What is company culture? How to improve your company’s culture? These questions might arise in your mind while thinking about a positive work environment. Isn’t it?
While individual teams have sub-culture of their own, company culture is always informed by the larger company values, missions, visions, and goals. But where to start?
Company culture is never a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Still, there are some easy, actionable company culture ideas that you can implement from now on to improve your company’s culture.
Being a top goal of leaders, let’s jump right in to give you an innovative take on how to improve your company’s culture.
How To Improve Your Company’s Culture
What’s the best way to improve your company’s culture? Is it the strategies, organizational procedures, or something else that needs to be worked on?
Here are the ways!
- Embrace Transparency
Transparency isn’t just positive for employees. A transparent company culture impacts the organization and produces highly engaged and productive employees.
Remember that trust is the foundation of a positive work environment. And if you wish to have an open and transparent company culture, the first step should be to ensure that your team is up-to-date and has organizational skills.
Moreover, outdated communication tools can be a significant barrier to transparency, primarily when you work in numerous offices and among various remote employers. Therefore, your team must have an easy and efficient way to connect with one another and share crucial information.
In addition to improving your communication and collaboration tools, another crucial step is to simply default to transparency.
This is a mental shift rather than a logical shift. So, for instance, instead of asking, ‘Is it necessary to share this?’, ask, ‘Is it necessary to conceal this?’
Here are some other ways:
- Share Successes
If you are going to do one thing to improve your company’s culture, do this! Openly share and recognize the successes of your employees, be they personal or professional.
It will be a significant motivation boost for the team to hear the positive results of their hard work.
- Share Challenges
You hire people for a reason. Being open about your or the company’s challenges presents opportunities for the teams to develop solutions together.
However, this doesn’t mean you must share every detail. But when it comes to solving complicated issues, you need to have diverse perspectives. And your employees can help you with this!
- Celebrate Team Wins
Just like an individual’s contribution is vital, so is celebrating the company’s team wins. By doing this, employees adopt an owner’s mentality when they are made to feel a part of the broader strategy team, thus improving transparency within the company.
- Help Employees Advance Their Careers
While celebrating employees and giving them feedback is vital, be sure to supplement positive recognition with employees for meaningful career planning & advancement as well.
According to resources, the most common reason employees leave a company is to get new and better career opportunities.
Thus, consider having a proper career growth chart. Chart what steps employees need to take for career advancement & accomplish their goals.
Thus, when career goals or opportunities are limited, providing employees with training opportunities can be an excellent way to invest in them.
- Offer Recognition To Employees
Employees who hardly receive any recognition throughout the year from their leaders are less likely to remain at the company next year.
To overcome such situations, it is vital to show employees that you value them and appreciate the contributions they have made to the company.
Openly recognizing employees who reflect company values reinforce the culture you wish to create. Moreover, giving them tools and resources will help them communicate effectively with their colleagues and work together to achieve a common organizational goal.
Thus, doing so will increase camaraderie between employees, encourage them to enhance their work performances, and retain them in the company.
- Give Flexibility To Employees
As employees balance their work and personal lives, the company can offer flexible schedules and open vacation policies to retain and keep them engaged.
When employees know that they can rely on their employer in times of need, it makes them feel appreciated. Beyond that, providing stipends and other perks can go a long way in improving the remote work experience for employees.
This leads to higher employee engagement, positively impacting profitability and productivity.
- Prioritize Timely Feedback
Employees crave constructive feedback, & simply implementing annual reviews doesn’t make feedback a priority. Moreover, it has been proven that many employees want consistent feedback to improve their work.
Thus, encouraging managers to arrange regular feedback sessions can make the team dynamic and move forward towards achieving organizational goals. Additionally, ensure timely feedback so that employees can act on it.
Moreover, ask your employees to give feedback as well. For instance, if you launch a new software, ask your team for their thoughts. Doing so will ensure that your decisions benefit your company’s culture, thereby making employees feel valued and acknowledged.
- Address Mental Health
Workplace burnout is on the rise. Be it in-office jobs or people working virtually, employees feel burnout when they do more than the required work.
As a result, addressing employee health & wellness to improve your company’s culture is more important than ever.
A helpful place to begin with, is to review the goals you have set for the employees. While being ambitious is essential, your expectations must be reasonable & flexible. Thus, reaching them shouldn’t come at the cost of an employee’s personal life!
In addition, it is also vital for leaders to create space for employees to look after their mental health. Thus, incorporating mental wellness days, flexible working hours, increased paid time off, etc., can improve employees’ work-life balance.
Finally, make personal check-ins a part of one-on-one coaching. When every interaction is about work and productivity, it can make employees feel that they aren’t doing enough. So, carving out time to ask your employees how they are doing offers them the space to vocalize their emotions when they feel overwhelmed or need assistance.
- Create Opportunities For Employees To Connect
Even in a remote work environment, employees must communicate and connect with one another during work and outside work. Thus, creating opportunities for employees to connect develops trust, increases employee retention, and improves company culture.
To make strong work relationships, leaders can host team lunches and organize several activities to engage employees in the workplace. Moreover, leaders can encourage bonding by taking time out to chat with the employees or asking about their lives.
Remember that non-work activities are as vital as work ones. So, ensure you create opportunities for employees to connect with you without breaking the healthy boundary of a workplace relationship!
- Promote A Team Atmosphere
Don’t think of the other employees at your company as groups of other people you work with, but as integral team members.
This shift in mentality from people working individually to a unified team moving in one direction is vital and can make an enormous difference in work outcomes.
Thus, promoting a positive team atmosphere can help in employee motivation and the accomplishment of short-term and long-term organizational goals.
- Stay True To Your Core Values
Core values are a company’s North Star. Subsequently, they are much more than a list of bullet points on a company’s About Us Page. They are created to inform people about the company’s mission, vision, and goals. Moreover, core values are the principles of the organization that keep the employees and procedures on track.
Thus, if you want your organizational culture to stick, you need to develop genuine core values & stay true to them. After all, core values are the foundation of every business!
Company Culture – The Backbone Of A Successful Organization
Regardless of where you are starting from, it’s vital to remember that you can improve your company’s culture. Moreover, ensure that you have the full support of your leadership team, employees and departments. Collaboration on all levels in the organization is bound to produce a company culture where all your team members feel welcomed and valued.
In addition to this, you must try the steps mentioned above. They will definitely help you create a positive company culture, resulting in employee satisfaction and retention.
So, incorporate these strategies and tell us which one worked like a charm!
