Have you ever considered how work culture impacts your company? When employees aren’t getting along or are always pushing their own agenda, it creates a toxic workplace culture. This can significantly impact their work productivity, and you’re left having to play the middle man or take disciplinary action.
However, with the help of human resources, this can all be avoided by developing a positive work culture, and here's how you can accomplish it:
What is work culture?
Your company's work culture describes how you and your employees conduct work together while at work. In essence, it is the DNA of your business, involving expectations, behaviour values, and anything related to how your business operates. As businesses grow and develop, so does the work culture. Your company's work culture will closely tie into the vision of your company and its goals. Thus, the whole culture will be built around creating a positive working environment to achieve the goals set.
While the company's values might influence its work culture, these two aspects are still vastly different. A company's values are consistent and might never change, while the work culture shifts as the business evolves, adapting to the work culture needs to meet the business's current demands.
The benefits of a positive work culture
As you would imagine, developing a positive work culture benefits filter into all aspects of the company, especially aspects related to your employees. As the former CEO of Xerox, Anne M. Mulcahy, says, “Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.”
With that in mind, here are some benefits of building a positive company culture in your business:
1. Employee engagement
When employees feel abused or unnoticed, they can often feel inadequate or unnecessary. This can cause them to work at a slower rate and produce lower-quality results. However, when they feel seen and needed, they are motivated to engage fully in their tasks and in the team, pulling their weight and helping out where needed.
When you build positive work culture, you promote a sense of belonging for your employees in the work environment. This allows employees to take ownership of their roles in the business and play a part in ensuring everything runs smoothly. This sense of belonging creates a sense of worth and value for them as people, enhancing employee experience and job satisfaction.
2. Increased productivity
As a result, they’re motivated to work harder as their sense of belonging makes them feel more intrinsic responsibility and motivation for their tasks. If all your employees work harder together, the whole production output will increase, leading to greater profits and more incentives for staff to work even harder.
3. Attraction and retention of talent
Likewise, a positive work environment encourages employee retention and building loyalty over time. As a result, this encourages employee growth as others who work in the same industry are attracted to the company's culture and its benefits, allowing you to source talent more easily when you need to.
4. Customer satisfaction
As Mulcahy said, satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers. When employees work together like a well-oiled machine, the increased productivity and work ethic result in better services for clients. This leads to customer satisfaction building and, in turn, a good reputation for business, too.
What does a good work culture look like?
A business’s work culture is implemented from management down. It stems from the employer's approach to performance, recognition, and vision. For instance, employees who receive performance-based rewards provide incentives for staff to work harder. However, the way these rewards are awarded has just as much of an impact on the employees as the actual achievement.
By making a big deal of employees who go over and above, you’re actively showing staff how you value their efforts, which in itself becomes an incentive. The key to building a positive workplace culture is to ensure that staff feel like they’re included in developing the company culture as it strives to achieve its goals.
How to create a positive workplace culture
So, where do you begin? Usually, people can tell whether a company has a good work culture within the first month of working there. So, the sooner you get started and change things, the better. Here’s how you can build a positive work culture in your business:
Make your core values clear
First, clearly explain and establish core values for your business. A company's core values can lay a foundation for how you want employees to conduct themselves while on duty. You can wrap rewards and incentives in with these values. But the goal is to ensure that all of your staff know the conduct that’s expected of them when they’re working for you. We’d also suggest that you model company values, too, because there’s nothing better than employees seeing you model the same values they’re expected to uphold.
Choose your workplace culture
Always start with the end in mind. So, what workplace culture do you want to cultivate? Once you’ve got a heading, then design your whole workflow around it. This includes your office layout, meetings, and the policies and practices you implement to regulate how you want employees to interact with one another.
Set clear goals
Nothing drives a group of people more than striving to achieve a common goal. If you can set clear goals for your employees and create incentives for them to achieve, they’ll work to their best potential. Ensure they have tangible results to work towards. A good example is using key performance indicators (KPIs) to track performance and give rewards accordingly.
Encourage employees to share their ideas
As we said a bit earlier, when you allow your employees to participate in the development of the business, it creates a sense of ownership for them, which encourages them to devote more of themselves to business success. A great way to do this is by encouraging them to share their ideas for projects. Delegate responsibility and encourage them to implement their idea with your support. This will make them feel empowered and trusted, building their loyalty and commitment.
Be strict when it comes to offences
In many companies, employees feel like they can’t speak up about issues because they fear the retaliation of a superior or even losing their jobs. This fear leads them to feel tramped and can significantly reduce their job satisfaction and their ability to retain employees. To solve this, ensure that you have a suitable HR team that employees can speak to and who will take appropriate action to resolve the issue.
Recognise employees who perform well
When you recognise employees for their efforts, and reward them as a result, it incentives them to continue working at higher levels. By doing this, you make them feel valued, and you motivate others to work just as hard. Make the reward tangible, like a bonus at the end of the month or year.
Use employee feedback
As a manager or business owner with several employees under you, you don’t see or know every aspect of your business. Thus, if something isn’t working and needs to be improved, you’d need to rely on employee feedback to get to the root of the issue. However, many businesses often don’t welcome constructive criticism or feedback from their employees, and as a result, their growth is stunted. Make it clear to your employees that you need their feedback to improve how the business runs and how the work culture can be improved.
Be a little flexible
Sometimes emergencies arise, and your employees might have to rush out to help a loved one. Be flexible when this happens. Imagine being in their shoes. You don’t want your employees to fear the repercussions of having to address emergencies. By being flexible, you’ll earn the respect and appreciation of your employees, as you've shown them that you are for maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Promote transparency
Keeping your employees in the dark on particular topics and ongoings of the business can make them feel unsettled in the workplace environment. So, be transparent with them regarding the success and difficulties the company is facing. We don’t mean going into details, but letting them in on important information can help them work towards a solution as a team. Open and clear communication between all departments and teams will also ensure trust between employees, which is essential for them as they work together and promote positive workplace cultures.
Engage socially too
Some people might disagree with this idea, but create opportunities for your workforce to engage socially as well. People crave social interaction with each other. But there isn’t always time for this at work, so their relationships stay surface-level. Allowing them to engage socially outside of work will encourage their relationships to strengthen, which in turn will benefit how well they work together, improving their work ethic and building a positive culture.
Final Thoughts
Building a positive work culture is central to almost everything in your business. Remember, a work culture refers to how your employees approach working for your business. This includes their behaviour, work ethic, and values. When the whole workforce is working with the same culture, they’re like a well-oiled machine, with every part working in unison to produce the desired result. Follow these tips, and you should be on your way to transforming your company's work culture for the better.
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