Posted

– by Ainsley Lawrence

– Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer with an interest in the way business, technology, and education intersect with the personal. She loves traveling to beautiful places and is frequently lost in a good book.

 

 

Managers have a lot on their plates, especially when they take the responsibility of cultivating a positive company culture seriously. A supportive, uplifting, productive workplace culture is the difference between flourishing and floundering.

Bottom line, if you want your company’s success to last and your employees to thrive, you need a positive company culture.

Cultivating a Positive Company Culture Is Critical to Success

There isn’t a successful company out there that will tell you company culture doesn’t matter. Instead, they’d probably stress how critical a positive company culture is to employee performance and satisfaction.

When employees go to a strong, supportive workplace daily, they’re more likely to give their best effort to every responsibility. They’ll feel better at work and be appreciative of the support they receive. And that, in turn, makes them want to do more for you and the business.

Highly productive, happy workers make for better business too. They treat your customers better, making them want to spend more with your business. As a result, profitability skyrockets.

American RecruiterssConstructing a Positive Company Culture

Constructing a positive company culture takes intentional, ongoing effort. Put these suggestions into play to ensure that effort doesn’t go to waste.

Recruit and hire for culture fit

Many managers focus more on a candidate’s skillset than they do anything else when recruiting and hiring. And what ends up happening more often than not is they hire someone with the skills they need but the wrong personality for their company culture.

Recruiting and hiring for culture fit as well as skillset will ensure you hire people that will uphold your company’s culture, values, and mission. Work with a staffing firm to ensure this happens whenever you’re ready to hire.

At American Recruiters, we’ve developed genuine relationships with incredibly talented candidates. Because of this, we can quickly determine whether a candidate is a good fit for your culture and company needs.

Encourage employee bonding

You can set the foundation for a positive company culture. But if your employees don’t like, respect, or know each other, keeping positivity free-flowing throughout the workplace will be nearly impossible.

Your employees don’t have to be best friends. However, they do need to have a working relationship that’s productive and pleasant. Encouraging employee bonding will help them grow these relationships.

Start with something simple, like providing coffee in the workplace. When employees gather around the coffee machine, they socialize, creating a feeling of togetherness. If employees have that time with each other daily, their relationships will eventually improve, and so will your company culture.

Facilitate interdepartmental communication and collaboration

A positive company culture can’t happen without everyone knowing, working with, and respecting one another. Not just within their teams but across departments.

You must facilitate interdepartmental communication and collaboration to ensure everyone is working toward creating a favorable company culture.

Aside from strengthening workplace culture, interdepartmental team building and bonding can improve a core part of your business: customer service and experience.

For example, suppose a customer has an issue with a purchase. In that case, they’re likely to interact with the customer service team, the finance department for the return, and maybe general management if it’s a complex issue. If the customer has to repeat the same information to each department because there isn’t a system for seamless interdepartmental communication, it will hurt the customer’s experience.

Facilitating interdepartmental communication and collaboration eliminates organizational silos and makes it easier for employees to come together and solve problems, regardless of their department.

You can strengthen the relationships across departments by:

  • Encouraging formal and informal conversations among workers
  • Creating projects that require interdepartmental collaboration
  • Allowing employees to shadow coworkers in other departments
  • Getting your entire organization together for company events and team-building activities

Talk to your employeesAmerican Recruiters - Together

Your employees play a big part in building and sustaining a positive company culture. Or, at least, they should.

If you create the practices, expectations, and beliefs that form your company culture on your own and then force them on your employees, it’s not going to go well. Your employees will feel like they’re in a dictatorship, and that only makes people feel unheard and controlled.

However, if you create your company culture with your employees, they’ll feel like valued team members. They’ll also be more likely to uphold the standards they were a part of creating.

Keep an open dialogue with your team. Have regular conversations with each person about how things are going and what they think could be improved. Welcome suggestions for building a better company culture and let employees lead the way in making those proposals come alive.

Give employees meaningful work

Your employees must be inherently positive and happy if you want your company culture to be that way. One way to ensure they’re coming to work joyful and satisfied every day is to give them meaningful work.

In other words, ensure they’re doing work that really matters to them. Use their skillsets appropriately. Assign them responsibilities they take pride in. Make sure their work challenges them and helps them grow personally and professionally.

Meaningful work will inspire happiness and positivity in your employees and, by extension, your company culture.

Conclusion

A positive company culture is more powerful than most managers realize. It empowers employees to perform well and work together to achieve company goals. When your team does this, it directly affects your company’s profitability. The more they produce, the more you can do for your customers.

Building an optimistic, supportive workplace culture is an ongoing project. Start with the strategies above and continue to follow them to see your culture evolve.

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