7 Practical Steps to Architect Company Culture
You've given a lot of attention to the personnel you're hiring, the product you're developing, and how you'll attract customers to your company. After all, these are essential steps to a successful business operation.
In today’s highly competitive hiring market, it’s even more essential that your employees feel inspired to show up for work every day. Research shows that millennials prioritize team culture as a key factor in their choice of a potential employer. And up to 27% of employees report having left a job due to a poor team culture, according to HR magazine.
In this article, I'll share a few fundamentals about organizational culture and outline seven ways you can start enhancing yours right away. Let's get started!
What is a Company Culture?
Culture can be defined as the “norms” within an organization. Culture is created by the way your team behaves and interacts with each other on a day-to-day basis. While having a list of company values is a great starting point, the ways values translate (or don’t) into everyday behaviors, policies and operations is what really defines your culture.
There are many different kinds of team culture, and the “best” culture for you is the one that reinforces behaviours that ultimately achieve your business goals and values. But in general, effective teams:
· have a clearly defined sense of purpose;
· promote collaboration and learning, and encourage employees to share ideas and work together towards a common goal;
· are made up of people who are committed to their work, have the opportunity to achieve, and feel like they're working towards something meaningful;
· build trust, not by being miraculously “conflict-free” but by finding respectful ways of dealing with frustrations and resolving conflict.
Your team culture reflects the group’s shared beliefs, and it’s created via both group activities and individual choices. Culture manifests in the way you treat each other, how you make decisions, how you communicate with one another, and the way you resolve conflicts.
The good news: behaviour creates culture, so there are many actions you can take to change culture for the better.
7 Steps to Architect a Healthy Culture
To build a strong team culture, you must clarify what that culture should be. Consider what your company stands for and why it exists. This can help you define the values that will guide your own and your employees' decisions, from how you interact with customers to how you manage time. Here are seven practical actions that will help you create an effective team culture:
Define Your Company’s Vision and Values
A company’s vision and values might sound like something only executives need to worry about, but everyone on the team should have input; after all, it's their work that will make them a reality. Building a clear, shared vision of what success looks like helps everyone to own the work of achieving that success.
You'll start building shared values and goals by getting everyone involved in defining them from the start. Collaboration and communication are fostered via teamwork, which serves as the binding agent for a business. Using the values that have been defined, you can clarify the behaviors expected of everyone in the organization. It also helps to be consistent about which behaviors are acceptable and not acceptable, but also why- and giving examples of the positive and negative impacts of those behaviors.
Establish Expectations From Day One
A potential employee begins to experience your team culture from their very first contact with you. Your job posting, initial communications and interview experiences tell them what it would be like to work as part of your company. Make sure these processes are consistent with your values and culture. And for new employees, develop an orientation program that is also an orientation to the culture. This will mean it’s not just focussed on the nuts and bolts of practical information, but about meeting people and having discussions about the history and stories that express your company identity, and the vision and values of the organization. An orientation should provide positive experiences that helps employees experience the strengths of your company culture from day one.
Build Trust
Building trust is the foundation of any healthy team culture. The best way to do this is by sharing your values and being transparent in your communication. This helps everyone on the team feel like they're “working towards” a common goal instead of just working with each other. You must establish these values from day one to build trust, honesty, and respect in your organization.
Put it in Writing
For your culture to be effective, everyone in the company needs to think about it and understand how their behavior affects it. Written policies can clarify the ways that employees should interact with one another, how they should treat customers or clients, how they should treat each other during meetings etc. You’ll also need written policies to guide how the company will respond when basic standards of behaviour aren’t met.
Motivate with Positivity
Positive reinforcement can go a long way toward making your team stronger — especially when used with other tools like regular feedback and recognition. But there are some things you can do to ensure your team is getting the most out of their positive feedback experience:
· Make sure you're not just praising for good work, but also recognizing improvement on tasks or projects that might not have gone as well as you'd hoped. Everyone needs to know they're doing a good job, but sometimes it’s encouraging to be reminded that we're improving.
· When frustrations are shared, connect that information to the potential for improvement and identify at least one positive change that can be made to address the frustration. Check back in later to find out whether the change is being effective, or whether further action is needed.
Cross-Train Employees
Cross-training is a great way to empower your employees and provide variety in their work while reducing the risk of burnout and turnover. If your company is small enough, then cross-training can make sense even without cross-departmental collaboration. For example, suppose your company needs an administrative assistant who can handle customer service calls or an accountant who can occasionally help with sales calls (or vice versa). In that case, this person should have experience in both departments to prepare them for such tasks when needed.
Develop Shared Understanding
Encourage discussions where people describe their goals, roles, and responsibilities. This includes both personal and professional goals, as well as how they align with those of their colleagues. When people take the time to share this information with each other, they often realize how little they had really known about each other up to that time.
Next, aim to understand what motivates each member of your team. Motivation is critical for creating a positive environment that helps people perform at their best.
Once you understand each person's role and motivations, you can use that information when making future decisions about projects and work assignments. It's also important to keep this information up-to-date as circumstances change over time.
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Creating an excellent team work culture takes time, but there are things you can do right away to enhance it. Better team culture can be attained by being clear about goals and values, inviting frank discussion about what needs to change, and taking practical action.
You’ll not only see an increase in motivation and output, but your team will also be happier and less likely to be lured by the attraction of a new job elsewhere.
What steps will you take now to foster a culture where everyone feels heard, valued, and seen for who they are?