Effective Ways to Improve Your Company Culture

Effective leaders create effective company cultures. They strive to understand how their employees interact, communicate, complete assigned tasks, and develop their professional skills. They uphold values their company believes in and encourage others to be loyal to them, at the same time being mindful of individual values and respectful of personal space.

But what’s so important about an organization’s culture anyway? Why should leaders care or pay attention to culture? In order to understand the answer to this question, let’s start with the end in mind.

Importance of Company Culture

It’s a rare leader who doesn’t care about the success of their company. But the very definition of ‘success’ may vary from company to company. For some, it’s about creating great products or serving customers well. For others, it’s about growth within profitability. And for others, it’s still about healing and bringing peace and beauty to a world that desperately needs it. Whatever your company’s definition of success, it is a leader’s responsibility to achieve it. Experts from Railsware believe that this begins with a strategy.

Strategy is a word that defines how an organization will achieve success. But your ability to execute on your strategy is largely contingent on your company culture. A positive and flourishing culture enables your strategy to be executed, while a negative or unhealthy culture torpedoes or undermines it. This connection between culture, strategy, and success is well documented in research and practice and can be summarized by a common phrase ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ This quote is commonly attributed to Peter Drucker, one of the top management gurus of the 20th century. In other words, if you care about the success of your organization, you need to care about the culture.

Leaders often put together good strategies, and they often assemble great teams to execute on those strategies. But they still come up short. And that is often because they haven’t created the right environment or high performance culture to enable success.

Basic Components of High-Performance Culture

So, what is a high-performance culture? Let’s find out right now.

Everyone understands why their work matters. People only give 100 % of themselves, their creativity, their motivation, their focus when they are able to connect their day-to-day activities with the purpose of an organization. Something they know will make the world a better place.

Values are practices throughout the organization. Identifying values and holding people accountable to them creates an environment of trust and alignment around priorities. This, in turn, allows the organization to move with greater speed and towards meeting its business objectives and expansion.

All activities provide real value to the customer. Organizations with a high-performance culture prevent and remove wasteful tasks that take away from fulfilling a central component of their mission, which is to serve their customer well.

People’s roles match up with their passions and capabilities. It takes time to figure out people’s design, both what they are good at and what they love to do. When this is done intentionally and in alignment with the organization’s purpose, teams become dramatically more creative and productive.

Teams grow and flourish without dependency on individual leaders. Leaders are intentional about delegating both responsibility and authority so that their teams are empowered to make decisions congruent with their company’s vision, missions, and values.

Bottom-line results and goals are achieved. Building a great culture is not mutually exclusive with growth and profitability. Instead, they are a natural consequence. So, when leaders build a high-performance culture, they are creating a foundation that will enable success in the long run.

How to Build a High-Performance Culture?

Now that we know what a high-performance company culture is, how do you create it and inculcate essential values in your company? Leadership is the key! You won’t get the culture you’re dreaming of in the absence of determined high-performing leaders. But this doesn’t happen by accident. All the values, qualities, and ideas you want to impress on employees should be professed by your leaders in the first place. If you employ the right management strategy directed towards enhancing your company culture through effective leadership, the chances are good you’ll succeed in creating a healthy and productive workplace culture.

Below are some essential steps any effective leader should take to boost their company culture.

1. Establish Trust

There is nothing more demoralizing and non-conducive to productivity and performance than a lack of trust in the workplace. As a leader, you should employ all tools at your disposal to establish trustworthy relationships with your employees. Oftentimes, managers tend to assume too much control over projects and don’t provide enough freedom to employees that could otherwise bring some meaningful changes or suggest workable solutions to the existing problems.

Unengaged workforce means poor productivity and lack of interest in one’s company development, which eventually leads to stagnation. To avoid this, make sure to allow your workers to take initiative. And to make your employees trust you, remain open to communication and align your behavior with your organization’s values. If need be, acknowledge your mistakes and limitations. Facilitate collaboration and exchange of expertise and ideas.

2. Get to Know Your Current Culture

If you want to improve your company culture, you need to acknowledge your current one. Take a closer look at the aspects that appear outdated or ineffective and articulate your vision of the situation. That being said, you should keep in mind that your perspective may differ from those of your colleagues. Once again, you should remain open to constructive dialogue and welcome other people’s ideas. It’s a good idea to initiate open discussions with your employees from different departments and determine the current company culture. Should there be any difficulty in defining the current company culture, consider hiring a professional consultant who can help you with that.

3. Be Clear and Objective

When it comes to outlining the scope of responsibilities and assigning tasks to employees, you, as a leader, should take care to be as straightforward and clear as possible. Set specific goals and explain the subtleties of specific projects. Also, make sure to set measurable goals. In other words, set deadlines and break global tasks into smaller, more manageable portions. Negotiating precise dates, amounts, and quantities is important for measuring the degree of each project’s success, as well as your employees’ efficiency.

4. Reward According to Merits

Much has been said about the role of incentivizing employees. To encourage employees to be more productive and loyal to the organization, you want to reward them based on their contributions and conscientious work. By appreciating and rewarding diligence and exemplary work, you create a more productive workplace environment and the atmosphere of constructive competition. Thus, you’ll motivate the most effective employees and set the right tone for the rest of your team. This is a very important step towards creating healthy and high-performance company culture.

5. Promote Constant Development

It’s impossible to scale your business without having a team of specialists that crave development. It’s one of your primary responsibilities as a leader to encourage constant development within your company. The Digital Age provides us with tons of tools and opportunities to hone out professional skills and acquire new ones. And this is something you should do in the workplace. Once you employees embrace the importance of continuous learning culture, they are more likely to contribute to your company’s success.

6. Engage Employees

Disengagement is the major killer of productivity and a positive workplace climate. As a leader, you should put enough effort into engaging your employees. A happy employee that likes their work and acknowledges its meaning is an essential component in your business success recipe. You would be well advised to try various employee engagement activities, which can go a long way towards helping you increase employee engagement within the company. Being aware of the rate of your employee engagement will help you better understand your workforce and make sure your culture aligns with the individual organizational values.