3 Powerful Ways To Boost Company Culture Now

Given its impact on performance, organisational culture should be top of your business agenda.

For example, research from the London School of Economics showed a strong positive correlation between employee satisfaction with company culture and employee productivity and customer loyalty. This was notably extensive meta-research of 339 studies, involving 1.8 million employees in 230 organisations and 49 countries. The message is, if you get the culture right you can reap huge rewards, get it wrong and you will soon be trailing the corporate competition.

So, here’s 3 practical ways you can enhance your company culture today:

1. Value learning and make it easy for staff to access it

Research from Culture Amp in the form of their 2019 Global Benchmark survey showed that employees in highly engaged companies, (with great cultures), experience a greater opportunity for learning than employees in companies with low staff engagement, (poor culture). Here are the results:

• “I am given opportunities to develop skills relevant to my interests: 22 pt difference between top (78%) and bottom (56%)
• I have access to the learning and development I need to do my job: 22 pt difference between top (77%) and bottom (55%)
• My company is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development: 29 pt difference between top (88%) and bottom (59%)”

Therefore, if you want to boost your staff engagement levels, see if you can develop your learning and development offering in your business. It doesn’t have to be rocket science. Simple initiatives will suffice.

For starters, are you able to offer any paid company time for self-learning? Or, what about offering job rotation, work shadowing, or stretch assignments to the wider workforce to improve access to on-the-job learning? E-learning and micro-learning represent budget-conscious and potentially affordable training options too. Done in the right way, some or all of these practical learning interventions could boost engagement in your business right now.

2. Encourage and support healthy habits to boost happiness

Research shows that employees are much more productive at work on days that they exercise. In fact, employees report being productive, happier and feeling less stressed than they do on non-gym days.  So, if you can develop couch to 5K style policies within your business you can boost staff engagement and enhance your culture.  There are several things you can do today to encourage staff to exercise on work-days.

• Provide secure bike-locking and shower facilities to encourage cycling
• Subsidize local gym membership
• Start a lunchtime running club

Another great way to encourage exercise and healthy eating is to gamify this activity by developing exercise or healthy eating contests or league tables and offering prizes or badges. For example, consider TourDeFIT.com’s Triple Threat Challenge. These health challenges require that employees be given one healthy habit to adopt per week. Using technology, (there are plenty of cheap or affordable apps to do this), employees and dependents can monitor their progress online,  compete in teams and win wellness-related incentives.

Once again, adopting just one of these practices is likely to boost healthy activity in your office while at the same time boosting happiness and productivity and enhancing your culture.

3. Say Thank you!

This classic study from Wharton University in the United States showed the motivational power of saying thank you. Researchers looked at the performance of two sets of fundraising teams. Prior to their fundraising shift, one team received a pep talk and a message of gratitude from the Director and the other group did not. Guess what? You got it, the team who have received a prior message of gratitude made 50% more fundraising calls than the team who had not.

Building a culture of saying thank you, versus a culture of taking staff commitment for granted, is a great and easy way to boost the culture in the business. Specific thanks, e.g. that reference a specific action, promises to have a more powerful motivation effect. An example of a good, specific thank you might be, “Thanks Helen, for staying late to make those calls last week on the Brown account. It helped placate the client and I appreciate your extra effort”

By coaching your managers to offer specific and regular recognition to staff you’ll make an immediate boost to company culture.

These may not be the most earth-shattering suggestions but they are simple, powerful and proven strategies that will boost your organisational culture right now.

Similar posts:

Your 2020 Essential Digital and Soft Skills Checklist, New Research Into Jobseeker Behaviours Could Force You To Change Your Hiring Strategy, What Exactly Are The Benefits Of Working With An External Recruitment Agency And Executive Search Consultancy?, How To Introduce Flexible Working That Actually Works