ps

Let Hunnicutt introduce you to the five Ps that can revolutionize your business.

Purpose

“You need to have a great sense of purpose. The employees, managers and leaders need to have a sense of purpose bigger than themselves.”

People

“You have to have great people and those people have to have great relationships. They have to fall in love with one another. They have to be great fans of one another and working together.”

Place

“You need a great place. It doesn’t mean you need a new facility, but people need the right tools, right light and have the right surroundings to be productive.”

Practices

“You need to have health promoting practices during the course of the day. The practices are things like non-smoking policies, healthy eating policies, giving people the opportunity to move during the course of the day. Those little things make a big difference. If you can do three or four small things, you can eliminate about 80 percent of the risks for a lot of problems that businesses are having.”

Performance

“The last P is performance. That’s all about bottom line outcomes. That’s about getting stuff done and making some noise. Here’s the interesting thing, when people look to build culture, they all start at performance. They skip the first four and start at performance and wonder why it doesn’t work. What we want to do is we want to show them how to do this step by step by step by taking them through the five Ps.”

The way it works

  1. Fill out your business assessment at p5performance.org/assessments to see how your business ranks.
  2. Once you have your scores, you will get sent their Thrive-in-Five processes that will give you step-by-step instructions on how to fix your weak areas.
  3. You can sign up for live training events. The next one will be October 17-18 at Dakota Medical Foundation. Watch the p5performance.org for more information.
  4. Follow the steps and enjoy your life.

Assess Your Own Business

The beauty of P5 Performance is that it’s all data driven. By actually completing the assessment, you will be able to directly see how your business stacks up against the average. Ideally, you want all your responses to be one of the first two answers. If it is below that, that is an area your business should focus on. Below are 10 sample questions to get you thinking about it. You can fill out the full assessment at p5performance.org/assessments.

Purpose Questions

1. In this organization, there is currently a strong sense of shared purpose.

  • Very True
  • True
  • Somewhat True
  • Untrue
  • Very Untrue

2. In this organization, employees are provided the opportunity to volunteer and give-back to improve the community and the world around them.

  • Strongly Agree
  • Agree
  • Neither Agree Nor Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Strongly Disagree

People Questions

3. In this organization, there is a strong, positive and healthy culture that brings out the best in employees.

  • Very True
  • True
  • Somewhat True
  • Untrue
  • Very Untrue

4. Employees at all levels believe that this organization cares about their lives, careers, and health and well-being.

  • Very True
  • True
  • Somewhat True
  • Untrue
  • Very Untrue

Places Questions

5. This organization has created a workplace environment that makes the healthy choice the easy choice.

  • Very True
  • True
  • Somewhat True
  • Untrue
  • Very Untrue

6. This organization promotes physical activity throughout the day by providing standing workstations and promoting standup/walking meetings for:

  • Everyone
  • The Majority
  • Some
  • Only A Select Few
  • No One

Practices Questions

7. In this organization, improving employee health and well-being is one of the highest priorities.

  • Strongly Agree
  • Agree
  • Neither Agree Nor Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Strongly Disagree

8. In this organization, there are clear goals and aggressive strategies in place to improve the health, well-being and performance of the employees.

  • Strongly Agree
  • Agree
  • Neither Agree Nor Disagree
  • Disagree
  • Strongly Disagree
  • Performance Questions

9. When it comes to engaging employees, this organization is:

  • Consistently Successful
  • Successful Most Of The Time
  • About Average
  • Not As Successful As It’d Like To Be
  • Not At All Successful

10. When it comes to maintaining and improving the health, well-being and performance of the employees, this organization is:

  • Consistently Successful
  • Successful Most Of The Time
  • About Average
  • Not As Successful As It’d Like To Be
  • Not At All Successful
  • 20 Little Things That Make A Huge Difference

It doesn’t have to be difficult to enact real change. Here are 20 things you can do today that will make a difference in your culture.

  1. Master the mindset
  2. Be in bed by 9:30
  3. Create your list by 9:35
  4. Count your blessings by 9:40
  5. Make your bed
  6. Show up early (with your jelly bean)
  7. Get your ducks in a row
  8. Get in the rhythm
  9. Celebrate every. Single. Day
  10. Move (a bunch)
  11. Eat real food… Regularly
  12. Get your preventive screenings
  13. Establish an emergency fund
  14. Identify your superpower(s)
  15. Build your (LIFE) support system
  16. Keep getting up when down
  17. Create a shine/purpose statement
  18. Do what other do-gooders do
  19. Serve and do good for all
  20. Grind with a glad heart

P5 Performance was developed by Dakota Medical Foundation.

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