After reading Melissa Lim’s blog post on Organizational Culture, I began to think about how important this concept is in my own life as well. My family runs a few Subway Sandwich restaurants, one of which I had the opportunity to manage on my own this past summer. My dad and I discovered how our employees lacked these shared values and beliefs on how to act in an organization, and how they mainly focused on what was important to them and not to the business itself. We eventually realized that getting employees to intrinsically care about a business that isn’t their own is going to be a very tough task.

We also decided to implement a sort of Customer First strategy in which we attempted to train our employees with the correct etiquette around a customer. This included keeping questions and sentences about the customers order short and sweet; all while making a customer feel at home by effectively striking a casual conversation. The simple solution we initially used was to utilize the resources offered to us free of charge. The Subway Corporation has many courses online which we could get our employees to complete so they have a better understanding of the business. Also, offering simple incentives worked as well. We organized many little contests in which our employees joined in on friendly competition, at the end of which prizes were given to those who were at the top. At first this seemed like it would cause employees to become selfish in competition, but we also organized pizza parties and group prizes for the whole staff whenever we have a successful week to show our appreciation.

Doing simple things like this allowed our business to grow significantly and guided all our employees along one strong, unified, and effective path.