Dead Simple Ways to Improve Your Company Culture part -1

You already understand the importance of having a strong company culture, but even with the desire to build one, it's not always obvious what steps to take.

Here are ten easy, actionable steps you can take today to improve your company culture, both in the short and long term.

1. Embrace transparency

Transparency isn't just positive for employees. The effects of a transparent company culture impact the entire organization and the people it serves.

In a post she wrote about building a transparent company culture, TINYPulse's Sabrina Son provided a great explanation of why transparency makes such a positive impact:

It's giving employees unfiltered insight into a company's operations and future. It's giving employees a voice. And most of all, it's trust.
-Sabrina Son

Trust is truly the foundation of a great company culture.

Sabrina shared a few ways to improve the transparency in any organization, but one in particular stood out:

Implement modern communication and collaboration tools

Outdated communication tools can be a major barrier to transparency. It's imperative that your team has an easy and efficient way connect with one another and to share crucial information.

There are some excellent options available for any size company. Here are a couple great options to start with:

Chat and collaboration

· Slack

· Microsoft Teams

· Google Apps for Business

Video conferencing

· Zoom

· Skype

· Google Hangouts

Project management

· Trello

· Jira

· Asana

For more examples of effective communication and collaboration loops, check out this article on the modern workplace. In addition to improving your communication and collaboration tools, another crucial step to take is simply defaulting to transparency.

This is primarily a mental, rather than a logistical shift. Instead of asking "is it absolutely necessary to share this?" ask, "is it absolutely necessary to conceal this?" It's that easy.

Share success. If you're going to share one thing, start with this. Openly share the successes of the organization, its teams, and its individuals with everyone. It's a major motivation boost for the team to hear the positive results of their hard work.

Share challenges. You hired the best and smartest people in the room for a reason. By sharing the challenges your company faces, you're opening up the possibility for your team to offer brilliant solutions that you may never have considered.

This doesn't mean you need to share every minutia of every logistical challenge, but when it comes to solving complicated challenges, several minds are often more powerful than one.

2. Recognize and reward valuable contributions

Did you know that companies that have a recognition-rich culture also tend to have dramatically lower turnover rates?

In a seminal article he wrote for Forbes, Josh Bersin shared some astounding statistics from some recent research Bersin by Deloitte conducted, namely that the top 20% of companies with a recognition-rich culture have a 31% lower turnover rate.

How much would a 31% reduction in your turnover rate save your company? A lot more than you think. Try our Cost of Employee Turnover Calculator to find out in a matter of seconds: 

If you'd like to see that kind of impact on your own turnover rate, you can. There are some great employee recognition resources available, and you can get started easily with this first step: identify specific behaviors and results aligned with your company's goals and values. Recognize and reward those behaviors as frequently as you can.

Now here's the key that most people miss: make it ridiculously easy for everyone on your team to do the same.

Employee recognition doesn't have to come exclusively from the top. It's often even more impactful when recognition comes from all around—from leaders, from peers, from everyone.

Peer-to-peer is the most effective method of infusing recognition into your culture.

Bonusly has definitely had a measurable impact on our Great Places to Work® survey results. On the 2017 survey, just a few months after we launched Bonusly, our score in the recognition category had the biggest improvement!
-Andrew Schrader, HR Manager at Chobani

Peer recognition dramatically reduces the managerial overhead required to make sure everyone's being recognized for the work they do. (If that doesn't convince your leadership team to invest in recognition, this webinar might.) It's also a great way to organically build stronger relationships between coworkers—which is the next step towards building an outstanding company culture.

See even more impactful recognition statistics in our The Employee Recognition Statistics You Need to Share With Your Leaders blog post.

3. Cultivate strong coworker relationships

Having a strong relationships at work drives employee engagement, but it doesn't happen automatically. Building strong coworker relationships takes time and effort.

MindTools shared some great tips for building better relationships: schedule time for it, develop your interpersonal skills, show your appreciation, and be positive.

Employees shouldn't scatter the moment their leader approaches the water cooler.

In fact, some research suggests you could benefit from doing the exact opposite, and create spaces that encourage, and even generate what Ben Waber, Jennifer Magnolfi, and Greg Lindsay refer to as "collisions," in their fascinating Harvard Business Review piece, "Workspaces That Move People."

As they explain in the article:

We’ve learned, for example, that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office...our data suggest that creating collisions—chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization—improves performance.

Think about both the physical and cultural environment in your own organization. Is it conducive to building strong relationships? If it isn't, make the shift. It's easy to engineer spaces and situations that promote coworker interaction.

4. Embrace and inspire employee autonomy

No one likes to be micromanaged at work. It's ineffective, inefficient, and does little to inspire trust in your company culture.

Trust your employees to manage their responsibilities effectively, and let go of the idea that work has to happen a certain way at a certain time.

Intuit's "5 Ways to Give Workers More Autonomy (and Why It's Important)" mentions a few ways that you can inspire employee autonomy, like allowing employees to exercise choice, letting go of the 40-hour work week concept, establishing autonomous work teams, creating decision-making opportunities, and reining in overzealous bosses and coworkers who tend to hover or bully others.

Embracing your team's autonomy allows them to make the sometimes difficult, but incredibly rewarding leap from being held accountable to their responsibilities to embracing accountability as they take on, and own, initiatives.

5. Practice flexibility

Many companies have begun to understand the value of providing their employees with added flexibility. It can improve morale and reduce turnover.

In a recent CareerBuilder survey, of nearly four thousand workers, flexibility proved to be one of the biggest drivers of employee retention:

Workplace flexibility could mean many things, from a parent stepping out for a few hours to watch a school play, to work-from-home opportunities, or an employee taking a much-needed sabbatical.

If you're unsure how to begin implementing a policy of flexibility in your workplace, here are a few articles to start:

· Three Steps to Creating a Flexible Corporate Culture

· What Everyone Needs to Know About Startup Cultures

· The Dos and Don'ts of a Flexible Work Schedule