Why Is A Positive Company Culture So Important?
A positive company culture provides workers with a sense of belonging, stability, and good well-being. It’s a crucial factor for a company’s success, in fact, companies that have fostered a strong company culture showed 20% higher employee satisfaction ratings for collaboration, values, and environment. Also, a Deloitte study also shows that 94% of company executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct culture in the workplace is important for the success of a business. All in All, Happy workers equate to more productivity. Here are 10 tips that you can incorporate into your business this year.
Step One: Are You Listening To Your Employees?
Are you providing your staff with a safe space to share their opinions, voice their concerns and ideas?. If you are not doing this already, there are plenty of benefits to starting; by listening to your staff and allowing their voices to be heard paves the way for more positive company culture, you will be able to earn their trust and support and more of their respect for the choice to take note of what your staff wants to share with you. According to Rise, 75% of employees would stay on longer in an organization that listens to and addresses their concerns.
Step Two: Better Together
By Allowing and encouraging your staff to collaborate and brainstorm ideas, you will generate a sense of openness to share ideas and develop individual creativity. 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communications for failure in the workplace. Why not inspire your employees to practice some active communication and make a high-spirited social feed where everyone’s ideas can be seen and heard? Take Brightwork, for example. To inspire a positive company culture, all of our employees are involved in Out Beyond the Pines, a project to plant 100,000 trees and offset 200 tonnes of carbon, and they have committed to planting trees per month, through our partner Ecologi
Step 3: Set Challenges
What’s a finer way to show your employees you are invested in their development than setting some challenges. By doing this, you will give each employee an opportunity to thrive perhaps, even developing new skills along the way. It’s motivating and exciting for staff to work towards something and prevents your staff from feeling stagnated by doing repetitive tasks. Providing challenges also improves confidence thus creating a more constructive and positive company culture. Employees who get the chance to continually develop are twice as likely to say they will spend their career with their company. We challenge our employees to reduce their carbon footprint. Find out how to reduce yours with some of our top tips.
Step 4: Communication is Key
Make sure you are effectively communicating your company ethos, mission statement vision, and values. When staff lack clarity on whatever it is they are working towards, they can quickly feel like a cog in a big machine. By being clear on a shared goal, you allow your staff to feel like they are part of something much larger.
Effective communication should never be a one-sided affair though, make sure your staff feels able to communicate well with each other too. Employees who say their organizational values are “known and understood” are 51 times more likely to be fully engaged than an employee whose organization does not have values that are not known or understood.
Step Five: Healthy Happy Staff
Another way to create a more positive company culture is to take into account the health of your employees. With the world facing a serious pandemic, the health and wellbeing of your staff are more important than ever. Make sure your staff feels as safe as possible by maintaining social distancing measures, encouraging your employees to work from home when unwell, and providing hand sanitizer stations.
Step Six: Encourage Diversity
People in society have fought for years to be recognized as equal to others simply because of their skin tone, country of origin, race, age, or sexual orientation. As a leader of a company, make sure you are inclusive, have a look at hiring a professional to receive advice on how to make your business more diverse. Make sure to take any complaints of discrimination seriously and deal with them accordingly and establish very clear consequences for anybody who wants to challenge your efforts of a diverse and happy workplace.
Step Seven: Set Standards
Regular attendance, appearance, and appropriate behavior are extremely important to every business. If there are no standards set, employees may push boundaries and show no effort in their work and worst of all promote a bad attitude to other Colleagues who will follow their example. To prevent this from happening, make sure you set out what your standards are for your company and be clear that there are consequences for failing to meet them, and make sure you stick to them.
Step Eight: Have Fun
There is a time and a place for fun for employees, sitting in a serious meeting, or serving customers should not be a time for silly behavior. However, it’s a good incentive to encourage your staff to venture on social outings once a month to have some fun, you could even put some games in the staff room for lunch breaks and allow your staff to blow off some work-related stress on their breaks. It’s these little extras that make your employees more likely to stay on with your company.
Step Nine: Recognise Hard Work
When you’re having a walk around your company and you spot an employee working hard make sure you should make it a big deal to celebrate their efforts. You could reward them in various ways, one way to reward them is a monetary reward. Other employees may notice and in turn, may work harder at their jobs.
Step Ten: Get to Know Your Staff
It’s Important to get to know your employees on a one-to-one basis and in group settings. You can do this by holding casual group meetings and holding personal meetings to discuss individual performance. A good topic to make sure you include in these meetings is how employees feel about working for your company. Another way to get to know your staff is by walking about your workplace providing some feedback and watching your staff in action.