Building a Strong Culture
A strong company culture will improve a company’s business reputation among customers and stakeholders, including employees. Though difficult to quantify and predict, a strong company culture can lead to better employee retention and productivity.
There is an established formula to improving a company’s culture that is simple enough for any business to follow. This formula includes:
● Establishing a clear set of values – It is standard for a business to create a set of company values, vision, and a mission statement. However, a company’s values should encompass more than the owners’ values. By seeking input from the company’s employees, those values will better reflect the company’s overall culture and receive more enthusiastic buy-in from all stakeholders. Involving employees in defining a company’s mission, vision, and values will pay dividends in the long-term success of the company.
● Establishing open, clear communication – Once the company’s mission, vision and values is settled on, management should open efficient communication channels for employees and clients. Doing so will allow for refinement of the company in how it operates according to its mission, vision, and values, but also allows for very important feedback.
● Receiving and responding to feedback – Communication brings feedback, from customers and employees, good and bad. Businesses that efficiently process and apply this feedback will build better culture, as people will feel like their voices are heard. One of the largest complaints people have against big business is the feeling that their voice is lost and that they are relegated to being just another number.
● Recognizing high-performing employees – When employees go above and beyond, it only takes a moment to recognize them, and that is time well spent. Recognition doesn’t have to include additional compensation – it can be as simple as praise and pointing out excellent performance during a meeting. Even small gestures of gratitude toward your top performers will support a positive company culture. One of the most fun and inventive recognition programs we have heard of is taking a coveted old bowling trophy and having it bestowed upon the lucky recipient or employee of the week during the weekly staff meeting. Making the recognition process fun is a great way to show appreciation and improve morale.
As the company changes with time and experience, its culture should also adapt and innovate. Continuous feedback is important to keep this adaptive process going.
Effective Leadership
Strategies and Skills
Effective leadership is a necessity to create and continue developing a strong company culture and driving bottom line successfulness. Talented leaders get the most from their teams while keeping morale high. They do so with a set of leadership skills that often include the following:
- Emotional intelligence – Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy – the ability to “read the room,” in other words. As emotional intelligence also depends on the person’s temperament and formative experiences, it can be difficult to teach and master, but it’s a powerful leadership skill for those who have it.
- Dynamic decision-making skills – Strong leaders make timely, informed decisions that synthesize data, intuition, and experience. By its nature, decision making is imperfect, but skilled leaders can learn from their mistakes. The hardest obstacle for leaders to overcome is making a timely decision that is also informed without having decision paralysis.
- Delegation and empowerment – A skilled leader delegates tasks to employees while empowering them to take on their increased responsibilities. This helps employees grow and allows leaders to take on higher priority projects, such as generating leads and growing the business. Granting employees empowerment allows for them to make real time decisions that would otherwise burden leadership. However, it also allows for more accountability to the employee for their use of their empowerment.
- Differentiate between tactical and strategic thinking – Tactical thinking focuses on today’s problems. Strategic thinking focuses on future problems. Skilled leaders know when to switch from one mode of thinking to another in order to ensure the company’s future challenges are addressed with time to spare. If a leader spends too much time putting out fires and thinking tactically, they may struggle with shifting their focus on strategic thinking and not addressing the problems on the horizon they could prepare for.
Employee Engagement and Retention
Engaging employees leads to long-term employees, and employee retention will lower recruiting and training costs, while supporting a stronger company culture. Your organization should also look to maximize employee retention, and the following measures can help with that:
- Recognizing employees – To reiterate from before, recognizing your company’s top performers builds company culture. It also improves employee retention, as a top cited reason for leaving jobs is a lack of respect from management. Another great way of recognizing employees is directly with the client and the customer. This is a great way to show your appreciation as a leader, but also let the client or customer know that you give recognition when it is due.
- Developing employees and blueprinting – Employees are more likely to remain with organizations that offer advancement opportunities. Companies can reinforce this by proactively working with workers to forecast potential advancement tracks and by creating “blueprints” for each employee. These blueprints specify the employee’s strengths and potential areas of development before advancement opens up – giving employees positive incentives to grow.
- Prioritizing workplace inclusivity – By inclusivity, this means involving employees in some of the decision making, when possible. If workers have some say in certain workplace practices or features, it can create a sense of ownership and pride in the company. However, not every decision should be democratic. As a leader there will be some things that need to be less democratic and more authoritarian. However, when possible, it is always good to try and bring in employees to decision making.
- Maintaining a positive work environment – Skilled leaders know that everything they say can leave a long-lasting impression on coworkers – and the overall work environment. As such, it’s important for leaders to minimize (or eliminate, ideally) complaining or negative comments, particularly if they would be more effective if delivered privately to the relevant parties. Negative comments bring down worker morale and encourage anti-cooperative behavior between co-workers.
Diversity and Inclusion
in the Workplace
Diversity can bring additional perspectives to your company that can help build out its culture and attract a wider range of talent. To make diversity work for your organization, the following is recommended:
- Considering all types of diversity – Diversity doesn’t just concern identifiable factors like race, gender, religion, and politics. It also includes important considerations like experience and background. Focus on these as well to improve your diversity of perspectives further.
- Celebrating diversity – Celebrating cultural events and holidays can help employees feel included and build better company culture. You may find that your organization has developed a patchwork of cultures among your employees as the business has grown. Celebrating and including religious holidays like Hannukah or cultural holidays like the lunar new year are great ways to embrace positive differences.
- Prioritize healthy interpersonal communication – The biggest challenge with maintaining a diverse workforce is interpersonal communication between coworkers. Different people communicate in different ways, and identifying and resolving communication issues can prevent potential conflicts before they emerge. Communication issues that stem from diversity can include both nonverbal and verbal communication. It is important for a leader to be able to diffuse and improve situations created by misinterpretation of communication in such scenarios.
Leadership Trends in Business
Every new generation of workers brings new ways of doing things in the workplace. Today’s leaders are expected to adapt to those new trends, which include:
- Remote and hybrid workplaces – Remote and hybrid work is becoming more common, so today’s leaders must be adept at communicating across multiple tools and platforms, such as video conferencing, texts, and messaging apps. AI software can also help managers refine the tone of their written communications to avoid any tone-related issues.
- Purpose driven leadership – Modern business leaders align their companies with larger goals that drive greater worker enthusiasm. This could be a greater purpose that’s connected to social or community engagement, for example. Connecting this larger purpose to the company’s goals and mission will reinforce the company’s culture. It is important for a company’s leadership to understand it’s stakeholders. Trying to align with larger social goals such as green initiatives can be problematic for stakeholders that don’t align with such things.
- Transparent leadership – Authenticity is a powerful trait that workers look for in modern leaders. Open, honest, and constructive communication is critical for the modern business world, and transparent leaders are better able to have those conversations and push the company’s culture forward. Transparency is one of the hardest traits to master, especially if the leader may naturally come off as harsh or too nice. There is a nice balance to be struck with personality and transparency.
- Accountable leadership – People respect leaders who hold themselves and others accountable. Modern leaders must be willing to evaluate their own performance following a mistake by the company or department. It’s important for leaders to discern when they could have done things better, so the company is better positioned the next time it is in a similar situation. The key here is for leaders to embrace responsibility, not make excuses for failures. Making excuses embraces a victim mentality, which can be devastating to a business.
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