A vibrant, healthy company culture is an incredibly powerful driving force behind any organization’s success. It keeps employees engaged, passionate, and working as a cohesive team. It boosts your company’s brand reputation and makes it a desirable place where people want to work. But building and actively maintaining that kind of ideal, high-performance culture does not happen by accident. It takes committed, sustained effort from leadership.
Clearly Define Your Core Values & Principles
First and foremost, you need to take the time to define and articulate the core values, principles, and overarching behaviors that should underpin and guide your entire workplace culture. Some common examples could include values like:
- Integrity, accountability, and ownership.
- Collaboration, teamwork, and open communication.
- Innovative thinking, creativity, and continuous learning.
- A genuine commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Consistently delivering outstanding customer service.
Instead of dictating from on high, it is wise to involve employees from all levels in the process of collectively crafting and finalizing these core value statements.
Hire for Cultural Fit
When hiring and building your team, it is critical to evaluate candidates based on how well they are likely to mesh with and embrace your organization’s intended culture. Look for people whose personal values, mindsets and work styles appear highly aligned with the type of environment you aim to create. If an otherwise talented person seems like a potentially toxic cultural misfit, they may eventually become disruptive to morale.
Leadership Must Lead by Example
As the old saying goes, culture starts at the top and cascades downward. Senior team members bear a special responsibility to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, by:
- Visibly and consistently exhibiting the same cultural behaviors they preach.
- Proactively giving recognition, praise, and rewards for notable examples of cultural values in action.
- Holding themselves and others accountable to cultural standards.
- Maintaining an open, visible, accessible presence and eagle-eyed vigilance.
Employees naturally take cues from the actions, attitudes, and habits of those in charge. Senior leaders must strive to be model examples worth emulating when it comes to personifying the culture.
Foster an Environment of Open Communication
In a strong, healthy workplace culture, employees at all levels should feel genuinely safe and encouraged to give open, candid feedback freely, both positive observations and frank, constructive criticism alike. Some smart ways to nurture this actively are:
- Distributing anonymous surveys and installing suggestion box systems.
- Holding open forums where any person can voice questions, concerns, or ideas.
- Maintaining a true “open door” policy from leadership and management.
- Encouraging an ethos of authenticity and transparency at all levels.
When people feel their voices and perspectives are not truly being heard or valued, that is when toxic, negativity-spreading subcultures can quietly fester and eventually erupt.
Provide the Right Customized Motivation and Incentives
Besides offering competitive pay and monetary compensation, the experts at Motivation Excellence say that it is important to find other ways to reward, recognize and motivate people in a manner that remains consistent with and reinforces your core cultural values. Things like custom employee incentives, public recognition ceremonies, fun team outings, and facilitating an enjoyable social working atmosphere can all inspire people to not only uphold but actively embody the culture.
Conclusion
While taking sustained effort to build and maintain over time, a carefully cultivated, positive, high-performance company culture eventually becomes a powerful self-perpetuating force. It elevates morale, inspires peak performance, and fosters loyalty. It creates a desirable workplace that attracts top talent. And it burnishes your organization’s brand reputation in the eyes of customers, too. Prioritize getting your culture right from the outset.
