5 Tips to Improve Your Company’s Culture
What is Company Culture, and Why is it Important?
Company culture is a set of shared values, goals, practices, and attitudes that characterize an organization.
It’s simply the way people within an organization interact with each other and work together, how they enjoy the work they do, and their values. Deciding early on what you want your company culture to be like and modeling that behavior as the head honcho will set the tone for the rest of your team.
Happy employees who love their job and the people they work with are committed to their organization’s values, and mission. They make up the company’s backbone. They will not only help you keep your best employees around, but they will also help you attract new, totally awesome ones as well. A winning corporate culture has been proven to increase employee engagement, productivity, and performance. And your office will be filled with cool people that are cheerful instead of a drag.
If the company culture is negative and toxic, employees won’t communicate or encourage one another. A toxic culture can bog everyone down and makes everything else more difficult, from organizing projects to getting critical approvals to move your work forward. It just won’t be fun to come to work every day to work on your business, your dream.
Here are five tried and tested tips for improving your company’s culture:
1. Create an employee recognition program
Employee recognition programs are used by many of the world’s most successful organizations. They can boost company culture, increase team-work, reduce turnover, and make your employees happy!
Employee recognition makes people feel really good and motivates them to keep up the good work. Positive reinforcement sets an example for your team, showing them the kind of work you value most. It will get them to want to work hard for you to reach your business goals.
Give perks that align with your company’s values and goals. Suppose you want a company with a light and fun work atmosphere that provides excellent customer service. You could provide a cool employee perk that activates after an employee receives 10 five-star ratings. The employee would receive a coupon for a free coffee at a hip coffee shop down the street.
Here are a few other perk ideas to consider to reward your team for their hard work and their wins (think about your employees and what they would really like and want to work hard for):
- VIP parking spot
- Team lunch
- Time-off coupons
- Certificate of Achievement
- Breakfast treat
- Casual or Themed dress code for a day
- Gift cards
- Raffle prizes
It doesn’t always have to be monetary — get creative, figure out what motivates your team the most, and then stick with it. Keep it fun!
2. Give Employees Flexibility
Employee involvement should be a top priority when recruiting candidates and evaluating your current employees’ overall happiness. Many employers are turning towards more flexibility in the workplace when attracting their best talent. A stable work-life balance works great for both employers and employees. Moving toward a flexible modern workplace model that makes your team delighted to work for you (and keeps them productive at work) is ideal with today’s talent, especially Millennials.
Some research showed that nearly 40% of job prospects across the world said schedule flexibility is one of their top three factors in employment decisions. It showed 26% of those surveyed said flexible start and leave times are most important, with 22% saying they prefer the ability to work remotely — meaning it’s okay sometimes to leave early, so you don’t get a serious case of FOMO. Get your work done and enjoy life!
3. Company Volunteering
Volunteering with your team will bring them together and encourage teamwork, increasing job productivity and boosting company morale. It’s a win-win. There’s a ton of non-profit organizations that are always welcoming volunteers, and the help makes a difference within the community. And let's be real, who doesn’t love making a difference? Find one that lines up with your company's culture, so your team really digs it.
4. Create Fun Games Your Whole Team Will Love
Who says work has to be all work and no play? That just makes the office boring and sometimes draining. A little fun at work helps to take the stress off and build teams and relationships. National Fun at Work Day was created just to encourage having fun at work. From experience, team-building games and activities help build relationships – some that may have never formed otherwise; it boosts team bonding and morale. Below are some ideas of fun games to choose from, but when it comes to games, the sky’s the limit.
Scavenger Hunts
Scavenger hunts can be a great way to break the ice and get your team to work together without even realizing it. You could make a theme and then leave clues that lead to the following clue until the final clue is reached and can be answered. To get the most out of it, make sure it’s a teamwork game and not done individually. This game brings people together, helps break up cliques, and improves strategic and creative thinking, which could then be brought into their work.
