The Missing Piece of Your Corporate Culture

Franchise brands with strong cultures have extremely high satisfaction and engagement among their franchisees. In fact, Franchise Business Review’s research shows that brands that score high on satisfaction outperform brands with low satisfaction on every key performance metric.

Strong cultures don’t just happen on their own. They are the result of leaders dedicated to fostering an environment of trust, growth, learning, and improvement. But truly great company cultures are more than just a set of shared values, norms, and principles–no matter how effectively they are integrated into the company’s day-to-day actions and decisions.

Research cited in this Harvard Business Review article points out that this type of cognitive culture is only half the story. They found that emotions are central to building the right culture:

“Countless empirical studies show the significant impact of emotions on how people perform on tasks, how engaged and creative they are, how committed they are to their organizations, and how they make decisions. Positive emotions are consistently associated with better performance, quality, and customer service—this holds true across roles and industries and at various organizational levels.”

Every organization has an emotional culture. Just like cognitive culture, emotional culture is driven by top management and should be supported at all levels throughout the organization. By consciously encouraging emotions, and shaping vehicles for expression, you can build an emotional culture that supports your larger goals.

As with any culture, emotional culture starts in the corporate office and will trickle down to your franchisees. So how do you take the emotional pulse? One way is to conduct an employee engagement survey of your corporate staff that includes questions about their levels of excitement, belonging, and happiness at work. The resulting data can be used to measure what motivates your team.

On the franchisee side, you can begin to get a sense of the broader emotional culture by looking closely at your franchisee satisfaction scores and feedback on specific questions:

My franchisor cares about my success

My fellow franchisees are supportive of each other

I enjoy operating this business

I enjoy being part of this organization

I feel I am a valued member of this organization

How has Your Attitude about your affiliation with your franchisor changed over the last year?

These responses will give you a window into the emotional culture that you’re cultivating within your organization. You can always conduct franchisee pulse surveys or add custom questions to your franchisee survey as well to gain even greater insights. With this data in hand you’ll have the tools you need to create and maintain a positive emotional culture.

Did you know FBR conducts employee engagement surveys and pulse surveys, in addition to franchisee satisfaction surveys? Contact us to learn more.

Related Content: eBook

The CEO’s Guide to Creating and Maintaining a Positive Culture in Franchising

Despite it’s critical importance, culture is frequently overlooked by leadership. This eBook provides practical advice for franchise leadership teams for creating and maintaining a culture that leads to greater productivity and profitability.

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