There has been a lot of talk about company culture and its importance lately. Company culture is a social operating system that determines how well your employees work with each other and within your company.

If you have a positive workplace culture, your organization will be able to run like a well-oiled machine. But it’s important to know that company culture isn’t something you build overnight. 

Finding your organization’s culture takes a lot of time and effort. And while there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, here are some general tips that can help every company.

Implement corporate gifting

If you understand the importance of employee recognition in the workplace, you will do whatever you can to recognize your employees as much as you can. Employee recognition is more than just saying “thank you” every once in a while. Rather, it takes real effort and thought.

But it’s worth it to put in all of that effort because, at the end of the day, it’s beneficial for both your employees and your organization. As much as 69% of employees would work harder if they received more recognition, and you can provide that recognition with corporate gifting.

Corporate gifting can often be seen when organizations give gifts to their clients as a sign of appreciation, but it can also refer to the practice of giving your employees gifts. These small tokens of appreciation can be a great way to show your employees how much you appreciate their hard work and that you recognize the effort they’re putting in. 

They are a great way to motivate and inspire your team and show them you’re all one big family. If you need any ideas for corporate gifting tips, Hoppier has some great suggestions that will let you know the best time to give a corporate gift and what presents your employees would like to receive.

Encourage employee career development

If you give your employees a chance to grow and develop at their own pace and encourage them to reach for the stars, it will do wonders for your company culture. In fact, as much as 94% of employees would stay longer at a company if it offered learning and development opportunities.

Take the time to learn about your employee’s career goals and find a way to ensure each employee has the opportunity to work on those goals and strive toward career development. If possible, pay for a mentor or coach that will help with those goals and always encourage mentoring.

It’s also important that your employees realize their worth and have that motivation that will push them to strive for more. Everyone should have a personal development plan they will use in their race to the top and toward personal and career development.

Work on creating a positive experience

When you’re looking for ways to improve company culture, you also need to take a look at the overall experience your employees have while they’re at work. Culture and experience are interlinked, and if one of them isn’t positive, the other one isn’t positive either.

To get a full scope of the employee experience, you need to gather information about all of the small and individual experiences they have during the workday and how they feel about them. This can include things such as team interactions, conversations with management, and technology usage.

Remember that all interactions fall into the scope of experience, and your job is to encourage the positive ones and find ways to resolve the negative ones. You can’t hope that all experiences will be positive, but if you find a way to appropriately handle the negative ones and allow everyone to feel comfortable in the workplace, you’ve done your job right.

Schedule one-on-one meetings with your employees

Giving and receiving feedback is important in any company. If you don’t know what your employees are thinking, you won’t know what they want to see a change in the company culture.

However, it’s not just about general feedback, but also about personal one-on-ones between leaders and their employees. In these types of meetings, both parties can speak openly and without any hesitation, allowing themselves to go into depth when talking about various topics.

These private meetings will let employees speak about what they personally feel and get out of the group mentality. While meetings with the entire team have benefits as well, they don’t give individuals the right setting and atmosphere they need to voice their honest opinions.

They can also be a great chance for your workers to express how they feel both emotionally and physically and talk about how they’re handling their responsibilities and workloads.

Final thoughts

A company is made out of a lot of components that need to work together to create an organism that has a chance of surviving and thriving. You can see that organism as your company culture. As long as you do what’s in the best interest of your business and the overall culture, success is guaranteed.