Company culture is not a nice-to-have benefit, and it’s not a luxury—it’s an integral part of business success that influences everything from employee retention and engagement to overall satisfaction and feelings of safety.
However, like the boy who cried wolf, the term “company culture” has been used so often it’s lost some of its meaning and impact. In this post, we aim to fix that.
This guide provides actionable strategies and insights for building a stronger organizational culture in any industry or org size.
Company Culture Definition and Examples
Work culture is the values, attitudes, and behaviors that guide your organization. It sets employee expectations for interacting with each other, performing their responsibilities, and interacting with the organization as a whole.
Here are some quick examples of company culture to help clarify the definition and show the cause-and-effect relationship between company practices and employee behavior:
- A company that fuels competition and only rewards top performers is building a company culture of hustle and grind that will lead to stress, burnout, and dissatisfaction.
- A company where executives regularly hold meetings to discuss company decisions, financial health, and direction is building corporate culture that encourages transparency and trust.
- A company that regularly holds helpful manager training is building positive workplace culture by supporting its leadership and building effective teams.
- A company that ignores HR complaints or fails to respond to red flags is creating an unsafe environment that leads to high turnover.
Obviously, company culture is more complicated than these examples, but hopefully these help you visualize the impact culture can have.
The Importance of a Strong Company Culture
There are amazing benefits that come from building a company culture that employees enjoy being a part of, and there are some dangerous consequences of not investing in culture, too. Here are some impactful stats to keep in mind:
- When employees feel connected to their culture, they’re 3.7X more likely to be engaged and 68% less likely to feel burned out.
- Employees who rate their workplace culture highly are 790% more likely to feel satisfied, 95% less likely to dread going to work, and 83% less likely to look for a new job.
- Having a healthy culture is 10X more important to employees than pay.
- 33% of employees would pass on the perfect job if the culture wasn’t a good fit.
- Companies with strong work cultures enjoy a 60% higher return to shareholders than median companies.
A strong company culture leads to employees who are more engaged, more loyal, more satisfied, less stressed, and overall happier. Plus, it leads to greater performance!
That right there is why building organizational culture is a must—but how exactly do you do it?
7 Strategies for Building Positive Workplace Culture
1. Define Your Mission and Values (and Incorporate Them Into Work)
Organizational values should shape how work gets done. For example, if a company’s values are integrity, honesty, and teamwork, employees should feel that the company is honest with them. They should feel empowered to collaborate with others in a healthy way.
If your company doesn’t have accurate or effective values yet, take the time to identify the fundamental principles and beliefs that guide your organization. Then spread them to employees and make them a part of their daily lives.
One of the best ways to make your core values a part of employees’ lives is to tie them into recognition. Value-based recognition gives employees shoutouts when they exemplify a core value, thereby reinforcing that behavior and making them much more likely to repeat it.
For a more in-depth look at how to develop and integrate effective core values, check out this post.
2. Lead By Example in Representing Values
No matter what leaders think, building company culture is a top-down exercise. If employees see their leaders working hard, recognizing those around them, and being honest with the company, they’ll emulate those behaviors.
However, if the company says they value honesty but leadership rarely keeps their word to employees, that’s called toxicity—and employees aren’t going to stick around.
Leaders at all levels must understand which behaviors strengthen the culture you want to create. Host training meetings with them or implement a recognition program to recognize their efforts, and watch as their efforts create a culture for direct reports, too.
3. Gather and Use Feedback
In order to know how to improve your culture, you have to know where culture isn’t meeting expectations. Here are some ways to do that:
- Send out surveys that ask employees what they like and what they’d like to see improved about the workplace.
- Train managers to hold 1:1s with employees to get direct feedback on culture.
- Watch data such as turnover rates, the talent pool applying to open positions, and engagement scores.
The more knowledge you have on your culture and where you can improve, the easier it is to build a culture that will reach all of your people.
