How to Build Company Culture?
Company culture plays a role in an organisation’s success. Having the right company culture can help the company attract and retain top talent. The company can also help improve employee engagement and help the company gain a competitive edge in the market.
What is Company Culture?
Company culture is shared values, attitudes, behaviours, and standards that create the day-to-day experience within a company. It also helps align the external messaging of the company to customers. A good healthy company culture will keep employees engaged, committed, and excited to come to work. Company culture is dictated throughout an organisation from brand-new employees up to the leadership team.
4 Types of Company Culture
Adhocracy Culture - Also known as “create culture” this is a highly innovative and fast-moving environment.
Clan Culture – Highly collaborative company culture that thrives on teamwork.
Hierarchy Culture – Structure work culture that typically follows established roles and processes.
Market Culture – Goal-oriented, high-pressure culture that focuses on output and goal attainment.
Each of the listed company cultures listed above is different and has different core values. You can find success or struggle with any of these types depending on organisation size, structure, and goals.
Why is Company Culture Important?
Investing in company culture has a variety of short and long-term benefits. Here are a few examples:
Employee Retention
For organisations to succeed they need to be able to attract and keep top talent. Employees will often stay if the company values match theirs and are driven towards a common goal. Employees will be more likely to stay with the company.
Employee Engagement
Employees that are excited about a company’s culture, lead to more engaged employees. When employees are more engaged it drives positive results for the company.
Employees Want to Grow with the Company
A culture that invests in its employees’ success, well-being, and happiness will help employees feel better at work and move forward in their careers with the company.
Increased Productivity
Good company culture that fosters positive experiences will typically make employees feel better about going to work every day.
On the other hand, a toxic company culture can impact employees in a variety of ways:
Higher Levels of Stress - Employees working in a toxic culture can make them feel stress leading to some negative outcomes.
Decreased Engagement - A toxic culture can cause engagement to drop leading to poor outcomes for the employee and business. These outcomes could be more absentees, more accidents, and more errors and defects than their engaged counterparts.
Developing Company Culture
Define Your Value
An organisation will need to define its set of values which will dictate all elements of your company culture including how people treat each other to expectations there are around work. These values could be sustainability, respect, transparency, kindness, equality, innovation, integrity, honesty, or fairness. Whatever the values are it is important to define them from the start as they will act as the foundation of your company culture.
Setting Goals
Think about the company values that have been identified in the first step and the next is to understand how to bring those values to life within the company culture. Setting goals to achieve these values will help keep the company focused and bring the envisioned culture to life.
Ask the Team
Employees at the organisation will be heavily impacted by the company culture. To create a strong company culture to attract and retain top talent, get feedback from existing employees. Ask them what they like about the existing culture, what could be improved, and their ideal corporate culture. Using the feedback captured will help drive your organisation’s culture strategy and build a culture that works for the company and its employees.
Implementing Culture day-to-day
When developing the company culture it’s important to think about how to bring the culture to life in a daily work environment. If the company culture is built on diversity, offering employees paid time off for any cultural or religious holidays they celebrate. Company culture is how employees experience work every day, companies will need to think about how to work the culture into day-to-day activities.
How to Improve Company Culture?
Check-In with Employees
Regularly check-in with employees and ask them what could improve their experience at work. Companies can’t improve their culture if they don’t know what needs improving.
Appreciation
Employees want to be recognised for their hard work. To improve company culture, giving employees recognition is the best place to start adopting a healthy company culture.
Flexibility
Look for ways to offer flexibility to employees such as working from home, hybrid work arrangement or flexibility with work schedules and hours.
Compensation and Benefits
If companies are not paying employees a competitive salary they won’t stay for long. To improve company culture, research on salary and benefits packages in the industry and area. Companies need to make sure what they are offering is competitive with other companies.
Summary
Company culture is the foundation upon which a company is built. A company’s culture impacts employees and their interactions with the company. A healthy company culture will enable companies to grow and bring long-term success. Company cultures will dictate the day-to-day experiences of their employees and how they are treated within the company. Company culture is maintained by everyone in the company, however, it is led top down. Defining a company's values early and setting goals to help achieve those values will ensure companies stay on track to bring the defined values to life. Setting goals will help everyone stay focused on building the core values internally to attract and retain top talent at the company.