Azure Standard, a family owned and operated business that delivers bulk and natural foods across the country, had a problem.
Employees were not engaged. Their culture was suffering. And, despite being the biggest employer in their county, they were battling employee turnover at levels that made it difficult to scale.
The problem was not a unique one. Small and large companies alike increasingly are struggling to create a workplace culture that fosters employee investment, generates long-term growth and productivity, and avoids significant turnover and the myriad issues that accompany it.
The solution, however, was novel: a strengths-based culture model. And it could offer a framework for other companies battling turnover in a time when remote work, artificial intelligence (AI), and generational shifts in priorities have complicated the employee engagement puzzle.
A Strengths-Based Culture Model
In leaning into a strengths-based culture model, Azure Standard started prioritizing a greater understanding of how each member of the team naturally operates, then incorporated it into how the entire business operates.
Most organizations already prioritize their employees’ IQ and education, and their affective preferences or personality, while placing far less emphasis on their instincts—how they naturally take action when making decisions, problem solving, and approaching a task.
Azure Standard made it standard operating procedure to use the Kolbe A Index to find out how every employee naturally operates, embedding it into their hiring practices, their leadership development, their performance management, and their overall culture.
The new approach has been a clear success, with turnover down 40 percent in key roles since implementing their strengths-based strategies.
According to Azure Standard Chief Experience Officer Karen Slusher, “It was the missing piece. It’s given us permission to stop asking people to be someone else as an organization. Now we have the whole person and not just two-thirds of the person. And we’re intervening before people burn out, before they’re frustrated, before some conflict arises.”
Top Performers Often Will Walk Away Before They Complain
Here’s the thing…unless you ask someone to take an objective assessment, you’re not going to know how they naturally get things done. Your rockstars are going to tell you they can do it all. And they probably can for a while. But it’s unsustainable.
Sometimes it happens so slowly you don’t realize it’s even a problem. Then, suddenly they leave, and you’re shocked they quit.
But don’t let the silence fool you. We recently surveyed a wide range of professionals about their current workplace experiences—stress, energy, retention, productivity.
We found some pretty shocking things, including:
- 60 percent of workers have no energy left for their personal lives after work.
- 38 percent of professionals say their stress levels are unsustainable.
- 86 percent report physical stress symptoms (lost sleep, headaches, strained relationships).
- And a very big reason for that: 42 percent spend more than a quarter of their week forcing work that fights their natural instincts.
And here’s the kicker: “Tasks that fit what I do best” (40 percent) rivals “compensation and benefits” (41 percent) as a top-two job satisfaction driver.
In other words, we’re dealing with a silent crisis of “misfit work.”
But There Is Good News, Too
When organizations assign work based on HOW people naturally operate—not just job titles—energy retention doubles, sustainable stress improves 80 percent, and job hunting drops 70 percent.
That means there are clear, decisive steps you can take to keep your employees engaged and productive. Here are three immediately actionable steps I recommend, based on my decades of experience in the human performance space:
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Find clarity in your team’s instinctive strengths and get more done with less friction.
Get crystal clear on your own strengths and the strengths of everybody on your team, in all three parts of the mind.
If you’re not familiar, there are three facets of the mind that drive performance. They’re formally called the cognitive, affective, and conative. At Kolbe, we refer to them as the thinking, feeling, and doing parts of the mind.
If you don’t have clarity on your strengths in all three parts, it’s much more difficult to create a culture where everyone is free to be themselves and thrive. When you’re clear on your strengths, decisions become easier, and you can quickly spot where everyone should be spending their energy.
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Commit your team’s energy to what moves the business forward.
Once you have clarity about everybody’s strengths, make wise choices each day about how to commit those strengths to the best and highest use of that energy. Perhaps more importantly, learn who to go to for different tasks, and know when to say, “No,” to new commitments to save time and energy.
If a project is going to make your team work against their grain for long periods of time, you’re going to burn them out. You can’t build the culture you want when that’s happening.
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Collaborate in ways that build a team that thrives, not just survives.
This is a big one. A great culture thrives on collaboration.
Start getting strategic about who should work with whom for various projects and when team members should be working alone to accomplish their goals. You can quickly put together ad-hoc teams that are the most productive when you know how to combine strengths to maximize energy and output.
A Strengths-Based Culture Is a Long-Term People Solution
When you can find clarity on your team’s strengths, commit to them, and use them to make collaboration intentional, you’ll find that your team operates with effortless performance because they’re no longer bogged down with misfit work.
This path not only reduces turnover for your organization (Azure Standard is no exception to the rule), but it empowers your team members to be themselves and takes away the stress that comes with tasks that don’t fit them. Nothing will be better for your culture long-term.
In other words: If you build with strengths in mind, they will stay. Ignore how they operate, and watch them walk away.
