Creating a successful company starts at the ground level. Employers and company owners in today’s world have started to realise and accept that a productive business is nothing without its workers.
Employees are the foundation of the business. Without their labor, there would be no product to sell. That’s why ensuring your employees are fulfilled, motivated, and inspired to do their best is essential.
One way of doing this is to establish a solid employee culture and ensure that you maintain it across the workplace.
Understanding Employee Culture
The culture of your business is defined by the character and personality of your organization. In a nutshell, it’s the feeling that employees get when they first step through the doors of the workplace. And the emotion and substance of conversation within the company.
Broadly, ‘culture’ refers to that intrinsic characteristic that makes your company unique. It’s the traditions, beliefs, values, and attitudes that your business exudes and abides by on a day-to-day basis.
If you want your employees to feel committed to the company’s success, then you have to build that idea into the foundations of the business. If you want your employees to have an attitude of hard work and productivity, you need to ensure that your company encourages it—every day they walk through the doors.
How Leaders Encourage Success
You need to instil a culture of hard work and happiness to get the best out of your employees. As the owner or manager that’s building a consistent company culture, it’s up to you to drive the narrative and establish the groundwork. The employees need a leader who they can look up to and follow.
A positive culture will incentivise employees already part of the workforce to perform at their optimum. It will also encourage retention as happy employees don’t tend to seek employment opportunities elsewhere. Plus, it will also attract talent that appreciates a solid employee culture. If you have a positive workplace and employee culture, it’s only natural that you will attract workers who share that same belief.
Good employee culture has many knock-on effects, including increasing workplace happiness, improving employee performance, and creating future leaders for your business.
Why Your Company Should Focus On Improving Employee Culture
Employee culture sets the foundations for each and every part of an organization. Without a solid employee culture in place, it’s almost certain that a business will not operate at its full potential.
Forging an employee culture that abides by the goals and beliefs of your company should form the foundational part of your business strategy. It’s essential to running any business and cannot be disregarded for other, less important things.
Often, leaders and managers disregard creating a good workplace or employee culture because culture itself is an abstract notion. They often focus on more practical goals like extending work hours to improve output and incentivising workers with monetary rewards.
These more practical areas of focus are also important, but it will all count for nothing if employees don’t feel happy and satisfied with their work.
Positive employee culture is essential for many different reasons, including:
Creating a unified and engaged workforce
Establishing a positive employee culture that’s aligned with the long-term goals of the company will ensure the entire workforce is on the same page.
Employees feel more engaged when everyone around them has the same attitude towards their work. Having an entire workforce work towards the same long-term goals will undoubtedly increase your company’s chances of success.
It increases employee happiness
Focusing on the company’s culture is a very people-focused objective.
Making employees aware that they’re important cogs in the company machine and ensuring that they know the company will fail without their dedication and work makes employees feel valued and vital. This is essential to creating a happy workforce that’s engaged in their work and dedicated to reaching the goals of the company.
It attracts talent
When potential job candidates go through the interview process, one of the most important things they look for is a workplace where they’ll feel happy, safe, and engaged.
Your company’s employee culture is the first thing they’ll notice when entering your workplace. If there’s a feeling of positivity, productivity, and dedication, it will attract people with those same goals.
It encourages retention
In the era of the Great Resignation, employee retention has become a significant concern. Every employee that leaves an organization takes knowledge, expertise, and insight with them. Hiring new employees is time-consuming and costly, and a knowledge or skills gap may be lacking if your organization is in a niche industry.
If there’s a positive employee culture and employees are fulfilled and happy in their roles, they’re less likely to resign.
All in all, a positive culture is essential to improving employee morale. This encourages teamwork and a sense of unity in the office.
Having one unified and dedicated body of employees working towards achieving long and short-term goals is the best way to improve productivity—far more than increasing working hours or providing monetary incentives.
How Can Your Company Create a Strong Employee Culture?
There are many different aspects to focus on if you want to start creating a positive employee culture. Culture is the foundational aspect of success in the long term.
But it must start at the top.
As the manager or owner, it’s up to you to set out the beliefs and goals of the company from the outset.
Leadership
Employees are hired to do a specific job. They’re hired because of their particular knowledge in a specific area of work. The leaders and managers in the business have very different roles for each employee within the workplace. Employees look up to those above them for guidance in their work.
Therefore, to create a culture that’s based on teamwork and happiness within the workplace, your business needs leaders who understand the culture and who are committed to instilling a sense of home within the employees.
Establishing a clear ethos and clear goals
One of the most important parts of creating a solid employee culture is ensuring everyone in the workplace is on the same page. Everyone needs to understand what it is that the company stands for and what the long-term goals they’re working towards are.
These goals and the ethos of the company need to be explained to potential employees during the interview and recruitment process. This way, not only will employees know if your company is one they want to work for, but you, as the business, will know whether the potential employee fits in with the overarching beliefs of your business.
The recruitment stage is hugely important in creating a unified workforce and a solid employee culture. You need to hire workers who will respect and understand precisely what it is your business is trying to build.
People
Before you embark on the recruitment process, you should set out a list of beliefs, behaviours, and skills that you’re looking for in future employees. Your workforce should be built of employees that you believe will fit into the culture of the company.
The process is like building a puzzle, with each employee filling the role of a specific piece your business needs. This will allow you to create a harmonic workforce of different personalities that complement one another.
Communication and Collaboration
Communication and collaboration are two of the most important elements that your business needs to foster to create a strong employee culture. Without solid communication and honesty from everyone within the team, there can simply be no growth and harmony in the workplace. The responsibility of driving this falls on those in leadership and management roles within the business.
You need to ensure that each and every one of your employees feels comfortable with the people they work with. You need to forge relationships with your employees and ensure that they develop professional relationships with one another.
In the end, a workforce is almost like a family. Employees depend on one another to correctly complete the work in front of them. People in the workplace need to feel comfortable seeking help from their peers when they’re uncertain or need clarity or assistance. This is the only way to truly have an employee culture that contributes to the success of the company. If your employees are scared to communicate and collaborate with one another, your business is facing failure.
Create an inclusive workspace
This is hugely important and essential for making each person in your workplace perform to the best of their ability. As the company leader, you must ensure that your workplace welcomes everyone, regardless of their background, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, and cultural upbringing.
Everyone in the workplace must feel accepted and comfortable to work to their full potential. There can be no prejudice and no discrimination in the workplace on any grounds. Employees who feel respected and accepted are likely to be happy and wanted in their jobs. This will contribute to higher levels of productivity and dedication to the business that they work in.
A solid and diverse work culture can also be highly beneficial to your company’s products and services. Having people from different backgrounds and social contexts will allow a melting pot of ideas to arise—leading to more diverse ideas and solutions to potential problems. Working for a company that respects and understands diversity and inclusivity will undoubtedly strengthen employee culture.
Promoting Pride and Hard Work
Overall, employee culture is important as it makes workers feel proud of their jobs and the organization they’re a part of. A sense of pride in the business and fellow employees will make employees want to work harder to see them succeed.
Making your employees feel as though their workforce is their professional family will encourage them to work harder to see everyone around them succeed. This is what employee culture is—the traditions, beliefs, relationships, and people within your business.