Create the Right Company Culture Mix With These Strategies

Creating the right company culture mix is an important step for any business that wants to attract top talent and then get them firing on all cylinders. 

But as anyone who’s tried to transform the fortunes of an underperforming team knows, building and maintaining a strong workplace culture is hard work. 

Read on for five simple strategies that will help you improve any organization’s culture, no matter where you’re starting from.

What is a company culture strategy?

A company culture strategy is what guides an organization’s approach to keeping its people happy, productive, and loyal. It lays out the principles and values the company holds dear and documents the approaches it takes to bring those to life. 

An effective company culture strategy helps create a positive and productive work environment that leads to happy employees who give their all when they come into work each day.

Book a demo of Assembly to quickly create a company culture strategy and share it across your organization.

What are 5 strategies employers can incorporate to improve workplace culture?

Creating a strong company culture will help you retain your best employees, achieve your goals, and make your business a better place to work for everyone.

Here’s a closer look at five of the most effective strategies for building a strong workplace culture for you to incorporate into your business: 

Make mental health a priority

If an employee is unhappy at work it can take a big toll on their mental health. Research even shows people in bad jobs have higher chronic stress levels than people who are unemployed.

Your people almost certainly won't be happy in their jobs if:

• They’re constantly having to work overtime to meet unrealistic deadlines
• They feel like they’ll end up in the higher ups’ bad books if they flag a problem
• They feel like they have to walk on eggshells around a toxic colleague

Your employees aren’t going to give your business their best work if you don’t look after them. But people will run through brick walls for an employer that takes their mental health and work/life balance seriously. Make that the foundation of your company culture and you can’t go wrong.

Train and support your managers

People quit managers, not jobs.

Which is why a surefire way to leave an employee eyeing up the exit is to give them a manager who:

• Doesn't communicate properly
• Is quick to criticize and slow to praise
• Micromanages
• Cares more about looking good in front of their boss than supporting their team

All the hard work you put into building a strong workplace culture will go out the window if your people managers are constantly undermining and upsetting their reports. 

Effective organizations understand this and make giving their managers all the training and support they need to do a great job a cornerstone of their company culture. If you’re currently promoting your best individual contributors to management roles without giving them any training then you might want to think about making it a cornerstone of yours, too.

Try Assembly to see how easy it can be to provide your managers with the support they need.

Lead by example

An effective leader can imbue every level of their organization with a strong sense of purpose. They inspire their employees to bring their best selves to work every day by:

• Treating everyone from directors to interns as valued and respected members of the team
• Being open and transparent about what’s going on in the company
• Showing up and putting in some serious work rather than being an absentee leader
• Being willing to put their ego aside and listen to other people’s opinions before making key business decisions

An easy and effective way to find out whether your leadership team is ticking all these boxes is to run an anonymous staff survey asking people to rate how much faith they have in their leaders. While egos will get bruised if this reveals your team doesn’t rate the people leading them, digging into exactly why they feel that way and then acting on that feedback is one of the most effective ways out there of improving your company culture.

Give your people room to grow

Your employees are bound to lose interest in their work if they feel like they’ve ran out of opportunities to learn new skills or climb the career ladder in their role. That’s just human nature.

If your company culture isn’t built around helping your staff achieve their career goals then they’re not likely to stick around for very long – or be very engaged while they’re there.

If this is the case then it's important to figure out where things are going wrong:

• If people are ready for more responsibility but you don’t have any to give them then you might need to change how you distribute responsibility among your teams. 
• If people feel like they haven't been trained well enough to do their jobs then you need to address that quickly.
• If managers aren’t having frequent check-ins about where their teams want to take their careers then you might want to rethink how you approach one-to-ones.

Making honest and open conversations about your peoples’ career development a cornerstone of your company culture is a surefire route to success.

Recognize great work

40% of employees say they’d put more energy into their work if they were recognized more – and 37% think the most effective thing their employer can do to cause them to produce great work is to recognize them.

Despite this, respondents to one survey said it’s been an average of 50 days since they last felt recognized in any way at work.

Baking employee recognition into your company’s DNA will help you get the most out of your people each day. 

Just be mindful that not all of your employees will appreciate being recognized in the same way. Some might love being made the center of attention while others would much rather receive a few words of praise from their manager in private. Ask employees how they like to be recognised during your new hire survey so you can tailor your approach to each person.

Book a demo of Assembly to make recognizing and rewarding your employees as easy as possible.

How to build company culture

Transforming a company’s culture isn’t an easy undertaking. It’s often deeply ingrained from years – or even decades – of bad habits going unchecked.

Here’s where to start when you’re setting out to try to reinvent your company’s culture:

Find out where you’re falling short as a company

No one knows your organization better than your employees. Staff surveys and one-to-ones are therefore the keys to quickly getting to the bottom of where you need to improve your culture.

Use this feedback to take an honest look at what you could be doing better

It’s crucial you leave egos at the door here and let your employees’ feedback guide which of the strategies we’ve outlined above is most needed in your business.

Start small

You’re not going to overhaul your workplace culture overnight. Pick one strategy to implement and one metric you’re going to use to measure its success to start with.

Measure and adapt

The companies with the strongest cultures are the ones that are the most interested in what their employees have to say. Once the change you’ve made has had time to have an impact, it’s time to go back to your team and see if they like the direction the business is heading in. Then you can tweak accordingly to make sure you’re developing as strong a culture as possible. 

Move on to the next strategy

Once you feel like you’ve made headway in one area it’s time to move on to the next. Pick the next strategy, start the process again, and watch employee engagement levels rise through the roof. 

The final word

Creating a strong company culture is never easy – and it’s always a constant work in progress. 

Stick to the strategies we’ve laid out here for the best chances of quickly getting the right company culture mix. Put in the hard work and you’ll get a happier, more loyal, and more productive workforce in return.