How to Build a Strong Company Culture
A company is only as strong as its culture. Whilst your skills, services and strategy may be top-notch, it’s your company culture that ensures sustainable growth and employee retention. Read on to discover what a company culture involves and how to build one that aligns with both your mission and vision.
Start with your values
The foundation of a company’s culture outlines what it aims to achieve and how to enable its people to make it a reality. This is separate from your sales and financial strategies, as it focuses on giving your employees everything they require to work effectively both now and as the company grows. As such, you need to start with your values and build up your company culture from there.
Your values are the very reason why your company exists. They include the purpose of the business, its role in your sector, and key objectives for the future. By establishing your values and designing projects and processes to fit them, you ensure that all of your business activity revolves around a clear methodology.
Get everyone involved
Whilst it’s important that your clients know your values, it’s absolutely imperative that they’re understood and shared by your employees. This means making your values clear at multiple points – when advertising a role, during the onboarding process, and long-term as part of a strong internal communications plan.
Aside from ensuring that everyone is on the same page, this clarity will allow your company to maintain consistency across the board. When values slip, a company culture can become clunky and diluted, so create a common language, define your standards, and provide ways for every member of staff to protect and grow your business.
Think about your community
A major feature of company culture is how the business will support external parties. It could be your local community, young people, charities or sports clubs. The shape this takes can vary enormously – you could organise regular fundraising events in aid of a worthy cause, go down the corporate sponsorship route, run free workshops at schools, encourage staff to take part in litter-picking events, or share a charitable organisation’s messages through your internal and external comms channels.
When you open up your CSR activity to all staff, you create a company culture formed on collaboration. This leads to team members gaining even greater value from their roles whilst also giving them the opportunity to pitch ideas for your next fundraising or community engagement project.
Health and wellbeing are key
If you’re serious about building a strong company culture, you need to focus on the physical health and mental wellbeing of your employees. This includes everything from designing a workplace that’s safe, secure, accessible, comfortable and motivational, to having a system in place for monitoring, supporting and enhancing mental health.
Give your employees a voice, listen to their needs and respond accordingly – the result will be greater workflow, higher levels of work satisfaction and a company culture that attracts top talent from near and far.
Lead by example
Every member of your management team should embody your company culture. This isn’t simply a case of knowing your mission statement inside out, as it also requires a proactive approach that’s based on respect, communication, innovation, and showing each employee that they’re a valued member of the team. We guarantee that the more work you put into this, the more your company will benefit.
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