Workplace Leadership Guide: Six Tips on Creating a Great Company Culture for All Employees

With what seems like an everchanging job market, it can be hard to attract top employees and retain them for a long period of time. One factor to combat these challenges that many employers are focusing in on is developing their company culture. Company culture is defined as the shared goals and values, practices and ideals of an organization.

According to Gallup, only 27% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they believe in their company’s values. With having such a low number of employees fully embracing their company’s values, many employers are trying to figure out the best way to boost engagement in company culture for their workers.

Read below to find out how to improve company culture and retain top employees.

Establish Effective Onboarding

Having great company culture starts at the beginning of an employee’s journey at your organization. Having a shaky start when an employee begins can impact how long they will stay at the company. One way to avoid this is to establish a comprehensive onboarding process for all new hires.

Zippia found that organizations that have a solid onboarding process increases their new hire retention by 82% and productivity increases by 70%.

Some examples of effective onboarding include:

• Have a presentation focused solely on the goals of the organization
• Set up meetings for the new employee to meet individuals in different departments
• Be available and open to answer any questions they may have
• Make training resources easily available
• Set up regular check-ins with their manager

Implementing these strategies into your onboarding process can leave a new hire feeling more comfortable in your organization and could increase short and long-term retention.

Share and Follow Company Values 

While it is important to share company values to new hires, it is also important to make sure they are reiterated to current employees. By consistently touching on your organization’s values, it helps employees get familiar with the values and understand them as an important part of your team culture.

Leadership IQ  reported that only 16% of organization leaders talk about company values daily, 17% discuss them weekly, 23% discuss monthly and the remaining 44% either talk about them quarterly or not at all during the year.

Consider including your organization’s values in company-wide meetings and town halls. This is a great time to recognize teams or employees who are living up to your organization’s core values. In addition to providing recognition, this also allows the values to be less theoretical to employees.

It is also a good idea to reiterate company values in your company’s physical workspace and make them easily accessible to employees.

Increase Employee Recognition

A great way to hold up the values of the organization and to show employee appreciation is to consider adding in programs and incentives into your team workflow.

According to WorkHuman, when there is employee recognition in the workplace, employees are five times more likely to stay at an organization and feel connected to the company’s values. These feelings of appreciation are essential when retaining employees.

Employee recognition does not have to be extravagant and costly. Some examples of simple employee recognition include:

• Weekly employee shout-out via email
• Anniversary and birthday shout-outs
• Award programs
• Personalized and direct messages of recognition

Consider adding programs and incentives like these into your team workflow and you will be on your way to building a more positive company culture.

Schedule Regular Touch-Base Meetings

When you’re managing a team, balancing a demanding workload, dealing with your personal responsibilities and more, it is easy to get caught up in work and put team meetings to the side.

Harvard Business Review found that employees of managers who do not have consistent one-on-one meetings are 67% more likely to be disengaged in both their work and the values of the company. When employees are disengaged with their duties, their work will likely suffer, which can be detrimental to both the employee and the organization.

Touch-base meetings do not have to be just one-on-one. Consider having team meetings to catch up on project statuses and discuss any barriers employees are facing. These meetings can be useful for brainstorming and coming up with new ideas. Additionally, leave time for people to connect on a personal level and feel more intermixed as a team. These meetings can be weekly or bi-weekly depending on workload of you and your team.

No matter if your workforce is in person, remote or even hybrid, it is easy to have these meetings in-person or in a virtual setting using programs like Microsoft Teams.

Encourage Open Communication

Without open communication, employees may feel like they are undervalued and may not know how to best prioritize time at work. On the manager’s side, without communication they could be unaware of the barriers that their team may be facing. In fact, McKinsey recently reported that teams that have open communication see a productivity increase of 20-25%.

For example, if you have planned paid time off (PTO) coming up, make sure you give your employee notice and provide them a gameplan of what should be done when you are gone. Having this open sense of communication will give your employees time to plan and could also make it less stressful on yourself when you leave.

Open communication does not only apply to PTO, but it can also be helpful when discussing projects, daily tasks, personal life and more. Consider the ways in which you can be more open to your team to have a more inclusive and communitive environment.

Provide Consistent Feedback

One of the many tasks of a manager is to give both positive and constructive feedback to your employees. LinkedIn discovered that 75% of employees that received feedback appreciated it and said that it helped them be more successful in their position.

Providing feedback to your employees only once or twice a year does not promote a productive team culture. This can make workers feel like they are undervalued and even forgotten in the organization. Instead, set both formal and informal touchpoints with your employees to provide consistent feedback.

Consistent feedback can have many different forms. For example, if you see a task or project come through that you think is excellent work, directly reach out to the employee(s) who worked on it and congratulate them on a job well done.

On the other side, if you see that an employee’s work is lacking in quality, reach out to them and give them tips on how to fix the work in a positive and open way. If this becomes a trend of lackluster work, you can mitigate any larger issues by establishing a gameplan to work on any lacking areas.

—

With the competitive labor market going on today, great company culture can be the deciding factor for many hires that can take your organization to the next level.

Looking for your next great hire? Contact Hunter to get your hiring journey started.