What is your company’s culture? While individual teams may have their subcultures, business culture is always influenced by the broader organization’s values, purpose, and goals. But where do you begin?
Company culture is never a one-size-fits-all answer, but there are some simple, concrete company culture concepts you can put in place now to boost your organization’s immediate and long-term performance. Let’s get started!
-
Embrace Openness
Workers are not the only ones who profit from transparency. Transparent business cultures have an impact on the whole company and result in highly engaged employees. In addition, healthy business culture is built on the foundation of trust. If you desire an open and transparent corporate culture, the first step is to equip your staff with contemporary communication and collaboration tools.
Outdated communication technologies may be a significant obstacle to openness, mainly if you operate across many locations and with remote personnel. Therefore, your team must have a simple and effective means to communicate with one another and exchange critical information.
Aside from strengthening your communication and collaboration tools, another critical step to take is to set your default to transparency.
It is essentially a conceptual transition, not a practical one. Instead of asking, “Is it essential to reveal this?” ask, “Is it necessary to hide this?”
It’s that simple.
-
Recognize And Recognize Significant Contributions
Did you know that firms that prioritize a recognition-rich culture have much lower turnover rates?
Employees who do not feel acknowledged are twice as likely to leave their job within a year, while the top 20% of organizations with a recognition-rich culture have a 31% lower turnover rate.
How much money will a 31% decrease in turnover rate save your company? There’s a lot more to it than you realize.
You can have that type of influence on your turnover rate if you want to. So here’s our first recommendation: Determine particular actions and outcomes consistent with your company’s aims and values, then acknowledge and reward such behaviors as often as possible.
Most importantly, include everyone! Employee appreciation does not have to come only from the top. It’s frequently much more powerful when it comes from everyone—leaders, peers, and everyone else.
The most successful way to instill recognition in your culture is via peer-to-peer recognition. Peer-to-peer acknowledgment also significantly minimizes the management overhead necessary to ensure that everyone is acknowledged for their efforts. According to a recent customer study, 88 percent of respondents spend little more than 2 hours per month on Bonusly administration! (If that doesn’t persuade your leadership team to invest in recognition, maybe our webinar will gain executive buy-in.)
Employee recognition is also an excellent approach to naturally strengthen employee connections, which is the next stage in creating an amazing corporate culture.
-
Work Well With Your Colleagues
Great connections drive employee engagement at work, but it does not happen by accident. Building great colleague connections requires time, effort, and, on occasion, specialized team-building activities.
More importantly, staff should not make it a habit to disperse as their supervisor reaches the water cooler.
Research shows that you could profit from doing the opposite—creating environments that promote and even induce “collisions.”
Consider your own organization’s physical and cultural environments. In addition to offering locations for concentration, productivity, and cooperation, these collision zones are something that many companies overlook.
Consider your lunch source. If so, how big is it? Is there just a microwave and everyone eats at their desk? If you’re on teams that don’t regularly communicate, eating lunch together is one of the simplest ways to get to know your coworkers, and it’s a low-cost and straightforward approach to foster relationship development.
Even if your company is hybrid or remote-first, you may stimulate spontaneous cooperation and collision zones!
-
Encourage And Support Employee Autonomy
Nobody enjoys being micromanaged at work. It’s unproductive and inefficient, and it does nothing to instill faith in your company’s culture.
You hired them. Therefore you should have faith in their ability to handle their obligations efficiently!
Allowing employees to exercise choice, abandoning the 40-hour workweek notion, building autonomous work teams, offering decision-making possibilities, and reigning in overbearing managers and colleagues who tend to hover or intimidate others are all methods to promote employee autonomy.
Embracing your team’s autonomy enables them to make the often challenging but very gratifying transition from being held responsible for their obligations to assuming responsibility as they begin to take on and own their projects.
-
Exercise Adaptability
Many businesses have come to see the need to give their staff more freedom. It has the potential to boost morale and minimize turnover.
Workplace flexibility may refer to various activities, such as a parent leaving for a few hours to attend a school event, work-from-home options, or an employee taking a much-needed sabbatical.
If you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to developing a flexible working strategy, here are some suggestions.
Conclusion
A genuinely great corporate culture will always be a work in progress, growing in sync with your organization and its employees, which is why it is up to you to direct that development and which of these measures to adopt first!
