Workplace culture can be your competitive advantage. But you have to be intentional about shaping it. Follow this 3-step guide for how to improve company culture at your organization.
Company culture is a critical element to creating a work environment where your employees can be successful. It not only helps attract and retain the best talent, but it is crucial to engaging employees and driving high performance.
Employees and candidates want more than a paycheck. They’re looking for a workplace culture that connects with their career goals and work expectations. A positive workplace culture connects employees to the company’s mission, recognizes them for their contributions to the organization’s success, and gives them actionable feedback to help them improve and grow.
Whether or not you’re intentional about your company culture, it’s always present. The question is, is your company culture working for you or against you? The goal is to create a magnetic effect where your culture is attractive not only to employees, but to candidates who want to join your organization. To do that, you will need to focus on how to improve company culture.
In this guide, you'll discover:
Organizations often struggle to define what workplace culture is. Your company culture isn’t a pizza party or whether you have in-person, hybrid, or remote work. It’s so much more than that. Organizational culture is how work gets done at your organization. It’s the decisions you make, how you communicate with one another, and how you recognize employees for their work. It’s the daily actions, attitudes, and behaviors of employees, teams, and the organization.
It’s important to understand how employees experience company culture so you have a starting point for improvement. Quantum Workplace research shows us that employees feel workplace culture through:
Often, organizations wrongly believe that employees experience organizational culture through certain aspects like being in the office. But research shows employees experience company culture the least through:
Culture doesn’t only exist in the office. Remote and hybrid employees still experience your work culture even if they’ve never visited an office. That’s because they experience organizational culture through other avenues.
Your company culture isn’t different from your employee engagement and performance initiatives. It’s all part of the employee success equation. The way you engage employees and inspire employee impact is part of your culture.
As you build a culture that has business impact, it’s important to remember what culture is and how employees experience it, so that you’re aiming your efforts in the right place.
Company culture is vital to how you compete with other organizations for top talent. And it’s essential to connect employees with your culture that engages them and inspires performance. It’s part of the sticky factor that keeps them working for you.
One of the traps that organizations fall for is that they don’t need to focus on retention unless they start losing employees in a competitive job market. But that’s not the case. You always want to make retaining top talent a priority. And you can do that by creating a culture of resiliency.
That’s why you can’t afford a mediocre culture. A magnetic culture is your competitive advantage. It influences every aspect of your organization every day. It’s either working for you or against you. As the labor market and economy shift, your culture should work to build an engaged culture of high performers today and in the future. Your culture sets the organization up for success regardless of outside influences.
What makes your workplace culture a positive experience? Quantum Workplace asked employees what words they would use to describe their company culture. The words they used depended on if they were engaged or not.
Engaged employees described their company culture as:
Disengaged employees described their workplace culture as:
Across the board, employees regardless of their engagement level described their ideal company culture as:
As you strategize how to improve company culture, think about how your employees describe your culture and what you can do so that they use the descriptions for an ideal workplace culture.
A good starting point for how to improve workplace culture is with research. Quantum Workplace asked employees about their company culture. Here’s what they said.
We’ve said that culture is how work gets done at an organization. That’s how employees describe it. It’s how an organization makes decisions, rewards and recognizes employees, celebrations, behaviors, and how everyone communicates.
Employees say that culture is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment experience. Two-thirds of employees say that their workplace culture positively impacts their work and behaviors.
Engaged employees and disengaged employees view culture differently. Engaged employees are more likely to say that their culture impacts their work and behaviors in a positive way. They’re also less likely to depart your organization for a better company culture. But disengaged employees are 2.6X more likely to leave your organization to find a better culture.
Whether you’re an employee, manager, leader, or in HR, everyone is responsible for creating a strong company culture. 83% of employees say that culture efforts start with your leadership team.
Now that you have a better understanding of positive company culture, the next step is to measure so that you can determine where you can improve company culture.
Before you can improve your company culture, you need to fully understand the employee experience. Once you’ve measured and analyzed what is happening, you can make meaningful changes to improve company culture.
