Company culture is one of the important business development aspects. This is where companies embrace innovation, creativity, and collaboration. In the contract workforce, you can form an integrative culture to combine knowledge and stand out in the modern competitive market. But you must agree and maintain good communication, negotiation skills, and understanding of business and legal agreements. Here is how you can merge two companies in the contractor workforce.
Identify Your Differences and Similarities
We all understand that a contractor works independently on a contract basis. You may venture into self employment and hire professionals to work as home builders. But in the construction sites you will come across the roofers, plumbers, and many other contractors. So, it becomes necessary to merge your activities and offer services as a team.
The overall benefit is delivering quality services and easy management of the workers. However, the first steps to integrative culture as two contractors are sitting and identifying your differences and similarities. This is where each person defines their culture. And if your similarities outweigh the differences, then you can work as a team.
How do you identify the similarities? You can start it by each party defining how they carry out their tasks. Secondly, you can explain details of management practices and finally come into conclusion of how you can contribute to the integrative culture.
Here are simple aspects to focus on while making decisions:
- How the other party makes decisions on their contracts
- Who is involved in the decision-making processes?
- What practices do they put in place to motivate employees?
Define the Culture You Want as Companies
Defining what you want as a company can be the most challenging task because you must abandon some of your cultures to match the deal. First, after identifying the similarities, you only have a few things to straighten up and form the union rules. But when it comes to differences, you must make firm adjustments.
Adjustments involve identifying culture gaps and closing them. For instance, if you want to merge with the roofing company, you must understand how they source their roofing materials and which supplier they have partnered with. Then, how do their professionals collaborate during the roofing project? By identifying all these aspects, you can come up with an agreement on which direction to follow.
Once you define and make adjustments of the new culture, you must create an integrated culture vision. For example, the impression you would want to create in your industry and how your employees will work as a team. This goes beyond the individual company’s mission, vision, and the way of defining value statements.
Ask the Employees for Input
You wouldn’t wake up one day and announce to the employees that you want to introduce them to an integrated culture. Or inform them that the company policies are changing immediately because we have merged with a certain company. No! It’s so unreasonable as it kills the employees’ morale.
Employees have various opinions about business culture. Many have worked with various corporations, like waterp roofing contractors or pavers. So, you must listen to their views because they can help avoid wrong unions that may kill your business growth.
Ideally, create anonymous surveys to encourage them to speak their mind. You can start by asking their views about the integrated culture and their experience before. Then, analyze surveys and look for the recurring patterns in their responses.
Afterward, send out another survey to gather more information regarding specific points you gathered from the previous survey. Go in-depth and request them to address the pain points in detail. You can address the company you need to partner with and learn more how it’s perceived in the market. For instance, if it’s a local roofing contractor who offers low quality services, you will easily learn about them and call off the deal.
Speak Out Your Expectations to Employees
Once you have consulted your employees about the integrative culture you intend to form, educate them about your expectations. Ideally, call all the employees for an orientation and then have a sitting as individual company employees.
You may have worked generally with simple supervision as your culture. And eventually, you have formed an integrative culture where employees must be team-oriented and post regular work progress updates. Then, you must communicate to your team what you expect of them during progress reporting.
On the other hand, the employees may have gotten used to simple tasks that encourage working independently. Lack of better communication on the changes can affect a sensitive employee, especially, who is introverted.
Moreover, inform them about their insurance covers and other benefits after merging the companies. Ensure your employees are satisfied by proving you have heard their needs. Also, ensure they understand getting into partnership and forming an integrative culture benefits the company in growth and experience.
Align a Top Team for the Planned Cultural Direction
Role modeling and leadership alignment are critical to improving both companies’ success. So, after signing legal agreements at the real estate attorneys office, choose a team that will lead the employees. You can choose the team from the managerial positions of both companies and guide them through your new culture rules.
Besides leading the workers through the integrative culture direction, the team must have values like integrity. Being honest and practicing good moral principles is the blind spot for many companies. This is essential for the top teams in making decisions.
Another quality of a good team is communication with the workers and self-awareness. They must be aware of their strengths and weaknesses when handling business matters. And in addition to all is people with gratitude. Gratitude creates higher self-esteem and reduces anxiety.
The team members must be agile to make better decisions when carrying out the projects and also have courage and respect for all people. Treating people with respect especially when you adapt to a new culture is essential. However, they must have the courage to point out wrongs.
