Introduction
Having a strong company culture is essential for success. It’s the glue that holds your team together and helps them work more effectively as a unit.
Most companies want to create a positive atmosphere for their employees, but not all are successful in doing so. Many companies have a toxic culture that’s causing their employees to leave in droves.
Culture is defined as “the beliefs, behaviors, and norms that make up an organization.” It includes a variety of elements, including work environment, company mission, values, ethics, expectations, and goals.
Why is Company Culture Important?
Company culture leads to higher productivity, better morale, and greater employee engagement resulting in more sales and lower turnover. A company with a healthy culture accomplishes more. When people like coming to work, they contribute more. If they care about their coworkers and the company, they do more to help it grow. They learn new things just to help on a project or put in extra time to solve a pesky problem. People who feel good about their workplace are proud of the product and work that they produce.
Read more: Investing in Company Culture with Employee Created Content
6 Ways to Create a Company Culture that Your Employees Will Love
1. Hire Mindfully
Define your company culture before you hire—employees will help shape it, but it’s up to you to set the stage. Don’t just hire for skills—hire for values and personality. Make sure that the person you’re bringing on is a good fit with the team and understands what they’re expected to contribute.
2. Get Employees Involved
Company culture is built through people and around people, so make sure that you are getting your employees involved in your company culture. Ask them what they value, what they want out of their jobs, and what they want their work environment to look like. This will help you build a well-rounded picture of what your work environment should be like.
3. Create Opportunities for Growth
Keep employees challenged by giving them new responsibilities, projects, and opportunities for professional development. It’s important that employees feel empowered to make decisions (and mistakes!) without worrying about getting fired if they make one wrong turn down a path that doesn’t work out as expected.
4. Foster Clear Communication
It’s easy to think that you need to start from scratch when you want to build a great company culture. But this is a flawed approach. Instead, you’ll need to create a culture of change that encourages employees to improve upon their current habits. Ask your employees what they like and dislike about the company culture and what suggestions they have for improving it.
5. Use the Right Tools
When it comes to workforce management, one of the most important resources you can have is a dedicated HR tech. When used correctly, it can help you to overcome the most common workplace challenges, especially given the fact that managing staff is becoming an increasingly demanding and complicated process.
Albert is a communication platform for managers who want a place to communicate, engage and train with their frontline employees.
Here are a few features of Albert you can use to engage your team and create a powerful company culture:
- Internal Communication: Provide your employees a place to communicate internally to help them avoid miscommunication on a variety of levels.
- Content Library: Incorporate all of the information your employees need in a single resource library to allow them to work more efficiently.
- Training: Cut unnecessary training costs and allow your employees to interact with your content, guidelines, and best practices directly in the app.
- Gamification: Encourage your employees to build up their skills with fun games while they learn, and track their progress as they go along. Check out how to boost employee engagement with gamification.
6. Build Relationships at Work
One of the most important things you can do for your job is to build relationships at work. But it can be hard to know where to start. As part of your culture building, try creating opportunities for social interactions at work. This could mean arranging for coworkers to get together for team meals or company outings. Or it might mean setting up a happy hour where people from different departments can mingle. Perhaps you could even come up with a few team-building games that you could play at the office.
Company Culture in a Nutshell
Creating a workplace culture for your employees isn’t easy. It can take time to develop and nurture, but it’s definitely worth the effort. Moreover, creating a company culture is a good way to ensure that your employees are happy and content at their jobs, especially in various workplaces and conditions where the environment itself can often be stressful and demanding. Hopefully, these six suggestions have inspired you to think about how you might work on developing a workplace culture that will help you expand your business as well as keep your employees happy. In the end, your company’s culture is up to you and the people that you choose to hire, but if you make it one that seems like a good fit for everyone, you should all be on the same page—one working towards the same goals.
