We currently live in a society where we want to be part of something unique and distinctive, and having a unique company culture is an extremely important aspect of any business.
A company's culture is the only unique identifier, it may be similar to others, but it's uniquely distinct to your business. In this blog, we delve into the importance of having a great company culture, whilst discussing the impact it has on your business and employees in the long run.
What Is Company Culture?
Although company culture is not a term that can be easily defined or expressed, it's simply the 'powerful force' that drives your employee's actions and influences their attitudes. It's usually developed through your businesses mission statement, shared values, preferred work style, shared experiences, and common practices.
There are plenty of roles that contribute towards obtaining a company culture. One of the main factors that makes up a company's culture is the ability to create unity in the workplace by defining a clear vision for which employees can join forces to accomplish. It can also work as an action-defining compass that can eliminate any uncertainty when employee's are faced with an unexpected issue or event. To simplify the 'definition', a company culture is your organisations perceived personality.
Why Care About Your Company Culture?
Since a company culture can impact every aspect of a business, it ultimately means that it can have a profound effect on a company's level of success or failure.
The culture is often closely associated with its employee satisfaction. Having a positive staff culture will improve not only staff retention, but it can also boost productivity and creativity, which can lead to a positive influence on the profitability of the company. While on the other hand, a negative workplace culture will result in higher levels of staff turnover, lower quality customer experiences, and even minimal to no profitability.
Company culture also has the ability to manifest itself in the way that business can communicate with its employees and external stakeholders. By adopting a culture of open communication, a business will be able to identify and capitalise on new, innovative ideas from its workforce a lot more clearly - similarly, management will be more likely to find out about issues and failures a lot faster, having the chance to take action where necessary
With 'The Great Resignation' taking over many industries across the globe, a key factor to help cope with this issue is to develop your company culture. This is something we discussed in more detail in our last blog which you can read here.
How To Better Your Company Culture
Understanding the unique characteristics that help to define your company's persona is the first initial step to developing a company culture. Asking yourself if you cover the following factors will help to better understand how your organisation operates as a whole.
Start With The Foundation - When building a company, you tend to start it with your own beliefs and experiences. Structuring it with your ideas, values and vision is what gives the company its individuality. It's significant to build a foundation with these core principles and to carry them out no matter where your company reaches.
Keeping everyone aligned with the goals and to help support your employees, it's always best to use the right kind of leadership styles and principles. If your main principle is to provide excellent customer service or to commit fully to your clients, you need to make sure that this is communicated clearly to your current and future employees.
The Right Hiring - Your company tends to carry the trait of its employees and their understanding of the corporate structure and behaviour. So to continue the development of your working culture, hiring the right people who fit within your organisation's ideologies from the get-go is a great tactic to follow.
When a business grows rapidly, it's easy to justify hiring candidates with impressive CV's and recommendations, without considering their cultural fit. In some cases, being under pressure when hiring can sometimes result in ignoring the obvious signs of a potential cultural clash. So it's best to always consider cultural compatibility when going through the hiring process and to reinforce it to anyone involved in the onboarding stages.
Job Satisfaction - One of the most important factors to have is having happy employees. As a company, you need to ensure that your employees are satisfied with their jobs and enjoy working for the company. Job satisfaction works along side of supporting your employees and helping them when they're in need.
Actively listening to them, communicating more and working on understanding any issues they may have will help their all around well being. Caring for your employees helps them to feel motivated and passionate about the work they produce - helping your team to thrive and accomplish anything.
Retaining Staff - Retaining your staff is equally as crucial as it is to hire new candidates. The teams you build have the potential to help your company grow in the long run. They help to develop your company culture and are extremely valuable.
You need to do what it takes to retain these employees - especially whilst 'The Great Resignation' is taking place across all industries. Whether that's considering flexibility, benefits and perks, or offering development within the company. Make your employees realise that it's their company too, the sustainability and growth have a lot to do with them and their work.
We carried out a poll with all of our LinkedIn followers, asking the simple question 'Would you rather accept a job offer with more money or a better working culture?' - where 62% of people answered 'working culture' and only 38% of people said they would rather a 'pay rise'.
So what is the point in developing your company culture? There are two main advantages to this point - firstly, recognising your company culture makes hiring the right candidates a lot easier. When you understand the current climate of your organisation, you can better identify perfect candidates who would fit in with you and your team at the company. It's the people you hire today that will have the potential to drive the future of your organisation and its own culture.
Secondly, you can utilise your defined company culture as a recruiting tool. Showcasing your culture as a benefit for future candidates will only bring you positive outcomes, like widening your talent pool. This is something we love to understand when working with our clients. We realise how important it is to have a great working culture, so truly getting to know how yours works, along side of your missions and values means that we can focus on the right candidates for your company.