How To Make Sure You Have A Good Workplace Culture
If you are a business owner, it’s important to place an emphasis on workplace culture. Workplace culture can be challenging to control, but there are things you can do to help improve it. A good workplace culture encourages both hard work and teamwork, and it also is a comfortable environment for employees. The right corporate culture can also help improve your business’ reputation. These five tips can help you to improve your workplace culture:
Make Sure You Have Good Business Core Values:
There are certain core values that are important for any company. It is essential that your environment puts an especially large emphasis on working hard, but this is not the only value to consider. Some other examples of business core values that are important for all businesses are integrity, honesty, teamwork, creativity, and transparency. Make sure that important values are talked about at your company. Many businesses even have a poster that lists their core values for employees to see.
In addition to making sure your company’s values are talked about, you can also take steps to make sure that you have the best company culture to ensure these values are followed. Here are two examples of good company culture ideas that lead to positive company values:
The Incubator: This company culture places an emphasis on the growth of employees, and it is the best company culture to attract motivated employees. If you want your business to fit this model, it is essential to give your employees the opportunity to advance within the company. Not only is making the opportunities for advancement available important, but it is crucial to make sure that your employees are aware of them.
The Family Model: This model is one of the best company culture ideas for job satisfaction of workers. Some important company core values for this model are teamwork, integrity, transparency, and a focus on the importance of a positive employer-employee relationship.
There are other company cultures that lead to negativity amongst employees. These two company cultures are best avoided, and they can lead to unsatisfied or even disgruntled employees:
The Guided Missile: This company culture is all about productivity and little else. While employees may be productive for a while, this company culture lacks essential elements that employees need to be satisfied with their job. In many cases, it can lead to employee burnout, which ultimately decreases productivity. It also can lead to employees leaving your company, which can be damaging to your bottom line.
The Eiffel Tower:
This company model is all about corporate hierarchy. It tends to marginalize those lower in the ranking system, and there is often little mobility. This can lead to disgruntled employees. It also can contribute to employee burnout, and some employees may end up quitting their jobs.
Prevent Employee Burnout:
If employees are overworked, the most common outcome is employee burnout. This can be very damaging to workplace culture, but it is easy to make sure that this doesn’t happen. If workload is kept reasonable, it helps employees to remain satisfied on the job, which is far better in the long run for the bottom line. What exactly a reasonable workload means for your company will vary, but it is important to make sure that your employees have a good work life balance.
One to prevent employee burnout is to offer a period of paid vacation time. Some experts recommend allotting one month off per year to vacation time. Additionally, in many cases, not all employees will use all of their vacation time that they are given. If it is not possible to provide employees with paid vacation time, you should have a system in place where employees can request time off in advance.
Of course, it is even more important to make sure that employees are able to have access to sick time. If employees are coming in to work sick, it can spread illness through workplace. Of course, this can be damaging to the quality of the work environment and lead to lost time from work. Employees also are likely to become disgruntled with the lack of sick time being given. Even if you aren’t able to give paid sick time, it is always important to make sure that sick employees are able to take time off from work to recover from their illness at home.
Another trap to avoid falling into is micromanaging. When you are constantly monitoring everything your workers do, it leads to an environment of dissatisfaction and creates disgruntled employees. While the goal is to ensure that workers are being productive, it can have the opposite effect, due to the disgruntled atmosphere that micromanaging can create.
Provide Benefits To Employees:
It is important that employees have access to health insurance. In many regions, providing health insurance is legally required. In some areas, these laws only apply to full time employees. However, even if it is not the law, it is good for the workplace culture to make sure that all of your employees have health insurance, including part time employees. Prior to selecting a plan, make sure that is of high quality and covers all necessities.
However, you can improve your workplace culture even further by providing additional benefits. One commonly overlooked area is dental insurance. Providing this benefit can help your employees to save a lot of money on necessary care. Some other examples of insurance that are offered by some employers are legal plans and life insurance.
