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As a company founder and leader, it can be easy to get engrossed in the quality, volume, and value of the end products being delivered to your clients and neglecting to focus on your employees and teams that have created it.
Creating a positive and strong company culture can have a huge benefit, not only on your employee wellbeing and retention but on the quality of your delivery to clients – happy employees will equal better and more efficient work.
Here are some of the key ways that you can create and maintain a strong company culture in 2021…
Flexibility
One overarching way to improve your company culture is to offer your staff flexibility. There are several aspects of a company where flexibility can play a key role, such as from the style of management to what your employees are allowed to wear to work.
At a time when we have all been forced to adapt to working from home, companies will need to accept the fact that many people prefer to work from home and are more productive in their own environment. On the other hand, you may have employees that prefer to work in the office and be around people for collaboration.
As a company, creating a strong and positive culture is about listening to your employees and giving them the freedom to make choices that suit them. This way, your teams will feel valued, trusted and this will be evident in their wellbeing and productivity levels, right through to the quality of your end products.
Rather than sticking to the traditional and now largely outdated hierarchical structure for your business, instead, you can move towards an Agile way of working where teams work together and no team is ‘above’ the other when it comes to decision making.
Agile transformations can be adopted gradually over time to transform a business in terms of its adaptability, management styles, communication methods, and much more. If you are considering moving towards an Agile transformation, Fractal Systems offer professional Agile consultancy to support and advise businesses and larger organizations on their Agile journey.
Communication
Another way to improve and maintain a ‘better’ company culture is to work on communication. Communication really is key, even for those colleagues that are quite happy to get on with their tasks without input from others. Enforcing daily check-ins with teams will ensure all projects, goals, and obstacles are completely transparent across the company so teams can combat them collaboratively.
It’s also important to make sure the methods and styles of communication fit with your company’s overall values to avoid conflicting messages across teams which can cause employees to lose trust and respect for the company as a whole.
Priorities
You should define your company’s unique values in order to prioritize what your company culture will entail. For example, is your company people or goal-orientated? Do you strive for quick wins or encourage close attention to detail at every stage of a project?
Having a blueprint in place for your company values means you can be completely transparent in your goals and your networks of teams can work towards goals collaboratively and fluidly to achieve them, rather than having their own insular projects.
Once your company’s priorities and values are clear and ingrained at all stages of the business, you can decide on appropriate reward schemes and company perks that reflect these.
For example, rather than trying to get new staff through the door with free pizza on Fridays or the odd duvet day, you can find rewards that really mean something and enable you to retain staff that really value working at your company. For example, prioritise employee wellbeing, wellness, and physical and mental health, rather than rewarding your staff with a bonus for doing great work.
Consistency
Next, it’s important to make sure that once you feel you have created a strong company culture, that this is maintained.
Instead of scrapping all your existing culture practices, identify aspects of the company you’re proud of that work well and build on them, rather than starting from scratch and causing too much change that will be hard to maintain. Set realistic and transparent goals that are sustainable and won’t just be forgotten about or too difficult to implement.
Rewards and recognition
Having reward and recognition programs in place for all employees is a great way to make sure your teams feel seen and valued as part of the company.
Instead of rewarding people on matters like revenue made or time committed, reward people based on your company values and whether they have emanated them effectively, such as determination, friendliness, teamwork, attention to detail, and more.
By rewarding people based on wider values as well as their individual achievements, you allow your company values to be personified and shown as an example to encourage others to behave in the same positive ways.