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Workplace Culture and Retention

Unless you’ve built a club from the ground up, every one of us has inherited a workforce, and for that matter, a club’s workplace culture. Some of us have walked into organizations where the service culture functions as the cornerstone of the operation and others have joined an organization that needed a makeover. But let’s be honest, the culture of our respective clubs needs to evolve with the labor force and increased member expectations.

A little more than five years ago I inherited a dedicated and hardworking team at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Md.—one that the membership embraced and celebrated. The distinguishing characteristic was their length of service. While our workplace culture was and still is our greatest strength, a key and contributing factor to our operational challenges was an overemphasis on tenure, and not enough emphasis on productivity. Our second challenge was an aging employee base in a competitive job market.

Knowing that change was and always is inevitable, we stopped talking about it. Why? Because it scares and disrupts. We instead focused on evolving and we still are. Yes, it is a play on words, but our team responded and so has our membership. Throughout our evolution we’ve been able to not only maintain a dedicated and hardworking team, we’ve been able to add to it. This year Columbia Country Club celebrated 112 employees who have five or more years of dedicated service. Their combined experience totals 1,904 years. We’ve been able to accomplish this with a concerted effort and focus on the following ingredients: evolution, communication, standardization, hospitality, tradition, enthusiasm and member engagement.

The Role of Tradition and Culture

Like many other traits, tradition can be seen and heard throughout the club. Generally speaking, the focus is largely on the membership, as many of our members are living time capsules and major contributors to the club’s history. The other part of the equation is the role that employees play. We are the conduit to not only maintaining traditions, but communicating and starting new ones. Our members have embraced the role that employees play and have allowed our team to maintain and start new traditions that support our service culture. Some examples are staff parties, celebrations recognizing years of service and professional achievements, off campus employee trips, Monday golf, member and employee golf outings, naming hallmark events after long-time employees, personalized birthday cards and our employee “wall of fame” just to name a few.

It’s no coincidence that our expressions of culture take on numerous forms and is often a combination
of multiple ingredients. More than 90 percent of our employee traditions involve some sort of member component. Our success and ability to not only maintain but also create new traditions is a shared passion of enthusiasm for Columbia Country Club. As Brian Chesky, the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb has stated, “culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.” There will never be a one-size-fits-all workplace culture. A club’s culture should be rooted in the ingredients that are important and vital to your club’s success.

I’ve always believed that culture isn’t taught, it’s caught. If a leader can show employees what he or she loves, the employees will catch it. It starts at the top and it starts with enthusiasm.

William T. Duthe is general manager at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Md. He can be reached at 301-951-5000 or [email protected].

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