Good business management comprises many moving parts – from lifting up the people around you to tracking and working towards lofty goals. One of the most often overlooked but most vital components of business management is culture.
Fostering a culture of togetherness and teamwork will increase productivity, boost employee loyalty, and save your company money in the long run, reducing the costs of hiring and training new employees. Developing a strong company culture that nurtures productivity takes a lot of work, but any company can succeed with a plan, effort, and empathy.
In this post, we'll review how companies can develop and implement a strategy to nurture a quality company culture that attracts talent and makes people want to work for you.
Great Cultures Center Around Core Values
Great cultures revolve around your core values, which serve as a central point of action for the company and give employees something to work for. Your values should be personal to the company but general enough for your employees to connect to them in their unique ways. Core values should encourage employees to work towards them daily, increasing productivity and motivation.
Your core values are the representation of how your company acts, outwardly shaping the expectations of incoming staff and clients. Choose values that correlate with your company, whether through its leadership or industry. For instance, if you work in consulting or staffing, making empathy a core value fits because it indicates how you take an interest in understanding other people. Integrity as a value highlights devotion to quality if delivering products or services to clients.
Tips For Improving Company Culture
Improving your company culture requires planning and implementation. Culture happens regardless of your efforts, but you can cultivate a culture that empowers employee productivity by taking proactive measures.
By embracing the power of the collective and keeping your core values in mind, you can craft a path to enhanced company culture that only continues to improve each year. These tips provide a great starting point for your journey.
Decide On the Ideal Culture You Want
The best way to start your strategy of developing your company culture is to decide what that ideal culture looks like. Once you have that laid out, compare it to your current company culture and determine if there's a distinct difference between them. Then, you can start outlining some possible steps to get your culture to that point.
Employees should factor into this stage, and you can use their input to determine what would be more conducive to their productivity. If possible, survey your employees to learn how they feel about the company culture and see what changes they think would improve it. You can conduct these surveys anonymously if that would make your employees feel more comfortable, or host a focus group where participants can talk openly about their ideas. Either way, thoroughly review the responses you receive and take them seriously as you move forward.
Communicate Clearly (And Reiterate Culture Goals)
During your journey to develop a company culture that nurtures productivity, keep your employees appraised of any changes and overall progress. Let them know what your expectations are and what the ultimate goal is so that they can contribute. Open and honest communication will help reinforce the quality culture you want to achieve while showing your employees that you trust them.
Tying correspondence and internal messaging back to your company's values, sharing them regularly through inspirational messaging, or portraying examples of how your staff lives by their values.
Emphasize Work-Life Balance
Maintaining work-life balance is vital for your employees' mental and physical health and your company's overall productivity. Workers who have a good balance between their work and lives are happier, healthier, and do better work at your company. Promoting good lifestyles to your staff demonstrates an investment in their well-being as people. It helps improve the positivity of your work culture by showing them that you value their health and appreciate the fact that they have personal lives and interests outside work.
Employees who keep their work and personal lives balanced will have a better chance of staying rested and recharged to do their best work and boost productivity for the company.
Hire Workers that Fit with Your Culture
When hiring new people, consider your culture and the culture you're working towards. Hire workers that you believe will fit cohesively with what you want to do and accomplish. If you believe you can trust their work and trust them to work hard toward your company's core values, they might be a perfect fit for your team.
Frame interview questions to get insight into their cultural approach, basing them around the information that's most important to you. Ask questions about their work ethic or ambitions to see whether they exhibit a growth mindset and take the initiative or if they will require more coaching throughout their roles. Whether a candidate's traits fit with your company is unique to that scenario, but gaining this insight helps you choose the best hires for your company.
Hiring for these inherent traits helps you cultivate a workforce that is there to stay. Quality values ensure they align with your company, improving employee morale, retention rates, and overall productivity by having a quality culture. Experience matters, but companies can train workers to become high performers. Bringing on a worker with a lot of experience who will steamroll other employees or jump ship quickly risks damaging your culture.
Give Consistent Feedback
Leaders establish vibrant company cultures by reinforcing values, praising hard work, and giving regular feedback. Providing feedback to your employees reminds them that their work matters, that you see what they do, and – most importantly – that you appreciate their efforts. You can empower workers to grow and thrive in their roles through consistent feedback, helping them learn how to handle more responsibility and improve performance.
Recognition and guidance allow you to meet with workers individually, making them more confident and assured of their duties. It's one of the most impactful ways that company leadership can instill a culture that upholds the level of quality and performance that your company prides itself for offering.
Discover the PRemployer Difference Today
While it's possible and within company means to implement these changes independently, companies don't need to worry about handling it alone. A professional employer organization (PEO) can be a crucial ally in cultivating a productive work culture. An experienced PEO can free up your internal HR teams' time to focus on providing employees the attention they deserve, as you trust them to handle mundane but essential tasks such as payroll processing and benefits administration. A PEO partner can also guide you to help your team implement the steps needed to build a stronger company culture.
PRemployer's founders set out to develop it into the leading human resource outsourcing firm. By following strong core values ourselves and working hard to empower workers and business leaders across industries, PRemployer provides the best customer service and satisfaction.
Contact us today to learn more about how you can start implementing a more productive company culture!
