Whether you are about to launch your startup in the near future or are already operating as a legal enterprise in an industry of your choosing, achieving a performance-driven business culture can be essential for your company’s long-term development. According to Forbes, 31% of employees experience high risks of stress at work. With 61% being burned out of their jobs for numerous reasons such as mismanagement of duty delegation, work hours, and other detrimental factors.
Giving out a general order for your co-workers to “work harder”, won’t transform your office space into a performance-driven environment – quite the contrary. Only a methodical approach to business culture auditing and revision will allow you to create a workplace in which employees are not only driven to work but are personally motivated to do so. With that said, let’s dive into the key steps which can help you achieve just that.
Why Should You Care About Business Culture?
Business culture can often be associated with hyperbolic abstract terms which tend to lose their meaning in the corporate world. With that in mind, it’s worth noting what business culture is all about before we dive into how to create a positive one for your own company going forward.
Nathan Mitchel, HR Specialist at Studicus spoke about it this way: “If your employees identify with the day-to-day culture in your company, you will rarely have to micromanage their work or mandate results. In today’s day and age, people care about brand values just as much as they do about their paycheques.”
Your business culture will affect not only how employees treat each other and your clients, but also how the public perceives your company from the outside in. This can have an effect on future networking, employment opportunities, and publicity as a whole. Whether through the introduction of project management tools or company-wide team-building activities, business culture can be built up from different angles and in various ways depending on your scale and resources. In that sense, there are several direct benefits that correlate with performance-driven culture being present in the company, including the following:
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- Industry reputation and general brand awareness
- Higher employee retention and leadership grooming opportunities
- Higher end-product quality and client servicing
- Employee brand advocacy and organic word of mouth
- High return on initial time and resource investment (ROI)
Clearly-Communicated Company Goals
There is no company without mission statements or long-term development milestones. In order to get your co-workers on board with your new business culture plans, they should be aware of your brand’s goals, vision, development, and general reasons for being.
Make sure to clearly outline and communicate your company goals to all employees in an accessible manner. This is best done through company-wide get-togethers where you can receive feedback, present long-term plans, and ensure that everyone feels equally important to the business culture.
Bottom-Up Culture Matters
Speaking of culture, bottom-up is a great way to create a transformative and dynamic work environment for everyone in your company. What bottom-up culture entails is that it allows everyone on your roster, whether intern or manager, to pitch ideas and give feedback suggestions about the current state of the company.
This can be extremely empowering for your office co-workers who may have the impression that their voice does not matter in the grander scheme of things. Bottom-up will have positive effects on your performance-driven business culture goals due to its general inclusion and emphasis on collaboration.
Meaningful & Segmented Meetings
Meetings are a necessary part of any functioning business and depending on your company’s scale, they may be more or less frequent than usual. However, meetings should always serve a purpose and help you and your coworkers perform better in day-to-day operations instead of being held for the sake of KPIs.
Samantha Brook, Chief of Content Department at Supreme Dissertations says, “If there is nothing to talk about apart from checking in on everyone’s work progress, official meetings should be kept to a need-to-be-held basis. Use them strategically and in order to either brief the employees on new projects or solve common bottlenecks.”
Coaching-Enabled Work Environment
Chances are that not all of your employees will be equally skilled at every function in the company – and that’s okay! However, you can mitigate this shortcoming and create an agile work environment by introducing coaching and mentorship into your office space.
Make sure that senior-helping-junior (and vice versa in some cases) is a welcome addition to the everyday workflow by your co-workers. This will ensure that everyone feels like a part of the team and that their professional skill sets are constantly expanding as a result.
Encourage Teamwork over Individualism
if you center your business culture on teamwork and collaboration, it will naturally be strong and performance-driven. According to IncentFit, satisfied and healthy employees will help you outperform competitive businesses by up to 20% with 87% less turnover present if your workers are content with their work environments.
In this aspect, you should discourage individualism and opt for creating job descriptions (JD) that encourage cross-department co-working. With co-workers assisting each other they’ll have greater odds at finding solutions to common issues. After all, your end-products won’t have individual names written on them, instead will be serving as de facto representations of your brand’s culture and quality of work as a whole.
An Ongoing Effort
Once you are satisfied with where your company is in terms of performance and business culture, you should do your best to keep things focused after the fact. While it may take some time and patience, your internal culture and public perception of your company can be changed with careful planning and employee collaboration. Include them in your business culture decisions as much as possible and strive toward a balance between comfort and performance in your offices – the rest will fall in place over time.
Dorian Martin is a graduated Digital Marketing Specialist and an Editor at Grab My Essay. He has dedicated his professional career to content creation and online marketing, fields in which he aims to develop through contributions to writing platforms such as WoWGrade. In his spare time, Dorian makes an effort to write for his personal blog, Not BusinessAsUsusal, and provide his readers with up-to-date insight into digital content trends.
This article does not constitute legal advice.
The opinions expressed in the column above represent the author’s own.
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