What makes people want to come to work? | Leadership, connection & performance | Shelly McElroy

In this episode of the Bee Formless™ Flow Driven CEO Podcast, I connected with Shelly McElroy, Founder and CEO of Dream Culture, and her energy made this such a fun conversation about something that shapes almost every part of our working lives: culture.Shelly spent much of her career in hospitality, including five and a half years at Merivale as it grew from around 1,000 people to more than 3,000. It gave her a front-row seat to what happens when businesses scale and teams begin developing cultures of their own. I loved the way she distilled it: every organisation has a choice between creating a “culture by design” or ending up with a “culture by default.”We went into what happens when you take the values off the wall and look at how people actually behave. Who speaks in meetings and who never does? When was the last time someone received meaningful feedback? Are we rewarding performance or simply longevity? And one of my favourites from Shelly: “Does the room get brighter when you walk in or when you walk out?”There was also an interesting tension around technology and the future of work. We can automate more, move faster and become increasingly efficient, but are we actually performing better? Shelly believes the human skills underneath great workplaces are becoming even more important: eye contact, honest feedback, curiosity, knowing what motivates people and creating space for different generations to learn from one another.Shelly also spoke openly about her own experience of being bullied at work and how that helped fuel her desire to build a business, Dream Culture and her belief that culture cannot be a second thought. As she put it, “What you walk past is what you accept.”THE SHAPE SHIFT IN MOTIONAt the heart of this conversation was a shift from treating culture as something we say to recognising it as something we practise through behaviour, conversation and shared responsibility.LEARN (LETTING GO)✨ Values on a wall do not create culture.✨ Loyalty and longevity do not replace growth, feedback or performance.✨ Efficiency does not automatically mean we are performing better.UNLEARN (CREATE, REIMAGINE & RESHAPE)✨ Create culture by design rather than accepting culture by default.✨ Bring experienced and emerging leaders together to learn from one another.✨ Replace assumptions with conversations about how we want to work together.RELEARN (TEST & IMPLEMENT)✨ Turn values into behaviours people can see and be accountable for.✨ Make feedback part of everyday culture, not an occasional performance review.✨ Remember that what we walk past is what we teach others we will accept.ACTIVE RECOVERY (REFLECT & RESET)✨ Does the room get brighter when you walk in or when you walk out?✨ What are you accepting because nobody has challenged it?✨ As technology accelerates, what human connections do we need to protect?🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/shellymcelroy/🌐 http://dreamculture.com.au💭 Are you creating your culture by design, or allowing it to form by default?Book a Strategic Shape Shift Diagnostic to illuminate what needs to shift across leadership, business and brand, from the inside out.🔗 https://calendly.com/beeformless/strategicshapeshiftdiagnostic#beeformless #flowdrivenceo #dreamculture #futureofwork #values #humanconnection #insideouttransformation