Do you need to improve your corporate culture?

Building a successful company is difficult and gets harder as the company expands and enters new markets and countries – which is often the seed bed for inertia as business leaders, swamped by the challenges ahead, deprioritise some of the key issues that underpin growth.

This is undoubtedly true when it comes to corporate culture, which is often undervalued by businesses – and especially start-ups – as they embark on a plan for expansion. And when they do realise the importance of culture in performance, it’s often too late.

Business culture is a vital component of success and starting with the right business culture makes life very much easier further down the road.

Why is business culture important?

Prioritizing company culture is smart for business. When the culture in an organisation is right, it can reduce (and even negate) the need for direct supervision – which often becomes micro-management.

Light-touch management makes employees happier and reduces manager stress, and harmony increases when everyone works together and recognises their teammates' strengths, skills, and responsibilities.

In fact, a study by Oxford University recently found that happy workers create 13% more per hour – and that isn’t just in some sectors … it’s in all of them.

And when performance is good and productivity is elevated, this culture of work translates into better customer experience, improved revenue, and repeat business.

Boosting company culture

There are many ways to approach the challenge of improving existing culture, but most successful models bear the following characteristics in some form:

1. Set out the company's mission and vision.

When the mission is clear, employees are able to better understand their work and can learn how what they do plays into the work being done by others around them.

2. Define the organisational values

Having the right basic concepts can help your teams make informed judgements. If a course of action fails the values test, it's immediately clear. For inspiration, find examples of businesses that live their values effectively and share these with your teams.

3. Be clear about how you want your people to feel.

Most organisations say they want their employees to love their jobs and careers, but they fall short of being explicit about what that means or how people can achieve it. Until businesses learn to express the emotions they want their employees to experience, they can't create a rewarding, happy environment.

4. Create practices that foster positive attitudes.

Your company's daily operations must reflect its mission and ideals. That starts with hiring and onboarding (starting as you mean to go on) through the professional lifecycle of the employee, to exit (consistency of approach).

Training, mentoring, and business events affect employees' perspectives. Digital signage can boost workplace culture in many ways – particularly when it comes to helping people to remember the company's mission and beliefs.

Because the message and style may be easily changed, it's easy to experiment with fresh images and videos to represent company events.

5. Every worker's contributions are valid and valuable

Every employee must be able to recognise their personal contributions to product and service delivery.

Setting organisational, departmental, team, and individual goals helps everyone take responsibility. However, those goals need to be realistic – not just for show. So, make them SMART.

It’s important, too, to define what success looks like in your organisation before you set the goals that are expected to achieve it – best practice elsewhere may not be appropriate or effective for your business and its circumstances.

And once you’ve set your goals, it’s vital that you review progress frequently and measure success against the key performance indicators you have identified when defining what constitutes success.

6. Feedback often and constructively 

How you review progress should be flexible and adaptable – but always consistent. How regularly you review will depend on the goal you’ve set. Too much assessment erodes trust, whilst leaving feedback unsaid may impact negatively on outcomes.

Work out a structure for review and feedback – and the stick to it unless something happens that makes it clear you need to change strategy.

Conclusion

Building or improving culture requires effort, but don’t be discouraged or daunted by the challenge – done well, it’s always worth the time and it always pays off in better results and faster growth.

Eventually, you’ll find it becomes second nature – a sign that your culture is now embedded in the organisation and truly reflects its mission, vision and values.

If you’d like to know more about how Constantia Consulting can help you to develop or create your company culture, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.