Hire Candidates Who Will Adapt to the Culture
When hiring new workers, let’s say you are a screened in porch contractor; you must assess the candidates carefully. It’s always tempting to interview the person and offer them available positions. This happens if they have certifications and a good curriculum vitae. But that would not be better for your culture.
Apart from being a professional, you must make decisions as a company owner to determine whether the professional is a good cultural fit. If they don’t qualify, then they would end up with much trouble cooperating with other employees in the company.
You don’t necessarily need to hire workers from the same ethnic group or same gender to have a good culture. Rather employees of different age groups and backgrounds will bring different points of view. This helps the leadership team tackle various challenges facing your merged companies.
However, that doesn’t mean you disqualify all the candidates. A certain candidate may have good qualifications for the job but lacks knowledge of adherence to the culture. You can invest in short-term training if they are willing to learn and work with the team to bring value. Suppose they are uncomfortable with the work environment; then you shouldn’t bother changing their mind.
Let Employees Build Relationships
When workers see each other as colleagues, they will embrace the integrative culture and offer value. This is the virtue that many companies have discovered. You don’t have to let employees see each other as two groups. Instead, let them form relationships in less formal circumstances and learn from each other.
Employees can share different expertise and achieve great things together by educating others with little knowledge about their field. For instance, if someone has worked with the home heating oil company, they can advise better on matters of home heating and cooling.
The same case if you are a foundation contractor, you can learn from a specific employee who has worked with other foundation contractors. This quality of learning is what pushes the company’s growth. If you are builders and roofing experts combined, you can plan and set up football teams to play over the weekend. Other activities to form good relationships are planning lunch, dinners, and hiking events.
Digitize the Workplace (Effective Training Program)
Apart from spending time together during the day, you must digitize the workplace with digital tools to enhance interactivity. This helps the workers to interact and feel they are part of the same team.
During the day, you may get busy with projects and fail to interact. This is because the team leaders organize workers in groups to carry out specific tasks. You can enhance communication and simple training through digital tools during the employees’ free time.
What would be the best tool for interactivity as framing contractors? Platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp are the best since this field would be hard to use intranet communication. It makes it possible for the employees to interact while at home by sharing vital information regarding the company.
However, some construction companies may have the office team and the manual workers. The office teams are normally the managers and other top officials. They can communicate well with the internet platform because various documents can be uploaded on the platform. For instance, if the hiring manager intends to hire new employees, they can outline the expectations for the other managers to learn.
Never Forget to Recognize Each Employees Achievements
As merged companies, never get satisfied with the integrative culture and leave out the hardworking employees without recognition. The culture’s purpose is to motivate employees to deliver the best for the company, but when it comes to the individual achievements, reward individually.
Employees who feel their contribution hasn’t been recognized longer will lose their work enthusiasm. As an employer, you must create a culture of recognizing and rewarding passionate employees in your company. You can recognize the employees by:
- Recognizing the employees’ birthdays
- Giving a certain team a shoutout when their project gets a positive review
Many companies promote their employees after making significant achievements. But you can also reward them with shopping vouchers and other gifts. Rewarding creates a lot of healthy competition with the aim of getting recognized and this pushes the company to higher heights of success.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
It’s nearly impossible to live in the modern world without stress. The work environment can sometimes be stressful despite setting some less formal times for interactivity. As such, every employee needs at least 80 hours a week to get refreshment. So, what is the best approach to helping employees manage stress? Encourage them to take all the allotted vacation days to have some refreshments. Also, offer access to mental, physical, and spiritual health care. In most companies, they schedule breaks during the workday.
Creating a work life balance encourages the employees to embrace the integrative culture by allowing them to get into a different environment from the job. Once the employee returns to work, they have a new mind and the enthusiasm to carry out their tasks. Moreover, the employees feel valued if the employer recognizes they need good care of their general health.
Schedule Regular Check-Ins
Over months, schedule a regular check-in to encourage employees. Holding a meeting with the employees and sharing various company issues promotes culture. You will easily learn the progress of new employees, especially how they are adapting to the new field.
Secondly, employees in the modern competitive world want to offer value to the community. As such, regular check-ins encourage them to discover their weak points and improve themselves to reach specific goals. There are also employees who don’t get to the forefront of the company projects but carry out their tasks in quieter ways. These employees need to feel supported too.
Creating an integrative culture in the contractor workforce is a sensitive process. After identifying and fixing the new culture gaps, you must speak to the employees to condition them for new rules and policies. However, if you get to merge with the right contractor, you will grow your businesses by thriving in the competitive market as you offer services in packages. Your team management will also be easier.