4. Give Everyone a Purpose at Work
When employees feel like their job is important, they have 51% lower absenteeism, 64% fewer safety incidents, and 30% higher quality work. But how do you build a culture where everyone feels purposeful and valuable?
- Clarify organizational purpose and frequently communicate how each employee’s work contributes to that.
- Create learning and development opportunities so that employees feel they’re moving somewhere in their careers.
- Recognize the good work people do!
- Allow employees to influence decision-making and company direction.
5. Promote Diversity, Inclusivity, and Safety
Create an inclusive workplace where people of all backgrounds are welcome and supported. Never ever ignore or take complaints about harassment lightly, and do all you can to ensure everyone feels safe at work by establishing a zero-tolerance policy.
A great way to increase diversity and inclusivity is to start from your hiring process: work to avoid unconscious bias when hiring, and take advantage of remote opportunities to reach diverse talent.
6. Prioritize Flexibility
Not every company in every industry can offer remote or hybrid work. However, there are other ways to boost your flexibility offerings and help employees strike a good work-life balance:
- Flexible work locations
- Flexible start/end times
- Unlimited PTO
- Compressed workweek
- Annualized hours
- Job sharing
- Shift swapping
- No-meeting Mondays
This type of flexibility shows that you trust employees and care about their personal lives in addition to their work time. This flexibility leads to 3X greater happiness at work.
7. Implement Recognition Programs
Feeling recognized and appreciated is key to a healthy culture: recognition makes employees 5X more connected to company culture and increases loyalty by 3X. So what are some easy ways to boost recognition at your company?
- Look into employee recognition vendors. There are many recognition companies with digital platforms that make creating, implementing, and running recognition programs easy.some text
- Resource: Check out our comparison of the most popular recognition vendors!
- Empower peer-to-peer recognition. Employees recognizing their peers is a powerful tool to spread appreciation. Set up specific ways for employees to do so, whether through a digital platform or a note-writing station or anything else.
- Make milestones special. Birthdays and service anniversaries are the perfect place to start recognizing because everyone has them. Make each year’s milestones special for each employee, with personalized and meaningful gifts.
- Try incentives to boost productivity. Recognize hard workers and increase motivation with incentives. There are dozens of different incentive ideas you can create, from sales incentives to wellness incentives or safety incentives.
Building Culture for Remote, Deskless, and Frontline Employees
Most of the above strategies will be effective for any type of workplace. However, for organizations in industries such as healthcare, education, food service, manufacturing, etc., building culture can often be especially difficult. How do you spread culture to employees who are most often away from a computer, dealing with customers, or on the manufacturing floor?
- Recognize often. Frontline and remote employees may feel unnoticed, but recognition can fix that. Build a culture where people feel valued and appreciated, no matter where they work or who they interact with.some text
- External Recognition with Awardco empowers third parties to recognize your employees. So patients can recognize nurses, diners can recognize servers, customers can recognize CS, and more!
- Focus on professional development. Create a culture where employees have the chance to learn and grow, even if they start as a retail cashier. Help each employee figure out their goals and provide pathways for them to develop.
- Consider remote benefits. Working remotely is one of the easiest ways to feel separated and isolated. Remote benefits such as food delivery gift cards, care packages, or birthday cards with a message from each of the recipient’s teammates are ways to build a culture that supports remote and hybrid workers.
Building Corporate Culture With Class
People spend a lot of their lives at work—it’s important to make that time enjoyable for them. That’s where company culture comes in. By building a culture that recognizes them, makes them feel safe, allows them to have fun, and shows them support and trust, organizations will have employees who enjoy the work they do and strive to do it to the best of their ability.
Ready to transform your company culture? Schedule a demo today.
An avid lover of fantasy books, a proud Hufflepuff, and a strong proponent of escapism, Jeff has a love of good storytelling. He relies on that for both his professional work and his writing hobby (don’t ask about the 10+ novel ideas collecting virtual dust on his computer).
