How to Improve Company Culture

Company culture directly affects employees’ behaviour and productivity levels. 88% of workers state that having a supportive and robust company culture increases employee engagement and business success. This is because a healthy culture guides employees, helping them reach their full potential.

Improving company culture is also successful at beating workplace stress, which is a very concerning dilemma. According to The American Institute of Stress, 83% of workers suffer from work-related stress, which causes one million workers to miss work each day.

Companies must focus on culture management, as a healthy work culture can help reduce these concerning numbers.

What is Culture Management?

Culture management is developing and implementing cultural beliefs, values, and norms in a workspace to positively influence employee behaviour. However, leading and managing cultural practices can be highly challenging.

Therefore, most organizations hire culture managers to modify their values, roles, and practices. As a result, the new changes are more sustainable, beneficial, and effective in improving employee performance.

Tips to Improve Company Culture

Company culture must evolve with employees’ needs to ensure they stay happily onboard. Organizations can improve their company cultural practices by following these tips:

Transparency Integration

Workplace transparency promotes open communication between employees and leadership (managers and team leads). Providing a safe workspace encourages workers to share their ideas and concerns without hesitation.

Promoting and practicing transparency also builds trust, which is the foundation of good company values. Corporations can embrace transparency through these actions:

• Celebrating company’s, team’s, and individual’s successes
• Teaming different departments for challenging tasks
• Encouraging employees to share their opinion and respectively responding to it

Evaluate Core Values

Core values are an organization’s drafted principles that revolve around its vision and mission. Well-curated core values guide the company’s leadership in making informed decisions that align with workers’ expectations.

Corporate leaders must evaluate each core value to check whether it is relatable and practicable. No matter how good a core value appears on paper, it brings no benefits if it cannot be applied in the workplace.

Value adaptation is another aspect of the evaluation process. If a company has too many values, most of them become irrelevant and difficult to adopt. Therefore, it is better to eliminate the ambiguous objectives and focus on compatible ones that are beneficial in the long term.

Provide Regular Feedback

Feedback is quite important in improving performance. However, receiving feedback becomes dreadful if it is delivered in a ridiculing and humiliating manner. Instead of improving employee performance, it breaks down their motivation to produce quality work.

Moreover, people believe that giving a high amount of feedback will produce better performance. According to a study, feedback provided on a moderate level is effective in increasing performance, but too much of it decreases employees’ performance. So, it is crucial to find the balance and stick to it.

When improving work culture, companies should focus on pleasantly delivering the right amount of feedback to ensure effective results.

Encourage Teamwork

A company is not created from individual efforts; its success stems from teamwork. Workplace culture is vital in unifying different departments into one solid team. Due to a unified work approach, each employee knows their role and what is expected of them.

This also helps with timely task completion because everyone works together to complete and accomplish goals. Organizations can promote teamwork by assigning shared tasks and conducting team meetings. In addition, organizing team activities will help strengthen the bond between members. All these activities will make an enormously positive change in production results.

Develop an Improvement Plan

An improvement plan is beneficial in identifying the objectives and changes that should be implemented to improve the company culture. The plan covers all the necessary adjustments, execution steps, timeline, and budget.

During plan development, companies should assign different benchmarks to check the progress. These benchmarks will track the results and effectiveness of each step. The action plan needs reassessment if the company is not meeting the assigned goals.

It is better to create multiple progress checkpoints to make the required changes quickly. Otherwise, retracting steps and starting anew will be more expensive and time-consuming. Organizations can also take feedback after completing each benchmark to assess its effectiveness.

After revamping the company culture, corporations should organize culture training in the workplace. It will acquaint employees with the changes, making them appreciate the company’s efforts. Moreover, culture training sessions teach employees how to act in accordance with the new policies and practices.

Wrapping Up

Cultivating and scaling a strong work culture improves employees’ motivation, boosting their productivity and performance. Leaders can create a transparent culture to gain insight into their worker’s motivation levels. In an uplifting and supportive environment, employees can express their opinions without the fear of judgment.

Organizations can also work on their core values to encourage teamwork. These new changes can be implemented with the help of a robust action plan. However, companies can also hire cultural managers to execute new cultural policies and train employees accordingly.