How to cultivate a positive attitude amongst your staff

Neil Tilley is the founder of Upstream Solutions and says defining a culture is the key to a positive environment.

“My theory is that most every new employee, and including myself, comes to work with an attitude of ‘I want to do the best I can and I’m going to add value and I’ll do the right thing by my customers and by my clients’. Then because we’re all humans it all gets messed up based on the inter-relationships that we have with each other.

“We’ve done a lot of effort in deciding a culture or a set of ethics that we wish to do business with, but most importantly a set of rules about how we want to get along with each other. Once we formed that culture, as a very small company everybody who comes along gets educated in that culture and either decides that they’re going to like those rules and fit in with them or they can leave and go somewhere else.

“We have a term called FiFo, which most people could guess what that means, (Fit in or F*ck Off) but basically it’s a set of rules that define how we work and get along with each other.

“FiFo is about helping people recognise that getting along with other people is a significant efficiency gain in your business. And if you’re someone who’s a super intellectual person and can add lots of value to a business but the way you go about operating really distresses everybody else around you, you might be adding extra value but you’re taking it away from all those other people.”

Read more about Neil Tilley and Upstream Solutions.