Are you experiencing a high employee turnover rate? If yes, here’s something to take note of. According to the U.S. BLS, nearly a whopping 47 million people left their position and company throughout 2021!
As revealed by an article published in MIT Sloan Management Review, toxic culture was the most important predictor of employee turnover, much more vital than issues with compensation.
The authors of the study referred to toxic culture involving aspects like employees feeling disrespected, unethical behaviour, etc. Unfortunately, the impact of poor company culture goes beyond high employee turnover.
In organisations with poor company culture, a lack of passion among employees can be commonly seen. Moreover, these organisations also experience a lack of smooth communication, which typically results in a lot of wasted time and an absence of professionalism.
Fortunately, improving company culture isn’t an uphill task. You can easily achieve a good company culture by following these five simple yet highly effective methods.
1. Clarify Your Organisation’s Focus
Clarifying the focus of your organisation is one of the fundamental methods to improve company culture. This gives employees something they can agree with and support.
You can choose any or all of these to clarify the purpose.
- Circulate your organisation’s core values
- Post your organisation’s mission statement
- Mention project timelines
- Set clear expectations for every employee
When employees understand how their individual efforts support the company’s objective, it helps boost their productivity and level of motivation.
2. Celebrate Success with the Entire Team
Celebrate success whenever your company achieves it, irrespective of how big or small it is,. And be sure to involve all your employees in the celebration.
One effective method is rewarding them with corporate gift items they can use every day. You can also throw a party or demonstrate your appreciation by sending out a company-wide email.
No matter which path you choose, it should let your employees feel they have achieved success and you are truly proud of them. When the team feels that it has actually contributed to the success of the organisation, it makes them more committed to and involved in its mission.
3. Promote Psychological Safety
Psychological safety refers to the environment where individuals feel comfortable expressing and being themselves. By building a psychologically safe environment, you can make your office a more comfortable place to work where employees feel included and recognised.
Such an environment also makes employees feel emboldened to innovate and take risks without having a fear of retaliation even if they fail.
You can choose these methods to build a psychologically safe environment.
- Demonstrate respect for everybody, regardless of their roles
- Stop micromanaging to give autonomy to employees
- Create committees for underrepresented groups and sexual harassment
- Instead of retribution, build an environment of reform when team members make mistakes
Focusing on psychological safety gives each of your employees an equal opportunity to succeed, which helps increase their productivity and motivates them to innovate.
4. Encourage Collaboration across Departments
Someone in your sales team could demonstrate exceptional results if he or she could collaborate with another particular employee in product development. Somebody in operations could do wonders if he could work closely with someone in HR.
You cannot find this out without promoting collaboration across multiple departments. This will help your employees get a better feel of the entirety of the office while keeping the ideas fresh by letting new people work together.
This will also develop a sense of unity that couldn’t be achieved if everybody only interacted with their particular team members. If you are following a hybrid workplace model, there are several online collaboration tools that can be used to bring multiple departments together.
When multiple departments are brought together, it helps employees feel more connected to your organisation as a whole, while improving their level of motivation and creating new opportunities for them.
5. Eliminate Unethical Behaviour
If you observe any unethical behaviour, you should take the necessary actions to eliminate it. Your actions must demonstrate that this kind of behaviour is completely undesirable and results in consequences.
Even if you need to take harsh actions, they will clearly define what activities the organisation endorses and what are not tolerated. Set clear standards regarding these, and be sure to follow through.
If you don’t follow through, your employees won’t have confidence in management, which will lead to poor company culture. But if you do, it will raise their trust in you, resulting in better company culture.
Parting Thoughts
While a poor company culture may cause several irreversible damages to your organisation, a good one can bring lots of unparalleled benefits your way. And as you can see, improving company culture isn’t as difficult as many business owners assume.
So, which ones of these will you implement to boost your company culture?
This article was written by InHunt World