If you want motivated, dedicated employees, a positive work atmosphere is critical. Unfortunately, not everybody knows exactly how to improve company culture. Here are eight unconventional ideas to help inspire you.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of a great company culture. Companies with happier employees tend to enjoy greater productivity, engagement, and profit.
Plus, when employees respect their company and feel like they are a valuable part of something bigger, they are more likely to innovate, potentially creating valuable innovations that add to your bottom line. The benefits are many, so if you are looking for how to improve company culture, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we will look at 8 great ways to improve the corporate culture of your organization. We don’t all have Google’s budget for volleyball courts and water slides, but a bit of innovation goes a long way. Maintaining a great company culture doesn’t need to be expensive, or even to really cost anything at all!
Check out these tips on how to improve company culture and get started today!
1. Allow Employees to BYOD
BYOD or Bring Your Own Device policies are becoming more common among innovative companies. While on the surface, it may seem daunting for IT to manage, it can actually be a big productivity booster.
People generally know how to use their own devices effectively. The computers at the office? Maybe not so much.
For example, a study featured on LinkedIn found that nearly half of employees felt that their personal devices were more useful than those their company’s IT department provided.
With a BYOD policy, employees have the option to use the devices that they are most comfortable with, and best know how to use.
This is a relatively inexpensive way to improve corporate culture. It requires some work from IT to set the system up, but can actually save your company money on devices in the long run. Plus, it means you can sell off some of your old tech.
2. How to Improve Company Culture? Make it Flexible
Allowing for a little flexibility can seriously improve employee morale. This can include things such as allowing people to borrow laptops to move to a quieter room to work for an afternoon, or having a flexible work-from-home policy.
This shows your employees that you trust them to manage their own work. Rather than being a micromanager always over their shoulder, they’ll feel that the company culture is responsive to their needs and lifestyle.
The great thing is that this is a way of improving the corporate culture that doesn’t really cost anything at all! And the benefits of flexibility? Higher productivity, reduced turnover, fewer missed days, and stronger corporate loyalty.
3. Recognize and Reward Achievements
Has someone on your team really gone above and beyond this quarter? Maybe they brought on a ton of new clients or improved productivity. Maybe they got innovative and simplified the team’s workflow.
No matter what great thing they achieved, a little recognition goes a long way! It will make them feel that their accomplishments are appreciated. This makes them, and their coworkers, more likely to want to contribute more in the future.
4. Team-building Goes a Long Way
Strong teams stick together and support each other when the going gets tough. An important company improvement idea is to look for ways to foster strong, healthy relationships among your employees.
This can be done in a number of ways. A comfy lunchroom with ample seating encourages employees to share the meal together and chat.
Organizing employee meetups, like a book club, a staff choir, or a video game group are all great ways to encourage employees to get to know each other. Invite staff out to a bar once a month for a casual hangout.
Consider forming a social committee and giving them a small budget to plan and run team-building events.
5. Encourage a Mentorship Culture
This is the next step after encouraging team-building. Look for ways that you can help your newer employees find mentors among their colleagues.
For example, setting up a hub on a site like Ten Thousand Coffees can help more senior members of staff arrange to meet employees who are looking for career guidance and advice.
This has a number of benefits for your company. It helps employees get to know each other, it gives people in leadership a chance to learn how their employees are doing and help newer employees perform better through guidance.
6. Allow Employees to Turn Off
While technology and the omnipresent smartphone may have made the 8-hour workday seem like a thing of the past, it’s important to allow your employees to “turn off” after the workday finishes if you want to improve corporate culture.
Knowing that when they leave for the day, they aren’t required to keep checking their email and potentially completing a task allows them to truly relax. When people feel like they can never disconnect from work, they are less productive overall, and less happy in their workplace.
A “no email after office hours” policy reduces the potential for burnout and means employees are more likely to be productive when they are at work.
7. Offer Training Opportunities
In many industries, employees need to be lifelong learners in order to stay current. As an employer, providing professional development opportunities makes good sense.
It allows you to have a highly skilled workforce that can make the most of the latest tools and processes, increasing productivity. But it is also a great way for how to improve company culture.
Training comes with a lot of benefits for your employees too. It makes them feel more loyal to a company that clearly prioritizes their learning. It increases their productivity and impact and prepares them for the potential of promotion.
Training and professional development opportunities can come in many forms, like courses, classes, and conferences.
8. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Perhaps the best way to make sure employees feel engaged and part of the company culture is to communicate effectively with them. Let them know what the company is doing, and how their roles are supporting the company’s overall mission.
People feel more invested in their jobs when they feel like they are part of something larger. Communicating the company mission will help them feel this way.
That communication should also go two ways. You can find out more about how to motivate your employees through methods like surveys.
Wrapping Up
There are a lot of great ways to improve office culture in your organization. From working on team-building to offering training and mentorship, showing your employees that they are trusted and valued will go a long way to improving culture.
In this article, we have shared 8 great tips on how to improve company culture.
Looking for more business tips? Check out our business blog for more great ideas you can incorporate around the office.
