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What is Workplace Company Culture & How to Improve It

How to build a better workplace culture through ideas such as team bonding events, workplace processes like transparency and workplace setup like flexible working and visible praise boards.

how can you improve company culture and instill company values in your team members

When it comes to the modern workplace, it's no longer just about turning up and doing our jobs. With much of our lives spent interacting with work colleagues and within the workplace in general, the workplace or company culture is more important than ever.

There are many theories around why company culture is important to the younger generations such as Millennials. Creating a positive workplace experience is, undoubtedly, a topic we’re all buying into.

But what is workplace culture? And how can you curate a positive company culture and ensure you convey these company values to your employees, especially in this era of hybrid and remote work?

What is workplace culture?

Workplace culture comprises the values, beliefs, practices, attitudes and behaviors that shape your company's environment and define how things get done within it. It is what makes your organization unique, and it's usually palpable the moment someone steps foot into your office or logs into a virtual meeting.

Workplace culture can be broken down into three key pillars. These are:

  • Company values, or purpose
  • The community, or organizational culture
  • Potential

To put these into perspective.

Company values

The company values or purpose define the place of this business in the world. Is it striving to do the best possible work and make the world a better place? While you might not necessarily be doing altruistic work, feeling like the work you do adds value to society in some respect is a strong motivator.

Community

The people we work with, or the organizational culture, are key to our daily productivity. Do we work with people we respect, and who respect us? Do we feel confident to share our thoughts, or criticisms or make decisions without fear of recriminations?

Potential

Finally, do we feel like our work is contributing either to the potential growth of the company, or our own personal potential? While we as employees work for our paychecks, increasingly people want to feel like they have room to grow personally, or that their input is helping the company to grow too.

Yes, professional development is a big part of employee engagement. But feeling like you are also a key part of the company's mission, and that rather than being a wheel in the cog, you feel like you are part of a successful business - this helps employees feel valued.

a positive work environment is part of good company culture

Why is workplace culture important?

Much has been written about how the rise of the Millennial and the Gen-Z worker have changed workplace culture. And it's true. These days, people rarely have a job for life, and our personal growth within a strong company culture has a big impact on our professional and personal lives.

Studies show that Millennials value being able to improve company culture and share their ideas.

And Gen-Z, who are rapidly driving the changes in the world of work, are more likely to quit a job if it doesn't allow them to manage their personal wellbeing (including mental and physical health) or value their input within the workplace.

In short: younger workers increasingly look to a company culture that aligns with their personal values and will harness and nurture their potential.

This can mean anything from allowing us to speak freely at work, or feel like we are contributing; through to a good work life balance to avoid burnout.

Workplace culture is more important than it's ever been. And in the post-Great Resignation era, attracting and retaining quality staff is part of an organization's success in the long term. And this is increasingly hard without a strong company culture.

Read more about workplaces of the future here.

What does a strong company culture look like?

While the specifics can vary among different organizations, businesses with a positive culture tend to value or share these elements:

  1. Shared Values and Vision: People know the purpose of their work and how it ties into the company's mission. They feel united by shared values.
  2. Clear Communication: There is open dialogue across all levels of the organization. Information sharing is encouraged, and feedback is seen as a stepping stone for growth.
  3. Employee Recognition and Appreciation: Employee's achievements, no matter how big or small, are recognized and appreciated regularly.
  4. Opportunities for Growth and Development: The company invests in their employee's growth and development, offering consistent training, upskilling, and clear progression paths.
  5. Work-life Balance: The company respects and promotes a healthy work-life balance through flexible work hours, remote working options, or bonus days off for specific milestones.

These factors all greatly influence workplace culture and have a strong bearing on the vibe within the work environment.

But how can you improve company culture, encourage employees to engage with your business in a more constructive way or even foster a culture of positivity?

highly engaged employees feel that they are part of a strong organizational culture

Steps to improve workplace company culture

1. Monthly or quarterly socials

Strong co-worker relationships are often the foundation of a strong company culture. But, they’re difficult to force. 

As an employer, it’s a good idea to set up regular environments that help nurture professional relationships between colleagues, like monthly or quarterly social events. Even better, make these part of the working day. 

2. Cross-team projects

One of the reasons why company hackathons (where employees get together to brainstorm and build products), are so popular is for their ability to bring together cross-functional teams. Finding ways to bring together people who wouldn’t usually work together on projects, can help foster new ideas and ways of thinking.

3. Company All Hands

Keeping everyone aligned to the company mission is crucial to forward progression, which is why many startups introduce the idea of a company “All Hands”. Here’s how our friends at Slido define the company All Hands:

“All-Hands meetings are regular company-wide gatherings where all employees and stakeholders have an opportunity to meet with leadership. The goal of an All-Hands meeting is to share the business updates of the past month or quarter, celebrate milestones and the people who made them possible and create a space for the Q&A.”

If your company is lacking transparency, or alignment between teams, the All-Hands meeting is a great initiative to bring in.

ideas to build workplace culture and improve employee engagement

4. Make the company mission visible, daily

Outside of a monthly report, or your company All-Hands as discussed above, how do you keep the wider company mission front and center of mind? A 2015 Achiever’s study found that 61% of employees don’t know their company mission. 

