Building a good company culture from day one

Company culture is integral to the successful running of any business, whether it’s large or small, remote work or in-person, a startup or an established organisation. Developing a strong work culture is vital to ensure effective teamwork, high employee satisfaction and achieving company goals. But how do you go about establishing a work culture that reflects your aims and values while ensuring the company remains productive and healthy?

Define your core values

The first step in achieving a great company culture is to decide on the core values at the heart of the organisation. These will be unique to the type of workplace culture you are aiming for.

Examples include:

• Adhocracy culture which encourages new ideas and creativity
• Hierarchy culture which is a rigid organisational structure providing clear levels of power and responsibilities.

Have a clear mission

A good way to demonstrate what is important to the company is in a mission statement, a short sentence summing up a company’s aims. Microsoft has the mission statement ‘to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more’. Mission statements can be made front and centre on social media by repeating it in the description of posts or even having it in the profile of the company account to make it clear what your company cares about and wants to achieve.

The company’s mission directly impacts the employee experience. It determines how a company operates and how workers should operate within the company. Having a clear mission also helps to attract employees who will find job satisfaction within your organisation, encourage high-level performance and adds to the positive company culture. If the employees’ ideals do not line up with those of the company, employee retention may drop, and without a sense of consistency within a business it is hard to promote a great culture.

Encourage open communication

Team-building can be a fantastic way of ensuring shared values across the workforce and team members that can work well together. It usually involves completing tasks as a group, real or fabricated just for practice, to grow a sense of team spirit and to fine-tune any new hires’ abilities to work with new people.

One skill that can be improved during these activities is open communication which is important to achieving rounded decision-making whilst reinforcing the wellness of the staff by ensuring all voices are heard.

Support employees’ mental health

Mental health is another key aspect of a positive company culture. Wellbeing must be prioritised by showing appreciation for all workers, whether they are new employees or seasoned members of staff. This can be done in a variety of ways but may include initiatives to award anyone for good performance or perks for top talent.

A recognition programme, using metrics to track performance, is a good way to provide evidence-based kudos to employees and ensure no favouritism or underappreciation.

Facilitate a good work-life balance

The work-life balance of employees is closely linked to their mental health. With too much work comes stress, burnout and depression but with too little, it can spiral into a lack of productivity. Both scenarios have a negative impact on work culture.

A good way to gauge where the balance lies can be to gather employee feedback on the subject and compare it with the company’s values to build a work environment that can achieve goals while satisfying workers and stimulating better employee engagement.

Develop an effective onboarding process

The onboarding process can be the root of a toxic work culture that can develop, particularly if there is lack of diversity within your workforce. If you simply look for a cultural fit for the company, you might be ignoring good candidates who can contribute great things.  

If a company rarely promotes its top performers and instead hires from outside to fill senior positions, employees can feel undervalued. They might sense that their professional development at the company is limited and look elsewhere for work, which further exacerbates the problem.

Build trust

A strong organizational culture fosters trust between higher-ups and those who report to them. This alleviates the need for close, overbearing management which may just hamper progress and even stunt professional growth among employees by preventing continuous learning.

Regular check-ins with employees are helpful, but if the corporate culture does not provide independence, employees cannot undertake hard work on their own terms which can then harm productivity and profitability.

Sustain a positive work culture

An organization’s culture is key to its success in building a competent and collaborative workforce that can achieve great things for an organisation.

Several people within a company are responsible for growing and sustaining a positive work culture. It is primarily the leadership team who should live and breathe the company values and ensure new hires adhere to the values and pursue the goals that the company has in mind.

The human resources (HR) team also has responsibility for maintaining a positive work environment. The HR team can help to identify people with the right attitude and ability to excel during the hiring process and can also be called upon to address any employee’s behaviour that is not in line with the company’s values.

Be ready to nurture your company culture

Entrepreneurs looking to start their own business must lead by example to build a strong and positive work culture from the outset, to encourage others to join the growing project. Providing training to employees early can drive development of a positive culture and tempt others to strive to climb the corporate ladder.

If you are an aspiring senior manager or CEO, who is socially responsible and wants to drive positive change, you may want to consider the 100% online MBA from Queen Margaret University. The master’s course is designed for busy working professionals looking to advance their careers and deepen their knowledge of strategy development, human resource management, business analytics and entrepreneurship and other topics that will help your business to thrive.