A strong company culture could make hiring and retaining great staff members for your organization easier. But the big question is really; How exactly do you boost company culture? Some say you can’t; it has to happen organically; others would argue there are steps you can take as a leader to encourage a strong company culture.
Our friends at CultureIQ have come up with six ways to strengthen company culture:
- Define what is important to your organization. The connection between an employee’s work and organizational strategy is a top driver for employee employment. Look at your company’s mission statement, core values, and strategic goals.
- Measure and understand your culture. 70% of American employees are not engaged at work. To understand your people’s thoughts, consider establishing baseline metrics to track over time. Send surveys to identify strengths and pain points, and provide channels for anonymous feedback.
- Establish direction. Assess and prioritize pain points, and send follow-up surveys if needed. Brainstorm and research culture initiatives, and always look for specific processes to improve.
- Communication direction. Companies with effective change and communication are 3.5 times as likely to outperform their peers significantly. Try holding informative town hall meetings (think Google’s TGIF), start a newsletter or internal blog (or why not Slack).
- Implement change. Managers are crucial catalysts for successful change; they create a culture committee, maintain a calendar of culture efforts, and provide induction and ongoing training. Finally, empower your managers to become change agents.
- Refine and iterate. Culture is dynamic, and thus you have to manage your culture on an ongoing basis, do regular surveys, analyze metrics to understand change over time, and experiment with new culture initiatives.
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