There is a direct correlation between a healthy and productive culture and an organisation’s bottom line. Today’s leaders understand that companies with positive cultures have better performance, productivity and profits than those without. It’s also no surprise that the top places to work are known for their strong culture – and top performance.
Here are 5 tips for making a positive impact on your company culture:
1. Start with a Staff Survey
Find out where you are at. Conduct a staff survey to help you get a clear view of the current culture and the factors that may be contributing to it. Employees are most satisfied when the environment they work in is comfortable and their needs are met.
Our recommendation is to survey every 3-4 months, depending on how your business is changing. This frequency will prevent survey fatigue, yet keep you in touch with how your people feel about working for you. This information is invaluable and can also feed into your performance review or appraisal workflow – providing your line managers with supplementary information to make sure they are engaging their direct reports.
If there has been a major change in the business, such as an acquisition or some redundancies, a timely survey can help you encourage your people to refocus on the important areas of working life, calm things down and enable them to concentrate on core business activities.
2. Communicate Clear Values
Making your values visible and understood can have a big impact on how your team behaves and on your overall culture. With each value, define the behaviours that demonstrate living those values, every day. To create a lasting impact, make sure there is a reminder of your values every day.
3. Align your Processes with your Values
Consider how your vision and values align with your HR processes. Ask some tough questions to find out. Will your current hiring practices attract and promote the type of talent that will enable you to build the organisational culture you are wanting? Also consider how you performance manage your team, your pay and benefits. Are your approaches really creating the leaders that you want in your business?
4. Measure it
Yes, culture can be measured, and what gets measured gets managed. The best companies do measure culture. Once you are clear on the culture that you want to have, it is important to measure whether reality reflects the culture and experience that you strive to achieve. There are software programs that help you measure culture and engagement. This will enable you to identify opportunities for where you can make an impact easily. You can also benchmark your results against organisations like yours and track your progress over time.
5. Don’t wait. Invest now.
Start building your desired culture immediately, anyway that you can. Don’t wait for staff and resources that may never come. Culture development and change is an ongoing process that happens over time. Be patient, Keep at it.
Put culture first. It will help you retain top talent and improve both employee productivity and effectiveness at work. Start the conversation and work towards putting culture first. We can help.
Download our free company culture checklist. Start using it today and make a positive impact. Ask us about Culture & Engagement with Park City.