Here how you play:
- Create a theme for the hunt.
- Come up with clues based on the theme.
- Strategically place the clues in different areas where your employees can find them.
- Divide your staff members into teams with an equal number of players.
- Give each team the first clue.
- Send them off to hunt.
You can keep this game in the office or send the team out for an hour or two to make it a fun event out-of-office. However you decide to play the game, you might want to set a time limit and require all teams to meet back in a single location at the same time. The team that completed the most clues wins.
What’s On Your Desk
Team members will each bring one item they choose from their desk. The idea is for them to use the item like it’s their new product that they want to get on the market. So they will create a name, logo, logo, and marketing plan for that object. Set a time their business plan needs to be done by. This could be done independently or in small groups. When the time is up, allow each person or team to introduce the item and give a short presentation on their “product” as if they were really selling it.
Afterward, as a group, discuss which products were successfully sold and why. It’s an excellent way to get everyone thinking like an entrepreneur or great salesperson.
Hold Virtual Night Outs
Let everyone have the good feeling of a perfect night out by taking advantage of virtual internet sources. It could be as basic as a virtual happy hour with their favorite cocktail where you just chat and joke around, have a totally hip dance-off, or play a game. Nowadays, there’s also fun options to go on a virtual safari to a zoo or a museum and explore these places together. Whatever you decide to do with your virtual night out, if your team is cool, they will make it fun!
Team-Wide Sales Game
You can ask your team to work together to reach a certain goal. To do this, set a goal for your team like a dollar amount for total sales or the number of products sold – whatever makes sense for your business. Keep track of the progress throughout the month, and make sure your team always knows. If they don’t stay informed, it’s not as motivating to keep pushing and encouraging each other to work toward that goal.
If the goal is reached at the end of the month, you take your team out for lunch or dinner or happy hour for more team building in a fun, relaxed atmosphere. This is a win-win type of game since everyone is playing to increase sales to win the prize at the end, and the company wins in the form of hardcore moolah.
Mad Lib Mission Statement
This one could be hilarious. Take your organization's mission statement and turn them into the popular Mad Lib game. You do this by taking out key nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Then create a worksheet in which the eliminated words are shown as a blank line with guidelines on what kind of word is needed.
In groups of two, have one person ask for the correct type of word, and the other team member provide the word. You can ask the team as a whole to supply one word at a time if you don’t want to break up in groups. When there are enough words, read the mission statement out loud. It will sound funny, and ridiculous. Now that they know what the goal is, ask them for the same word types. See what kinds of words they give. Repeat until you get a mission statement that the team feels is accurate for your company.
Another way to do it is to categorize the types of words before the first round. Tell a little white lie by saying you are looking for words that apply to the team without revealing you are working on a mission statement.
You could also have games like foosball or ping pong in the office and have tournaments which are always fun, even on lunch breaks. Bingo anyone?
5. Build a Team of Superstars From the Start
Entrepreneurs work hard to create the culture they want for their organization. If you create a light and fun atmosphere, remember each new hire can contribute to support or destroy that culture, so it’s important to hire people with the same attitude, values, and goals as the company's culture. Hiring team members who contribute positively to the company's culture helps with your awesome work environment.
Communicate to hiring managers what type of culture and people you want and spend time training them to be sure they understand the behaviors and actions that show if someone is a good fit. Rather than asking applicants about their values, using behavior-focused questions will get them talking about how they’ve previously handled situations and what kind of person they really are.
The Takeaway
A powerful company culture can have a huge impact on employee happiness, performance, and productivity. That’s why it has been one of the buzzwords for quite some time, and companies are promising to offer work-life balance and fantastic company culture to attract the young talented workforce.
Contact Awesome CX today. Find out how we can get your employees stoked and ready to gas up your company to anyone who’ll listen.
Sources:
https://www.unitedway.org/blog/4-personal-benefits-of-volunteering-in-your-community-redo