At ScreenCloud, we like to leave nothing to chance. Our company mission, and the key KPIs that push us towards it, are shown every single day on the digital screens in our offices. This helps make the information more visible of what we’re working towards. Of course, these are surfaced in other ways as well, but a great big screen is a pretty sure fire method of ensuring we all know what the big goals are.

5. Build a learning culture

The best example of a great learning culture? Google. The former Senior Vice President of People at Google, Laszlo Bock, wrote a book called Work Rules that discusses three core principles Google used to build a learning culture through the very veins of its company:

  • Learn from your best employees: rather than looking for external expertise, allow employees to train and teach others.
  • Don’t link development straight to rewards, development should be linked to both rewards and learning.
  • Learning is personal and how different people like to learn may involve varying styles and formats.

Consider how you might build a learning culture within your company; this doesn’t have to be big budget training courses either. It could be inviting a knowledgeable friend in to speak, creating a list of interesting documentaries on Netflix or investing in a breakfast workshop or lunchtime training session.

6. Share knowledge

Alongside building a culture of learning, a culture of knowledge sharing is also hugely beneficial to employees, and the overall company. This might mean Founders sharing success stories during a company All-Hands, or just having a Slack room titled “Knowledge” where employees can share anything they’ve learned from an experiment or project. You may also wish to organize your knowledge in some kind of company wiki or portal, so that information isn’t lost when an employee leaves, or is on holiday.

7. Create no meeting days

If your company culture is designed around helping employees to be productive, you may want to consider company guidelines on creating space for deep work.

In research for his book We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement, Kevin Kruse found that leaders at companies like Asana, Aria Healthcare and Moveline all have a “no meeting” day each week. These are designed to increase productivity, or to give people space to create.

Team meetings can feel like a hamster wheel for some people, especially if they feel like they don't need to be involved. Asking for employee feedback on the necessity of team meetings can be a helpful way to identify if this is a positive step.

There’s some conflicting advice on whether no meeting contribute to a more productive rest of the week, but they’re certainly an idea worth considering.

8. Improve onboarding for new employees

We all know that first impressions count, but when it comes to onboarding new employees we forget to give it much consideration. Organizations with a strong onboarding process saw an 82% improvement in new hire retention and a 70% improvement in productivity.

team building activities and onboarding are key to integrating new employees

Check out this great Hubstaff article on how different companies work the onboarding process.

9. Productive workspaces

One of the big perks of working from home is that you get to choose your most productive workspace. The trouble with company workspaces is that you’re trying to abide by a ton of different parameters. Ensuring you cater to different employees, within the restrictions of the building, or coworking space, can be really difficult.

We spoke before about how to create an inspiring office space, even when you might not necessarily own the building. You could also focus on making a few small tweaks with productivity in mind. For example, creating quiet spaces, improving the booking system of meeting rooms or using physical, or virtual, “do not disturb” signs to help protect employees when they are in the zone.

10. Flexible working

You may not have to have flexible working to have a great company culture, but many great company cultures do practice flexible working. As an organization, flexible working increases access to a wider talent pool and also reduces overheads, like offices and desk space.

PwC are one corporation who found that offering true flexible working through a culture of flexibility is the best way to achieve success:

“To build a culture of flexibility, you must first reimagine what flexibility means today. Remember, to create behavior change, you need to allow for variance and creativity and agility. In other words, be “flexible” when creating a flexibility culture. A policy guide or a formal program can work against you. It seems counterintuitive, but having rules in place actually hinders the development of a truly authentic culture. At PwC, we loosely call it “everyday flexibility.” It isn’t something we mandate that all teams adopt; it’s a mentality and a way of life that should be individualized for each person.”

11. Visible digital noticeboards

One way to live out your workplace culture in a physical workspace is to create your own company TV channel. This gives you a way to surface important information, praise staff and live out any company notices that may otherwise be hidden in forgotten Slack threads, or emails.

digital signage can help to communicate important events, recognize achievements and promote company's core values

The benefit of digital noticeboards is that you can adjust them as you grow in size and they can be a mirror image of your core culture, that everyone by default will see. ScreenCloud's digital signage solution makes the process simple and easy to do from anywhere, at any time.

12. Praise boards

In the same vein as the digital notice board, a public praise board curates a culture of recognition and reward. This can be automated and employee-driven, to encourage more peer-to-peer praise.

13. Live your culture

Many companies have a handbook, or website page, dedicated to how awesome their company culture is and how they want to equip employees to do the best work possible.

But picture this: if the printer is constantly breaking and isn’t being fixed, or if management never really shares where the company’s going and there’s always a level of uncertainty, does that company truly care about its culture?

Culture must always be more than the sum of a company handbook and values printed on the wall. It needs to be threaded throughout how people work, how managers manage and what the space looks like (either physically or online) for that company’s employees.

Improve your company culture with ScreenCloud

ScreenCloud helps teams in 9,000+ organizations around the world communicate with those who matter most, using the screens on their walls and the content in their systems. 

ScreenCloud’s digital signage can improve employee engagement and help to convey the core values or your company's culture.

Use ScreenCloud digital signage to:

  • Display relevant and up to date information
  • Promote events or reminders about courses or professional development opportunities
  • Share quotes or other messages to promote the company's values
  • Share wins and successes
  • Welcome new hires
  • Share breaking news, weather updates and sports results
  • Highlight security protocols or upcoming fire alarm tests

Sign up for a free demo and see what your organization can achieve with digital signage.

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