5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Company Culture
How much thought have you put into your company's culture lately? Fostering a strong company culture is essential to having a healthy work environment. A strong culture leads to satisfied employees. In turn, this improves retention, heightens performance, and makes recruiting staff easier. A positive company culture even results in 59% less turnover. Overall, saving your business time and money in the future.
What is Company Culture?
Flat screen TVs, free breakfast, and foosball tables don't make up your culture. Although those are great perks, they don't represent your company's culture. The definition of culture is:
"The shared values, attributes, and characteristics of an organization."
Or, if you like equations:
Culture = Values + Behaviour
Where to Start
First, choose values important to you. Then create incentives and rewards that motivate people to follow those values. Don't just incentivize performance. Incentivize behaviour too.
For example, Sarah runs a sales department and only gives bonuses based on deals closed. Then, she presents the employees that made the top sales every month. Davina never mentions any other metrics or aspects of their job. So, Sarah's employees often cut corners and compromise values to hit sales goals. Since that's the only valued metric, it's the only thing her employees strive for.
Like Sarah, Davina runs a sales department and gives bonuses based on closed deals. Davina also rewards fostering client relationships, teamwork, and quality of work. Every month, she gives shoutouts to employees that follow these values. This entices her employees to follow company values.
5 Tips for a Strong Company Culture
Stating your values and measuring what's important is vital to your culture. Once that's in place, there are more things you can put in place to improve your company culture.
Hire the Right People
Your culture starts with the people you hire! You can always try to motivate employees once they're on board. It's not easy to encourage them if their values don't already align with your company's. Look for candidates that are a good culture fit.
Connect Your People to a Purpose
Communicate your values and purpose to employees. Believing they are a part of a bigger purpose will motivate them to act according to your values.
Embrace Strong Communication
Communication can be hard to manage. This includes communication between employees, managers with their employees, and employees with customers. These all reflect your culture. Encourage managers to communicate openly and honestly with employees as a good example. If useful, schedule monthly or quarterly one-on-ones to talk and embrace transparency.
Use Positive Reinforcement
Like our earlier example, measuring and rewarding your values is important. Peer-to-peer recognition is one of the most effective ways to encourage your values to employees. Don't expect your employees to live by your values if you don't incentivize them!
Give and Request Feedback
Giving productive feedback is a skill that everyone should learn. Receiving feedback can be even tougher. Encourage your team to provide you with feedback to create a collaborative workspace. Then, employees won't be holding anything in and will be more open and honest.