Workplace culture continues to be a major concern for organizations across all industries and they have all the reasons to be so. An organization without a culture lacks both personality and character. Culture gives your business a personality and is the number of its beliefs, values, interaction, attitudes, and behaviours which makes or breaks employee motivation.
It goes without saying that a positive environment further attracts talent, improves engagement, impacts satisfaction and happiness and boosts performance. Culture is the behaviour that results when a group of like-minded people comply with a set of generally unwritten and unspoken rules for working together.
What Makes a Good Workplace Culture?
Generally speaking, workplace culture can be defined as a set of practices, values and goals that shape and characterize an organization. Simply put, culture describes the way things work within a working environment. Culture can be things such as how employees behave, how projects evolve, what tools they use and even how they are rewarded for their efforts on a daily basis.
Company culture must be driven by a top manager, able to provide people with a direction and meaning within the business. This often evolves through values, mission, and vision.
- Values hold employees together and create a common culture along the way. In general, value should be encouraged by general and shared views about how the organization should run and how the employee should be managed.
- Vision is the place where a company strives to go in the long-term. For a business, having a vision is like creating the future in advance. It defines where the company aspires to be.
- Mission is nothing else but a company’s reason for being. It is your business purpose voiced as an action.
When a company culture is strongly linked to the overall strategy and practices of the business, it succeeds in drawing people who share goals and feel purposeful in the environment.
An organization that operates with vision, mission, and shared values, will lead to satisfied employees giving theri best – not because they have to, but because it serves the overarching purpose of the company.
Employees need to be listened to and feel involved. Therefore, making sure to listen to their feedback and involving them in attaining important strategic goals is an excellent way to establish engagement.
Bridge the Cultural Gap With Good Communication Skills
Great communication skills are essential when dealing with different cultures. How you choose to communicate with other cultures, both non-verbally and verbally, can be a great deal maker or breaker. It’s great when your employees speak the language of the country you plan to have business with, but they can still be successful if they have a thorough understanding of the local cultures.
When it happens to have a foreign customer, who does not speak English very well, simply ask your team to rely on short sentences, stick to the point and avoid humour and colloquialism.
Another way to encourage becoming more culturally aware is to tell them to observe and listen to foreign staff members and customers. Moreover, it’s essential to observe behaviours and attitudes of foreign colleagues and customers to know the set of values and underlying logic shaping their behaviours and actions.
Stress the Importance of Development and Come up With Efficient Tools
Every organization has its own set of priorities to help take it to the next level, and these can be its commitment to support their professional advancement and personal growth.
Indeed, employee development can be a long-term initiative, but it also leads to numerous short-term benefits such as increased loyalty and improved performance and engagement.
A great way to set employees up for success in the roles starts with providing them with all the tools and resources they need to do their job well. This may include Timesheets Portal, a software that performs analysis across projects, activities and employee roles and many more. An organization can create a training program based on critical information and best practices for its new employees, so when it comes to development there is nothing that should remain unexplored.
Come up With Achievable Goals
Goals and rewards have to be a key responsibility for any manager. By setting measurable, realistic and attainable goals, a manager not only guides improvement in employee performance, but it can also actively help fortify the organization and boost its reputation as an employer of choice.
Goals Should Align With Company Objectives
When it comes to goals, managers usually have certain goals in mind for each staff member, but they will likely obtain valuable answers if they ask employees to identify goals strictly related to their individual tasks. There is a huge discrepancy between imposing goals on staff members and encouraging them to imply goals of their own. If their suggested goals align with business objectives, then managers can do a great job in developing action plans to make those goals achievable.
Goals Should Be Smart and Engageable
Asking an employee to “work better” doesn’t actually sound like an effective goal. A plan must be specific, measurable, relevant and most important, achievable. Goal setting usually fails when the objectives seem to be far too ambitious or simply unachievable. Pressuring an employee with an irrelevant goal often leads to frustration and lack of motivation. When the goals have been achieved previously by others who run through the same training and have the same experience, this can be a good indicator that the goal is unreasonable.
Workplace cultures come for well-established goals and values. So, the culture a company provides it determines how toxic or pleasant the work environment is. That being said, it has a direct impact on how employees fit into the company and the company’s ability to attract and retain valuable employees. A creative and purposeful environment creates satisfied employees and boosts productivity. So it makes sense that the healthier the work culture is, the happier employees will be to come to work day-in and day-out.
teamwork concept -DepositPhotos
