SGEi
The Architect Of High-Performance Organizational Culture

In the current experience economy, balancing employee experience (EX) with customer experience (CX) has become crucial for a business to be more productive, profitable, and deliver the quality their customers expect. A company that enables organizations to address this requirement is SGEi—a catalyst in transforming customer experience cultures and elevating individual and team performances. Over the years, the company has evolved within the culture space, offering customized consultation and coaching services. Today, SGEi is the expert in elevating brands and businesses by creating a positive and performance-focused culture.
In a conversation with Manage HR, Shane Green, the President of SGEi, mentions how the company is at the forefront of assisting customer-focused organizations in developing a culture that attracts the right talent, retains their team members longer, and engages employees to perform their best.

How has organizational culture evolved over the years, and what challenges have emerged?

Over the last couple of years, culture is no longer just an HR thing but a business thing that every owner and executive needs to be focused on. There is an emergence of a new generation of diverse and confident workers who never hesitate to express their views regarding core business operations, their work, personal needs, and socio-economic and environmental affairs. Simultaneously, all employees have realized that remote working is possible and that the traditional way of working no longer maximizes their strength, talent, and wellbeing. A lack of response from some companies has caused employees and managers to resign from their jobs at an unprecedented rate.

What is your unique approach to enabling culture transformation?

We call our approach ‘culture hacking,’ which is an intentional and organic approach to making small positive changes to an employee and manager’s experience at work. We focus on evolving manager habits and the various employee mechanisms such as recruitment, onboarding, communication, performance management, and social engagement to improve the employee experience. We begin at the top of an organization and focus on the attitude and actions of managers, which have the biggest impact on how employees feel about what they do and whom they do it for.

What distinctive projects are you engaged in?

Traditionally, our focus has been around large-scale culture transformations for big companies, mostly Fortune 500s. However, in the past couple of years, we have shifted our focus to helping small businesses and start-ups too. Although smaller companies face similar challenges to their large counterparts, their loss is far greater if they fail to hire the right people. In response, we have developed the Culture Hacker Small Business Toolbox, which offers clients the tools, training, insights, and consultation to create a culture that will attract, engage, and retain the right people.

We utilized the Culture Hacker suite of products with a client who had 150 employees and lacked a strong HR infrastructure. Through our culture hacker assessment, we identified over twenty key moments in their employee journey that were not supporting the type of culture they wanted and their business needed. From this information, we were able to implement a dozen hacks or small changes that had an immediate impact on their culture. We also established a longer strategy with clear objectives around having better performance conversations, implementing values with tangible behaviors, offering leadership training, and defining their employer brand and marketing it better. We also identified the key leadership habits that their managers needed to focus on to elevate how their employees felt on a daily and weekly basis. We implemented habits such as weekly performance meetings between top managers, daily operations meetings for the front-line teams, and having managers spend time every week connecting the dots between a team’s performance and business outcomes.

How is SGEi unique in the organizational culture space?

We continue to view employee experience and culture from a customer experience and brand perspective and look for ways to elevate the performance of individuals and teams. Rather than helping you copy what another business has done, we design and implement an employee and manager experience that will create a culture that will deliver on your brand promise and improve performance. Our customized top-down approach emphasizes leadership responsibilities and ensures the right amount of emotional intent in key moments of the employee journey to create a better relationship between the employee or manager and the organization.

Although we are a U.S.-based company, we have an extensive global reach with projects across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Asia.