Importance of a Good Company Culture

Company culture is the personality of your company and a bad one can harm your entire employee experience. The things that make up your company culture include work environment, expectations, vision and values, company mission and ethics. Culture and can impact everything from retention to productivity impact the way your whole business performs as your culture is completely dependent on how your employees perform. You may find this a difficult thing to balance as the way an employee acts or feels in a work environment is out of your control. But there are steps you can take to prevent a negative company culture.

Visions and values 

Your company culture is in your hands, so you must set expectations of what is acceptable in the workplace. Once you have set these expectations you can then work from this. Start by looking at your organisations visions and values and share these with your employees. Once you have clear vision and values you can set your expectations from this. You must outline these expectations to your employees ensuring this is in line with your visions and values of your business.

Structure and environment

Each company will be different when it comes to the structure of their business and their management style. For example, if your business has remote workers you will take a different approach from a business that relies on face to face interaction. Your business may have a team-based culture and emphasise collaboration with different levels of participation. These offices may be open plan or may offer a casual approach to the workplace, with very little rules and regulations. A business with this structure may take a different approach to those businesses that take more of a traditional and formal approach to their workplace and these factors all contribute to your culture. After you have established what type of workplace you have, you should be able to outline your expectations of your employees and hire accordingly.

Hiring for culture

As an employer you should emphasise work culture as a fundamental part of your business. Employees who fit in with your culture are more likely to be happy and therefore productive at work. Once you have identified your culture you can start to introduce people who understand your organisations visions and values. If you have a collaborative office, you would not hire someone who thrives working by themselves. It is your company’s DNA and will impact performance and productivity if it becomes toxic. When employees enjoy work and feel as if they have their needs and values met they form better relationships with co-workers and have increased productivity. When an employee doesn’t fit the work culture they are less likely to perform well in the workplace and will find. Finding a lack of motivation and pleasure. It is partly your responsibility to ensure that your employees are happy at work and one of the things that you have control of is the cultural setting of your workplace. Overall you must really rein in on what you are about in order to determine who is suitable to hire.