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You have often imagined ways to improve your product, and price and position it in such a way that it reaches more people. If you are a service-based organization, you will do the same for the services you offer. But at any point in time, have you thought about your corporate culture? Have you ever thought about what it is like or how corporate culture can be improved?
What Is Corporate Culture?
The shared beliefs, values, and behaviors of a company together form what is called a corporate culture. Just as an individual has a personality, a brand has a personality, so does a company. It affects the way the employees and the management interact and the conversations they have more than one can imagine it would. As you can imagine from the more than 8 billion distinct personalities on this planet, every company has its own distinct personality too.
What are the Benefits of Corporate Culture?
Awareness of corporate culture began in the 1960s, though the term began to be widely used by corporate leaders and sociologists in the 1980s. In fact, according to Lexington Law, nearly 70% of all employees value their corporate culture over salary and other benefits. This is a staggering statistic and one that shows a shift in thinking towards valuing the workplace environment more.
1. Increasing Employee Engagement
Employees are more engaged at work when they add more value and feel more trusted and recognized.
2. Improve Productivity
Employee productivity also increases when the employees are more engaged at work. Their attention levels are higher, and they work smarter and harder.
3. Reduce Employee Turnover
Satisfied employees tend to stay longer in the company, provided there are no other problems they face. Employee retention goes up.
4. Attract Top Talent
You can attract top talent when you have a strong corporate culture. Your corporate culture builds your EVP and encourages more people to join.
5. Empower Innovation
Increased innovation happens in a great, employee-friendly and employee-sensitive workplace. Employees are encouraged to fail on the road to success.
How to Build a Corporate Culture in Five Steps?
1. Build shared values
Who are the most important people in your company and what do they value the most? This will include your senior management and leaders. What are the values that are most important for everyone else in the company?
What are the values that most companies in your industry consider important? What are the values you think finally resonate most with you as a brand leader? Get everyone’s approval and rebuild processes in your company aligned with these core values. Make sure the people receive these values positively and remember them well.
2. Invest in DEI
Investing in DEI does not just mean investing in DEI programs, though many businesses assume this is what it means. It is a lot more than that. It’s about finding time, bringing together resources and spending more money.
And the best way to do this is by going right to the beginning. Begin by investing time and money to infuse DEI into your recruitment process. Start by hiring recruiters who are ready to invest time in finding diverse candidates and build an onboarding process that respects diversity and is inclusive.
Build inclusive spaces and ERGs (employee resource groups), so people feel supported and wanted. They have events where people talk candidly about work and people at work. These are some of the things you can do.
3. Ground your culture in mutual trust
Build a culture grounded in mutual trust. To do this, you must encourage employees to try and fail. You must guide them through failures and celebrate their successes with them.
Employees must feel included by the company. Some of the things that can be done are holding open forums with the leadership, where the executive team directly interacts with the employees, soliciting feedback from employees at every level in the company and sharing this feedback with the leadership, and increasing visibility across the processes, projects and decisions made by senior leaders.
All this leads to building mutual trust between the employees and the management, contributing to building a strong corporate culture.
4. Distribute responsibility to the right people
Make the right people responsible for functions in the company. The people who manage these functions must be a good fit too. This ensures meritocracy, where company members lead on the basis of merit. Apart from this, it is also important to ensure that everyone is allowed to keep ownership of what they do.
Even if it is small things that they are doing. This will prevent the risk of micromanagement and ensure that everyone on the team, from fresh hires to higher managers, finds their roles attractive and worthwhile. Feeling unimportant is as bad as feeling underappreciated.
5. Increase clarity of goal alignment
At the end of the day, the business needs to get the work done. To ensure that there is an alignment between the business goals and the company’s activities, teams must have clarity on how to manage their day-to-day tasks and improve the alignment with their goals.
Goal management software can be very useful to ensure that the goals are met one by one in a process. Assigning people to maintain responsibility for the process can be very beneficial as well.
Closing Words
Corporate culture is the difference between an unmotivated workplace and one that is proactive and team oriented. It is the sum of all the behaviors, ideas, values and perspectives that are upheld at the workplace. It multiplies employee engagement and dedication and divides the top-performing companies from mediocre and unappreciated companies in the sector. It is a true reflection of a company’s actions and ideologies and where it hopes to see itself in the future.
