Important Reasons to Revamp Today's Working Culture

Your company's culture has a direct impact on your bottom line. This is why you must continually evaluate and refine what takes place in your office if you want people to love working there. It's important to do this before focusing on outward growth and expansion. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to have a positive impact here.

Purposeful Leadership

As your company's leader, you need to stay purposeful in creating a culture that delivers great results. This is more than simply showing up for work each day. It also means being involved instead of simply delegating everything and doing nothing. Sometimes you'll find yourself in need of motivation here.

One of the main areas where you'll need motivation is in regards to being open and honest. Unfortunately, it's easy to keep everything to yourself instead of creating a culture of transparency. This needs to change. Some of the ways how this must happen include:

• You need to let your employees know that they can come to you with concerns, ideas, and questions. Show your appreciation in this regard by encouraging their innovation.

• When employees need to leave early or work from home sometimes, you need to let them have time to deal with their own personal lives.

• When you make big changes in the company, make sure you iron out all the details and then tell your employees everything yourself. Transparency is always better than allowing your employees to receive information through the rumor mill.

Personal Change

Clearly, all of this will require some personal change on your part. Sometimes it's challenging to make these changes, but inspirational speakers can help you here. They'll encourage you to do things in a different way that's based on your situation and goals. This is something that's especially important if you've been in your business niche for a long time. You need to remember that things change—that what worked for you in the past may not work for you today, or what will help you succeed in the future. Not only do you need to learn and understand this, but Inc. says that you also need to let your employees make changes that improve the way things are done.

You must also learn new ways of taking care of your employees. Again, this is another way in which you'll need to change, because what worked in the past won't work today. Instead, you'll need to take care of your employees by:

• Investing in your employee’s well-being: Big businesses implement wellness programs, which is why they're able to attract top talent. Studies actually show that 55 percent of job seekers are willing to accept a lower-paying job if it has the right benefits. You can offer wellness programs that fit your company's budget. Teaming up with a local fitness facility to get a company discount or offer in-house yoga classes will save everyone money.
• Cracking down on bad behavior: Don't allow your incredibly talented employees to act rudely towards others. Just because they're your company's top performers doesn't mean that you should tolerate unacceptable behavior. This will cause tension and aggression through unnecessary competition. Instead, you must maintain a policy of transparency which allows everyone in the company to feel comfortable bringing their concerns to you. It's important for you to take these concerns seriously, especially in the way that you address them. This will help you build a strong team that works well together and watches out for each other, instead of one where there are unhappy people who are unmotivated to do well for your company.
• Letting your employees work remotely: Today, 60 percent of employees feel that they can do just as good of a job working remotely as they can do when working from the office. Of this number, 72 percent actually prefer to work from home. While you don't have to always let them do this, you should be willing to let them work from home when necessary—when there's bad weather, they have an exceptionally long commute, aren't feeling well, or have to take care of a sick family member. This can actually save you about $20K per year while also allowing your business to experience a 22 percent increase in productivity and 50 percent less employee turnover.

Focus Forward

Startup Nation says you continually need to work on making your workplace somewhere your employees want to be. You want to make your company one that people want to work for. When you create this type of company culture, you're creating a workplace that other people will want to join.

There are two ways that motivational speakers encourage you to do this:

• Create systems and processes that make the cultural changes in your workplace sustainable. For this to become seamless you'll need to create a culture leadership team that's “staffed” by key leaders from the various parts of your company.

• Remember that in the beginning, it's going to take a lot of work to make these changes. However, as the changes take root they'll gain their own momentum. So, while it will take a lot of energy in the beginning, eventually you'll simply need to watch its progress to make sure it's still moving forward.

Of course, you need to remember that you can't make every moment of every day exciting or fun. You can offer perks of all sizes that help boost morale, productivity, and efficiency though. There are some great ways of doing this, including:

• Offering outdoor work spaces
• Game rooms
• Fully stocked kitchens that offer free snacks
• Massage chairs
• Casual days
• Catered lunches

Creating a great company culture plays an important role in making sure that your employees are happy, which encourages them to be much more productive when they're at work. This is something that you need to put to work. You can't simply say that your work culture is fun and exciting. You have to make sure your work culture actually shows this, especially if you want to attract the top talent to work at your company.