10 Ways to Build Your Company’s Awesome & Innovative Work Culture

What do you want people to think when they see your brand? What qualities do you want people to associate you with? Professional, dependable, and reliable? Why is your work culture important? Whether you’re running stores online or an on-the-ground business, the way people see your brand is linked to the success of your organization.

Here are ten simple steps that will set you well on your way to transforming your work culture.

How to Transform Your Company’s Work Culture

1. Recognize Your Employees

If you want a successful work culture, employees must be working towards your goals. When employees is put in dedication and hard work, they rightly expect to be rewarded.

Putting aside time to recognize your employees will avoid feelings of neglect. Employees helping you to achieve your goals, are the staff that you want to retain. Lack of recognition may lead them to look for work elsewhere.  

63% of employees are unlikely to seek new employment after receiving recognition.

Build peer recognition into the workplace, meaning giving out praise when an employee goes the extra mile. Think about different ways that you can reward employees.

One fantastic example is an employee of the month scheme. You could even offer a prize to winners. This not only rewards hard work but also encourages it.

2. Encourage Creativity

Without creativity, your business will fail to produce new ideas. This can lead to your outfit looking stale. But innovation doesn’t always have to come from the top. And encourage team leaders and members to put forward new ideas and approaches.

Encourage individuality so that people feel comfortable in suggesting different approaches. Allow space for brainstorming such as a whiteboard or sticky notes. When an employee has a suggestion, make sure it’s added to the list.

Think about the roles your staff is undertaking. Perhaps you could consider the option to automate processes for the more routine tasks, freeing staff to focus on value-added activity that is more likely to generate a creative environment.

3. Communicate Your Goals

For your employees to work towards your goals they need to be clearly laid out. The only way to achieve this is through direct communication. Often, employees are left in the dark about what their company aims to achieve in the long term.

To overcome this, make it a priority for leaders to review their team’s strategy to ensure it aligns with their goals. You should also think about your rewards strategy, 52% of employees feel that their rewards program isn’t aligned to organizational goals. Try to build your rewards in a way that helps employees to meet your goals.  

4. Teamwork Is Key

Good teamwork forms the building blocks of successful work culture. On the other hand, poor teamwork can be the downfall of an organization. Miscommunication and arguments are just some of the problems that you’ll run into if teamwork is lacking. Unaltered, this attitude will spill into your wider work culture.

Certainly, the expression “there’s no ‘I’ in team” is enough to trigger a significant amount of eye-rolling. But in terms of conveying an approach, there’s no better message.

People should feel invested in their team, working with each other to achieve success.

Of course, teamwork doesn’t always mean working in the office. Knowing how to manage a remote workforce is equally important. 

5. Practice Team Building

Achieving effective teamwork is often easier said than done. First, you need to change the overall atmosphere and approach within the workplace. Employees should no longer see their associates as co-workers. Instead, they should feel part of the team.

Team building exercises can be a useful way of promoting teamwork. You could also run competitions, allowing different teams to compete, helping to build a competitive yet friendly workplace culture.

6. Practice What You Preach

For an effective work culture, your company’s values need to be clear right from the off. Are you showing the best example to your employees? If not, it’s unlikely that your employees will be acting any differently.

To foster the best workplace culture, you need to be a living example of the values that your organization represents.  

7. Build Work Culture into Hiring

Should you always hire the candidate with the best resume? Not necessarily. If their attitude doesn’t match your culture, they’re unlikely to be the best candidate for the role. Experience and knowledge can be gained through training. Attitude is a much harder trait to fake.

When hiring, always consider how the approach of a potential employee can affect your work culture.  

8. Tough Love

It’s always better to educate than to criticize. But if an employee continuously acts in ways that are damaging to your culture, you need to have an honest conversation. Without taking the necessary action, employees will continue to act in ways that negatively impact work culture. This could damage the performance of hard-working employees.

Make sure that you’re ready to have difficult conversations. Choose team leaders that don’t shy away from tackling the problem.   

9. Give Regular Feedback

Feedback is useful in lots of different ways. Firstly, it’s an opportunity to let employees know the areas that they are succeeding in. Positive feedback can give a boost to team members, helping to maintain productivity.

Feedback is also an excellent way to ensure that staff works towards your goals. If an employee is underperforming, you can offer advice to help set them on the right track. Remember, to avoid negatively impacting morale, always balance negative points with praise.

10. Think about Wellbeing

Create an honest and open culture about mental health. If someone is struggling, allow them the opportunity to talk about their difficulties. Give them the space and time that they need to support their recovery. This could mean setting out an enterprise transformation roadmap to plan for flexible working.

For a positive work culture, the well-being of your staff is paramount.

Awesomeness and Innovation Achieved

If you’re viewed as unprofessional and unlikely to deliver your promises, customers won’t stick around for long. One of the key factors that drive the standard of your marketing, products, and services is your business’s work culture and one of the main reasons it needs to be head and shoulders above everything else. 

For an effective work culture, your ethics, values, and goals should help build the mindset of your employees. 

About the author:

Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business communications platform with interactive voice response (IVR) system that takes every kind of conversation to the next level—turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams, executing and optimizing marketing efforts, for both company and client campaigns.

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