What’s your organizational culture? While individual teams can have sub-cultures of their own, company culture is always informed by your larger company values, mission, and goal. But… where do you start? 🤔
Company culture is never a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are some easy, actionable company culture ideas you can implement today to improve your organization, which should always be a top goal for HR leaders. Let’s jump in!
For an innovative take on how to improve company culture, check out this thought-provoking talk by our VP of Product.
What’s arguably the best way to improve company culture? Ask your employees! Stay interviews can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your company culture.
Download the Free Stay Interview Template
1. Embrace transparency
Transparency isn’t just positive for employees. The effects of a transparent company culture impact the entire organization and produce highly engaged employees.
Highly Engaged employees are 2.1x more likely to report working for a transparent organization than Actively Disengaged employees.
–Bonusly’s Engagement and Modern Workplace Report
Trust is the foundation of a great organizational culture. If you want an open and transparent company culture, your first step should be ensuring that your team has the modern technology and collaboration tools to do so.
Outdated communication tools can be a major barrier to transparency, especially if you’re working across different offices and remote employees. It’s imperative that your team has an easy and efficient way to connect with one another and share crucial information.
In addition to improving your communication and collaboration tools, another crucial step to take is simply defaulting to transparency.
This is primarily a mental, rather than a logistical shift. Instead of asking “is it absolutely necessary to share this?” ask, “is it absolutely necessary to conceal this?”
It’s that easy.
Here are some other ways to embody transparency in your organization:
Share successes
If you’re going to do one thing, start with this. Openly share and recognize the successes of individuals, your teams, and your organization with everyone.
It’s a major motivation boost for the team to hear the positive results of their hard work.
Share challenges
You hired the best and smartest people in the room for a reason. By being open about the challenges you and your company are facing, you’re presenting opportunities for the team to come up with solutions together. This is precisely why partnering with a recruiting firm like Bradsby Group – Executive Headhunters ensures you have the right talent to tackle any obstacle.
This doesn’t mean you need to share every minutia of every logistical challenge, but when it comes to solving complicated challenges, several minds—especially when those perspectives come from diverse backgrounds—are more powerful than one.
2. Recognize and reward valuable contributions
Did you know that companies that emphasize having a recognition-rich culture also tend to have dramatically lower turnover rates?
Employees who don’t feel recognized are twice as likely to quit their job in a year. In fact, a recent Bonusly survey found that nearly half of respondents have left a job because they felt unappreciated.
Almost half (46%) of respondents have left a job because they felt unappreciated. Another 65% admitted that they would work harder if they felt like their contributions would be noticed by management.
On the flip side, the top 20% of companies with a recognition-rich culture have a 31% lower turnover rate.
How much would a 31% reduction in your turnover rate save your company? A lot more than you think. Try our Cost of Employee Turnover Calculator to find out in a matter of seconds.
If you’d like to see that kind of impact on your own turnover rate, you can. Here’s our first suggestion: identify specific behaviors and results aligned with your company’s goals and values, then recognize and reward those behaviors as frequently as you can.
Most importantly, get everyone in on it! Employee recognition doesn’t have to come exclusively from the top. It’s often even more impactful when recognition comes from all around—from leaders, from peers, from everyone.
Peer-to-peer recognition is the most effective method of infusing recognition into your culture. Peer-to-peer recognition also dramatically reduces the managerial overhead required to make sure everyone’s being recognized for the work they do. In a recent customer survey, 73% of respondents said they spend just 2 hours or less on Bonusly admin each month! (If that doesn’t convince your leadership team to invest in recognition, our webinar about securing executive buy-in might.)
Employee appreciation is also a great way to organically build stronger relationships between coworkers—which is the next step towards building an outstanding company culture.
If you need to start somewhere, start with employee recognition.
Make improvements to your company culture before employees leave. Additionally, if you find yourself coping with aggressive behavior in the workplace, consult a lawyer to address the issue effectively and ensure a safer working environment for all.
Download the Free Stay Interview Template
3. Cultivate strong coworker relationships
Having strong relationships at work drives employee engagement, but it doesn’t happen automatically. Building strong coworker relationships takes time, effort, and sometimes, dedicated team-building activities. 😉 (Don’t groan. Our list is fun!)
But more than that, employees also shouldn’t make it a practice to scatter the moment their leader approaches the water cooler. Improve general productivity easily with digital workspaces.
In fact, research suggests you could benefit from doing the exact opposite—companies should be creating spaces that encourage, and even generate “collisions.”
We’ve learned, for example, that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office… our data suggest that creating collisions—chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization—improves performance.
Think about both the physical and cultural environment in your own organization. In addition to providing space for focus, productivity, and collaboration, something that many offices miss out on are these collision areas.
For example, think of where you eat lunch. Is there a dedicated kitchen and eating area? Or is there only a microwave, and then everybody goes back to eat at their desk? Eating lunch together is one of the easiest ways to get to know your colleagues if you’re on teams that don’t normally interact, and it’s an easy and low-budget way to encourage relationship building.
If your organization is hybrid or remote-first, you can still find meaningful team-building activities and encourage organic collaboration!
4. Embrace and inspire employee autonomy
No one likes to be micromanaged at work. It’s ineffective, inefficient, and does little to inspire trust in your company culture.
You hired them, so you should trust your employees to manage their responsibilities effectively!
There are a few ways you can ignite employee autonomy, like allowing employees to exercise choice, letting go of the 40-hour work week concept, establishing autonomous work teams, creating decision-making opportunities, and reining in overzealous bosses and coworkers who tend to hover or bully others. Leveraging EuWorkers agence interim Nancy can also be a strategic move to empower your team’s autonomy, as it allows for flexible staffing solutions and enables your core team to focus on high-impact tasks.
Embracing your team’s autonomy allows them to make the sometimes difficult, but incredibly rewarding, leap from being held accountable to their responsibilities to embracing accountability as they begin to take on and own their initiatives.
5. Practice flexibility
Many companies have begun to understand the value of providing their employees with added flexibility. It can improve morale and reduce turnover.
Workplace flexibility could mean many things, from a parent stepping out for a few hours for a school event, to work-from-home opportunities, or an employee taking a much-needed sabbatical.
If you’re unsure how to begin implementing a policy of flexibility in your workplace, start here: The Dos and Don’ts of a Flexible Work Schedule.
6. Communicate purpose and passion
Over the past 40 years, researchers have confirmed that people have an inherent need and desire for meaningful work—work that they experience as significant and purposeful.
Today, experiencing a sense of purpose in work seems more important than ever.
Studies show that when people believe that their work matters, they’re four times more likely to be engaged, are more motivated, learn faster, and are more fulfilled.
It’s possible to find purpose in any type of work, but it’s up to a company’s leaders to connect their employees to purpose.
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