Finally, it is a good idea to give employees access to a savings program for retirement. There are many plans to choose from, and they allow employees to invest their own money into funds that grow over the course of time. In some cases, these funds can lead to total gains of as much as 500% over the course of one’s career. One of the most common plans that is offered by businesses is the 401k. However, there are other plans, such as Roth IRAs and 403b plans. If it is possible, it’s a good idea to give your employees the ability to choose between different types of investment plans.
Provide Opportunities For Further Training And Advancement Within The Company:
It is important that your employees do not simply feel like stationary cogs in the machine. This is likely to promote an overall atmosphere of dissatisfaction with the workplace. In order to make sure that employees do not simply feel stuck in place, it is a good idea to provide them with options for further training. This can be either on the job training or even setting up programs to assist employees with their education.
In some cases, when an employee signs up for one of on the job training programs, they will have access to a higher level job once they finish it. However, in other cases, you can set it up so that employees have to have a test or observation at the end of the training program to determine whether they get the higher level job.
There are different ways that you can help your employees to further their college education. Of course, this can create a significant expense until the employee graduates. However, it is possible to contribute a partial amount to helping employees to go to college for further training. Even if a business contributes a relatively small amount, the mere fact that you are contributing to their education is can help with fostering a positive workplace culture.
In other companies that promote progress amongst employees, the process is more informal. If employees see that a significant number of employees are able to move up the ladder, it is very beneficial to promoting workplace culture. It helps people to feel like their careers have the potential to take off.
Providing Employees With The Proper Mix Of Socialization And Time To Work Alone:
One of the most important core values of a company is teamwork, and making sure employees connect well with one another is crucial to fostering it. If employees are not able to work well together, it is likely that not very much will get done. To avoid this scenario, it is a good idea to promote socialization between employees. There are different ways that you can do this. One way is to organize corporate events. However, another way to promote this important aspect of organizational culture is to have group meetings within the company.
It’s important to make sure that all opinions are heard from, as this is critical to avoiding the Eiffel tower type company model. Not only should everyone feel that they voice in the organizational culture, but it is important to make sure all employees have access to all information on the company’s operation (other than information that is on a need to know basis for security reasons).
There should be meetings where attendance is not only encouraged but mandatory. If your small business has too many employees to have the meeting at a singular time, you can have several meetings. During these meetings, you and/or other managers within the business can listen to feedback from the employees, and you can discuss plans for the company during a certain substantial period of time (e.g. the next few months or next year).
In addition, there should be time for your employees to socialize outside of a meeting setting. One good way to do this is to organize events. One example of a good event for socialization is a sporting event. Another good example of an event is a scheduled business luncheon.
However, there should be multiple different events at the company, because certain types of events may appeal more to some employees than others. If you are able to, it is a good idea to have a selection of different corporate events that occur on a regular or semi-regular basis. However, you should not have attendance for non-essential to work events be mandatory, because some employees may prefer not to attend.
Another way that you can promote socialization amongst employees is to have a water cooler or lounge area. These spaces are often crucial in fostering connections between workers. In this area, you should provide comfortable places to sit and mingle while employees are on break.
While socialization is very important for workers, most people will need to have time away from it to be able to be the most productive. In fact, if employees have little time apart, it can lead to friction between them. One reason is that people can get burned out from spending their entire day around others. Another reason is that sometimes socialization can take time away from important work assignments.
People should have a mixture of tasks that they do on their own and tasks they do with others. Additionally, it is also a good idea to design the office in such a way that people can have physical space from one another, if need be.
There are different ways that you can give employees space from each other. One way is to have individual offices rather than shared office space. Of course, having traditional rooms for each employee can be quite expensive. One way to give people their own offices without giving each one of your employees separate rooms is to install cubicle space. While cubicles may not always offer enough privacy, it is possible to add doors to your cubicle space, which can increase the amount of privacy.