You can’t measure culture with a gut instinct. The best way to determine if your culture is mediocre or magnetic is to ask employees to share their perspectives. They’ll tell you.
Employee feedback will show you what’s working when it comes to shaping culture and what’s not. Your employee listening strategy will help you take the reins on your organizational culture. Start by asking employees at different moments in their employee journey:
These are pivotal moments in your employees’ personal experiences. And it can help you drill down what’s working and what’s not.
Take the feedback employees provide and connect it to some of your other metrics. Compare it with turnover data or the number of performance conversations employees have with their managers. This will help you understand if culture is the reason for turnover and how performance plays a role in your culture. Then think about what an engaging culture should look like. Strategize what barriers you can remove and begin developing a plan to act.
The survey results mean nothing if you don’t do anything with them. Employees want to see that their feedback contributed to meaningful changes to improve workplace culture. The first place you can start is where employees feel culture the strongest: company mission statement, approach to performance, and recognition. Then look for areas where you can make the most impact.
Part of acting on employee perceptions is communicating about the changes. Don’t forget to connect the changes back to employee feedback. That way, employees feel valued for their contributions and are more likely to provide feedback in the future.
The best way to improve company culture is to identify the specific areas where you can improve. But there are also some easy things you can do to start improving your company culture now.
Start by focusing on the right things. A positive workplace culture is aimed at engaging employees. Engagement is the sticky factor that keeps employees connected to their organizations. And by aiming your culture improvements at engagement, you’ll help keep top employees and motivate them to do their best work.
Concentrating on creating an engaging workplace culture will get you a better return on your investment. It’s all part of creating an environment of employee success and building a magnetic organization.
Employees say that the organization’s approach to performance management is a huge component of how they experience company culture. It makes sense that your performance processes should be one of the first places to take action to improve company culture.
You want your approach to performance to be engaging for employees. The key drivers of a culture built on an engaging performance culture are:
When you’re evaluating your performance strategies, you don’t have to make a bunch of changes at once. Evolve them over time. Start with Quantum Workplace’s Performance Pathways that can help you engage employees through performance initiatives.
Help employees feel connected to the organization and one another. One of the ways you can do that is by building trust between employees and leaders.
Here’s how:
With dispersed workforces, connection between employees isn’t always easy. Make sure employees have the tools to collaborate and communicate effectively. Designate channels for employees to communicate and connect. For your remote employees, mimic the in-office environment with “water cooler” conversations and opportunities to chat with other employees about more than just work.
Also, consider connecting workers with common interests, experiences, and backgrounds through employee resource groups or hosting team-building opportunities that are immersive and fun.
Employees want to feel trusted to do good work. Help managers avoid becoming micromanaging critics and transform them into coaches. Managers are a key driver of performance initiatives. And they're also your culture champions. When we empower managers to foster a positive work environment where they can express their thoughts and concerns about organizational changes, we help employees be more engaged.
Part of the autonomy conversation is thinking about flexibility. Flexibility doesn’t always mean remote or hybrid work. It can also mean giving employees the flexibility to determine work hours, worksite, teams they work with, or projects they work on.
At the core of engagement is making sure employees are valued and recognized for their contributions. The best way to do that is by creating a culture of recognition.
Recognition doesn’t have to be complicated. You can have an impact in a simple way. Acknowledging employees for their contributions to the organization’s success and showing the organization cares by offering work flexibility and growth opportunities are all part of a culture of recognition.
Think of these aspects when analyzing the role of recognition:
Employees want to run from a toxic culture. The same ways you improve your company culture are the same for correcting a culture that doesn’t create an environment where employees can be successful.
Are employees telling you have a good company culture? Or that your workplace culture could be better? Start with these steps to improve:
Improving company culture doesn’t have to be complicated. By aiming your efforts at engaging employees, evaluating your approach to performance management, and recognizing great work, you can take the first steps to transform your workplace culture from mediocre to magnetic.
Published October 3, 2024 | Written By Jessica McBride
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