You may be quite rightly proud of the products and services that your business offers, and you may have the latest technologies in place to help your business grow, but while these are business essentials, you also need to pay as much attention to the culture of your organization to optimize their full potential.
The culture of your business is based upon the core values, principles, attitudes and behaviors that your employees share in the workplace, and it determines how employees respond to where they work. Workplace culture not only affects the happiness of your employees, which is important for their productivity, but it drives their ability to make good decisions and shapes their actions to boost the performance of the business. By nurturing the culture of your business, you will not only boost your bottom line, but you will also future proof your organization by being able to attract and recruit the highest caliber of staff to further your business’s growth.
Core Values
You need to identify what your organization’s core values are; they are the common language by which you will all speak, and by documenting them you can give your employees something tangible, rather than just notions to work with. Think about what is important to you in your personal life, and see how they also apply to your business life. The chances are high that the values overlap.
- Treat people how you wish to be treated
If you treat people well, they typically reciprocate and treat you well. Treat the office cleaner with the same manners and courtesy as you would a CEO: they are just as much a member of the team as your best-selling salesperson. You will find that applying this principle earns you respect among your staff, and sets them the benchmark too.
- Be direct
Being direct means that you avoid the office politics that are so prevalent in the corporate world. Direct does not mean rude; instead, it means cutting out the nonsense, and calling a spade a spade. So much time is wasted by people having to read between the lines, that if they were just more direct so much more could be achieved.
- Open and honest
Being open and honest goes hand in hand with being direct. Problems within businesses occur when honesty has been compromised. If mistakes have been made, your workplace culture should be one that allows the person to be able to voice that they have made an error, before the issue escalates. You need to create a culture that promotes honesty, and by doing so you open your business to new possibilities. Giving your staff the opportunity to be open and honest about where they see improvements could be made to the organization will enable your processes to be developed by the people that use them, and boost your efficiencies at the same time. Giving a voice to your staff makes them feel appreciated.
- Appreciate
There is not a person on the planet who does not like being appreciated and valued, inside work and outside of it. Showing your staff that they are appreciated is a great motivator for doing the job to the best of their ability, and really helps to nurture their sense of loyalty to your organization. You may look at introducing staff incentives for hitting deadlines and targets, or give employees their birthdays off work as a way of saying thank you for their hard work.
Measure Your Organization’s Culture
So how do you know whether your business has these values within its culture? The easiest way to measure how successful your business’s culture is, is by implementing a staff survey. List the attributes that you would hope are within your organization, and ask employees to grade each attribute out of 10, and ask for suggestions how to improve the score. An example of attributes is listed below:
- Respect
- Trust and integrity
- Teamwork
- Responsibility and accountability
- Learning opportunities
- Meaning and purpose
- Value
- Adaptability
- Collaboration
- Organization
- Communication
The results that get returned to you will give you a true picture of your business from the viewpoint of your employees – your view from the top of the tree is very different to those on lower branches! You may identify aspects of your organization’s culture that need to be eliminated and strategies put in place to overcome any negative characteristics. Do not underestimate the power of attending management training to help you develop your workplace culture. You need to have in place key strategies to progress in the right direction, and by taking positive action, you can respond by making positive changes to your business.
Signs of a Negative Business Culture
So, what are the signs that you need to improve your business’s culture?
Look at your staff turnover. Happy employees will not want to leave, but if you have a high staff turnover, the signs are there that there is something lacking in your organization. What is it that is making people leave your enterprise? Is it that your recruitment process is not being selective enough? In which case, you need to review it, and review what you are doing wrong. You need to have exit interviews with leaving staff, so that you can get a clear picture of what is behind their decision to leave, and address any issues that arise from them.
Look at your staff sickness levels. Employees often use sickness as a way of escaping from the workplace. Hostile work interactions, too heavy workload, and a lack of feeling valued can make employees feel incredibly stressed and want to take time off. Arrange back to work interviews so that you can understand what it really occurring.
A huge proportion of our lives are spent at work. By ensuring that your organization’s culture is positive, you will see how investing in your employees’ well-being and happiness correlates with your bottom line: fewer days off with sickness, increased morale, motivation, productivity and efficiency; and a desire for your business to succeed. Don’t delay in addressing any identified issues, and you will soon be able to see the benefits of making these changes.
