Building an efficient and long-lasting business is about more than caring for your customers. Caring for your employees is equally as important. By creating a corporate culture where people want to work, you can reduce turnover, improve morale and more. Check out these tips for creating a healthy company culture.
Establish a Vision
Common problems that shake the cultures of many companies include a lack of empathy between departments as well as silos of knowledge and projects. Overcome these problems by creating an overarching corporate vision. This vision can unify your workforce and create a common goal for all employees. Employees will develop a better understanding of the purpose behind their work as well as the work of other departments.
Create Values
Along with a corporate vision, you must establish values for the company to help build the business’s culture. Rather than creating abstract values that look great on paper but mean nothing in the everyday lives of your workers, bring your employees into the values creation process. Ask for input on what the business stands for, what is most important to your workers and more. The answers to these questions can help lead to values that will unify your workforce.
Reward Innovation
Many factors can influence your business’s success or failure. But one of the biggest influencers is the motivation within your workforce to innovate. Are your employees satisfied with the status quo or are they always looking for ways to create efficiencies, spur sales and surpass competitors?
Encourage innovation among your employees by rewarding employees who exude this quality. The best ideas for your business’s future will likely come from your loyal workforce, so find a way to foster those ideas.
Set the Tone
As detailed in the video CEO’s Set the Culture by John Mattone, no matter your business’s industry, your CEO sets the tone for your company’s culture. And that tone is a mixture of the CEO’s character, values, emotions, actions and other elements.
If you hope to successfully transform your company’s culture, you must ensure your CEO is on board with the transformation. If you’re the CEO, the change starts with you. Assess your actions, thoughts, leadership style and more in the workplace to see whether those elements are contributing to or working against the intended changes.
Create Employee Committees
According to Interviews with 14 of the World’s Top CEO’s about Leadership and Cultural Transformations, the key to creating a healthy company culture is leadership. Effective leadership starts with management, but it must also trickle down to other leaders within your business. Foster a culture of effective leadership by establishing employee committees to serve as the voice of the masses.
The particular purpose of the committee will depend on your industry and other significant elements. However, at the most fundamental level, employee representatives can take action to resolve top concerns from the business’s overall workforce.
Give your company culture the attention deserves. Establish a corporate vision, create meaningful values and more to experience a real corporate cultural transformation.