Cultivating a Positive Company Culture – Lessons From Successful Startups
Establishing an attractive company culture is essential to business success, affecting employee engagement, retention rates and productivity positively.
Establishing and adopting company values are a great way to establish a uplifting company culture. Here are some lessons from successful startups that may help your organisation foster a vibrant workplace culture.
1. Invest in Employee Development
Company culture is more than just a empty buzzword it is at the core of what makes your organization run smoothly and efficiently. Employee satisfaction and productivity play a enormous role in its overall performance, profitability and morale.
Investment in employee development is one of the key ways to creating a positive workplace culture. A properly trained staff will be more productive, and can even help your company expand.
Encouraging employee development also generates promotable employees and an emerging talent pipeline for future leadership. Furthermore, developing employees can lead to improved loyalty and reduced turnover costs; two huge costs for any business.
Investment in employee development also promotes team collaboration. This can be accomplished by hosting seminars and training sessions on various subjects, or undertaking team projects or cross-functional discussions.
2. Encourage Collaboration
Collaboration is a cornerstone of creating an effective work culture. Teams who can cooperate efficiently are more productive and can achieve their goals more quickly than those forced to complete tasks independently.
Promoting a collaborative environment means encouraging team members to be themselves, share their thoughts and opinions freely, and actively take part in brainstorm sessions. Teams should also accept healthy disagreements as these can often spark revolutionary new ideas.
At the core of it all lies each team leader, who should set an example by leading by example and encouraging collaboration among their teams. Leaders should frequently communicate with their teams regarding how they expect them to work collaboratively and how they will measure its results, through meetings, emails updates or employee reviews.
3. Encourage Healthy Work-Life Balance
Employees who don’t perceive their work as a imposition on their personal lives tend to be happier and more productive at their job, leading to improved morale and commitment for an organization.
A positive company culture includes employee recognition programs, flexible working arrangements and generous vacation time. Furthermore, it fosters mental health and wellbeing by prioritizing trust, respect, compassion and objectivity within the workplace.
Team leads should be aware of unconscious bias and demonstrate their commitment to inclusiveness by supporting the needs of their teams helping employees find ways to balance their schedule or ensuring all members qualify for benefits like healthcare and learning support, or encouraging staff members to take regular breaks from screens and utilize all vacation days available to them.
4. Encourage Transparency
Transparency is an integral component of company culture. A recent study conducted by Tiny Pulse demonstrated that employees who perceive their companies to be transparent regarding goals, successes and challenges reported higher levels of employee satisfaction compared to those whose organizations weren’t so forthcoming with information.
Encourage transparency by openly communicating with employees and making information easily available team meetings, company newsletters and intranets all can help create an open work environment.
Transparency can also be promoted by encouraging employees to ask questions. A healthy company culture should make it routine for frontline workers to address concerns quickly and receive timely feedback from leadership teams. Incorporating bottom-up feedback tools like Polls and Surveys allows leaders to gather employee insights easily allowing for greater company culture improvement.
5. Encourage Accountability
Leaders must promote an environment of accountability and integrity among their teams. This can be accomplished by encouraging open, constructive feedback channels for employees to air concerns about leadership as well as using a goal setting framework (like OKRs) that align organizational and individual goals.
An accountability culture also calls on leaders to demonstrate their own commitment and value as role models by supporting employee development and encouraging a healthy work-life balance.
Leaders can foster accountability by clearly outlining each team member’s roles and responsibilities through a RACI chart before commencing projects. This helps all parties understand who is accountable, consultable, informed (RACI). By following these tips, leaders can establish a inviting company culture that attracts top talent while driving innovation.