Today’s Ask the Expert column features Bill Scavone, president and COO of Weichert Real Estate Affiliates, Inc.
Q: How much does a winning culture contribute to the success of agents, and what are the key ingredients in building one?
A: A winning office culture can have a huge impact on your agents’ success and happiness. It’s also a selling point to potential agents and what helps retain the most talented ones. When the right culture is in place, it becomes attractive to others, and draws them in.
But building a winning culture takes time and effort.
As a company, you need to provide all the things necessary to help your agents go head-to-head with the competition and work together with them to be successful. At Weichert, we focus on building a collaborative, results-oriented culture to create a positive impact on agents, which positively impacts an office’s bottom line as a result.
We provide year-round coaching to help our affiliate owners and their associates improve their skills, which leads to greater success—and greater success leads to winning, and winning is what builds a more positive, success-oriented work culture. After all, who doesn’t want to be part of a winning team?
A culture of success and winning becomes magnetic, attracting people who want to be around other successful and motivated people. And this creates an atmosphere that clearly enhances retention.
We’ve observed that when you have that winning culture, everyone is so focused on their own success that they don’t get distracted—or obsess about—the competition.
A company with a positive culture is also able to determine what tools and technology will truly add to their bottom line and that of their associates. They make those resources available and actually put them to work.
By doing so, they’re not fixated on the next “magic pill” or what the competition is doing.
Transparency is another key component of a winning office culture. That means being clear with what management expects of sales associates and staff, and making sure sales associates and staff know what can be expected in return from management. Making the expectations clear, and agreeing upon them before hiring, is one example of transparency. Having your sales associates, staff and management meet regularly to openly discuss what’s working and what isn’t is another.
All of these things should be bound together by a set of core values you establish. These should not be mere words on a plaque, but an ingrained set of principles put into action in everyday situations. People know when what they value is (or isn’t) consistent with what the company values. If this is in alignment, a powerful, positive culture will thrive.
For more information, please visit www.weichertfranchise.com.
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