Guest Post: 4 Contributing Factors That Create an Impactful Company Culture

The culture of your company is what helps to set the tone and direction of your business. Sometimes the hardest thing to change about any business is the culture. It’s one of those things that you can’t always start from scratch on unless everyone is on board.

If your company is reevaluating your culture or if you’re starting a new business and want to take such matters into consideration, consider these four factors of what will make your company’s culture impactful.

Think of Your Employees as Individuals

Your workforce and how they interact with each other plays a significant part in the development of your culture. To encourage positive interaction, see your employees as individuals—people with real-world issues and different backgrounds. They are not just dispensable robot-like creatures who show up every day for your corporate gain. No, they have needs.

One need is to be happy and comfortable where they’re at. You can encourage such sentiments in the workplace by encouraging a compassionate environment with leaders who are understanding and willing to work with individuals.

Improve Your Creative Vibe

Surround your employees with items that are designed to stimulate their creativity. This could be bright colors on the walls or adding in office plants. You could even have unique signs or features made from acrylic, such as perspex, that show off your company’s brand and further define the type of culture your company needs.

You may also want to look at examples of companies like Google and Amazon that make culture a huge part of the working experience—providing a work hard/play hard type of environment with their creative spaces and awesome perks.

Offer Growth Opportunities

If your employees feel stuck in their positions with nowhere else to go in your company, then it’s time to evaluate your business model. Maintaining loyal employees is not only great for company morale but it is financially beneficial as well. You can provide more growth opportunities by creating new positions and/or teams.

You can also encourage cross-training so individuals feel more capable of applying for positions on other teams. Another thing that you can do is to have your recruiter sit down with employees who feel stuck and counsel them on how to get to a higher position.

Work Towards Transparency

One of the biggest impacts to any business is the perception that employs have about the company. Creating transparency is more than just having an open door policy. It includes things like posting the salary ranges for any given job title or creating a measurement tool for rating overall performance.

One way to create transparency is to have Q&A sessions where employees are free to ask the company’s executives questions and where they can also be informed on important changes, whether or not the company is doing well, and other such matters that employees are often concerned about.

It can be a huge challenge to get the culture you want your company to have. It’s not going to happen overnight. In fact, it can take years. Little by little, however, you will get there.

 

 

Hannah Whittenly is a freelance writer and mother of two from Sacramento, CA. She enjoys kayaking and reading books by the lake..