I've written so many times about the importance of company culture and in fact many of my keynote speeches recently are focused on that general theme also on how it can be a tool for your recruiting how it helps with engagement and how it improves performance and gives your company and your team the competitive edge in order to compete in today's very competitive environment.
As a business leader you can't just overhaul your old company culture with a simple decree, you can't just say this is what we’re going to be doing moving forward especially if you been doing it differently for many years.
Even before we implement a program to begin to change the culture in any organization, we first must assess what some of weakest areas that need improvement may be found.
It has been my experience as a consultant who has implemented transformational leadership systems into companies around the world successfully for over thirty years that there are four common areas that we all need to focus on to improve workplace culture.
Here are a few:
Ensure that employees are empowered to make decisions:
- Employees quickly get discouraged when they feel like they don’t have the ability to make decisions.
Align your employees with the mission of the company
- Show each person how his or her role aligns with the big picture.
Allow your employees to innovate
- One of the hallmarks of a strong company culture is that employees feel like they have room to try new things and potentially fail. If your response to failure is punishment, employees will never try anything daring or new.
Create a culture of feedback.
- Your team members want to feel like they can come to you with their new ideas and projects. Be willing to listen and hear them out without getting defensive and give them honest feedback.
Once you have assessed how you are doing there are a few simple steps that you can take to start improving your workplace culture immediately.
1.Talk to your employees.
Simply by involving your employees in regular communication, you’ve already made your culture better.
2.Be Flexible.
Think about ways to inject some flexibility into your employee experience.
3.Encourage professional development.
This can be as simple as providing some flexibility for employees who want to pursue some continuous education courses.
4.Recognize employees.
There are a number of ways in which you can recognize employees, whether it’s by giving them the day off on their birthday; creating an Employee of the Month honor; or simply giving public shout-outs for employees who make a difference.
5.Make room for innovation.
Consider ways in which you can give your team members more room to try new things and innovate new solutions—without the fear of failure. Often, this is what gets people excited about coming into work.
For Information on how Dr. Rick Goodman can help your organization improve their organizations workplace culture contact us at info@rickgoodman.com or call us direct at 888-267-6098.
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