Remuneration is the culture

There are three main reasons people sell their home.

Death. Debt. Divorce.

Not ambition. Not a fresh start. Not because they saw a bigger place they liked the look of. Most people who put a house on the market are doing it because something has gone wrong, or is about to. A parent has died. A marriage has ended. The money has run out.

That is the customer. Walking into an estate agent, usually a bit raw, usually not in the best week of their life, hoping the person across the desk is going to be decent with them.

Now look at how the industry is set up to receive them.

Always be closing

If you have seen Glengarry Glen Ross, you know the score. Hard sell. Revenue targets. Commission structures built around closing the deal this week, this month, this quarter. Always be closing.

That posture is not unique to estate agency, but estate agency has a particular reputation for it. And that reputation is not an accident. It is the predictable output of how the industry pays its people.

I worked inside a large estate agency group once. When I joined, the senior leadership team was paid almost entirely on revenue generation. Not profitable growth. Not customer satisfaction. Not repeat business. Revenue.

So that is what they ran at. Pure sales mode. Every conversation was a closing opportunity. Every target was a number. The human being in the chair opposite was a transaction waiting to be executed.

You can guess how that felt from the customer side. And you can probably guess what it did to the complaints data, the engagement scores, and the long-term commercial performance.

The culture deck was not the problem

The organisation had the usual cultural apparatus. Values on the wall. Customer-centric language. Service principles. Training programmes. A perfectly respectable internal narrative about doing the right thing by people in difficult moments.

None of it was landing.

Because the moment a director walked out of a culture session, the scoreboard in their office still said one thing. Revenue. The bonus was built on revenue. The promotion criteria were built on revenue. The quarterly business reviews opened with revenue. Everything that actually drove their decisions pointed in one direction.

You cannot train your way out of that. No amount of coaching, no amount of leadership development, no amount of internal comms will change the behaviour of a senior leader whose pay depends on ignoring what the comms are saying.

How you pay people helps to create the culture. If the two are pointing in different directions, remuneration wins.

What we changed

We redesigned the senior leadership reward model. Revenue stayed in the picture because the business still had to make money. But we added two things that had not been in the mix.

The first was sustainable profitability. Not short-term revenue. Actual profit, measured over a longer horizon, with enough weighting that short-term stunts became counterproductive. If you closed a deal at a loss to hit your quarter, it no longer helped your pay. It hurt it.

The second was customer outcomes. We moved NPS into the bonus calculation. Actual net promoter scores, measured in the field, tied to actual money. If customers left the process feeling like they had been looked after, the leaders running those teams were rewarded. If they did not, the leaders felt it.

It sounds mechanical when I describe it like that. It was a spreadsheet exercise with a lot of negotiation and some uncomfortable conversations. But the point of it was not the mechanism. It was the signal. If we were serious about customer outcomes and sustainable performance, those things had to be in the pay packet. Otherwise the culture work was scenery.

Selling through service

The best people in estate agency, the ones who have been doing it for decades and still enjoy it, understand something the training programmes rarely capture. People who are selling a home because of death, debt or divorce do not need to be sold to. They need to be helped. Done properly, the selling comes through the service, not in spite of it.

That was the behaviour we wanted. Calm, competent, human. The sort of interaction that builds a business over ten years, not ten minutes. A service people would actually recommend to a friend in the same position.

The culture language was already there. The training was already there. The people were not incapable. They had been asked, quite reasonably, to follow the money, and the money had been pointing somewhere else.

What I took from it

Most of the culture problems I have seen since that were genuinely culture problems, rather than capability problems, were doing the same thing. The behaviour leaders were rewarded for was not the behaviour the organisation said it wanted. And then everybody wondered why the values posters were not landing.

If there is a gap in your organisation between what you say you value and what your senior leaders actually do, the first place to look is not training, or coaching, or culture. It is how they are paid.

Read what your top team is paid on. Read it the way an outsider would. If a stranger looked at that document and had to guess what the organisation cared about, what would they say? Is that the same thing the strategy deck says? Is it the same thing you tell candidates at interview? Is it the same thing you told the board last quarter?

If those things are aligned, good. If they are not, the behaviour is not going to change no matter how much training you put in. You are asking your leaders to ignore their own pay. Most of them will not.

Remuneration is the culture.