How to Improve Your Company Culture
Sustaining a healthy company culture can be difficult, especially in large companies with multiple branches. If you're trying to improve your company culture, it's important to work from the ground up, making sure your foundation is solid before working on individual locations or problem areas. Once toxic elements are allowed to grow and fester, they can become harder to deal with the longer they've been left to grow. Here are a few key ways you can help to improve the health of your company culture if things are starting to go sour.
Evaluate Your Culture
It's hard to actually go about fixing your company culture if you don't know what your culture is. There are essentially five aspects that go towards making up your overall company culture; how much of one or the other your company is made up of determines the culture as a whole.
These aspects are:
- Capability Culture: Focus on developing character and skill values at all levels. Often described as the 'Can-Do' Culture.
- Commitment Culture: Focuses on how motivated employees and leaders are, measuring their sense of purpose and risk-taking. Often known as 'Will-Do' Culture.
- Alignment Culture: Indicates how well aligned the goals of the company are at all levels, and how compelled people are to work hard at all levels in the company. Often referred to as 'Must-Do' Culture.
- Individual Performance Culture: Includes things like progress reports, mentoring, and employee-focused development.
- Team Performance Culture: Indicates the extent to which collaboration and teamwork are needed to get things done within your company.
Improve Productivity
Keeping productivity up is important to maintain positive company culture. One way to ensure this continues is to follow kaizen, a business theory that focuses on improving your business at all levels. Kaizen consists of five core elements that can help you improve productivity and culture in your workplace. Point kaizen focuses on individual issues that can be pinpointed and fixed. System kaizen focuses on system-wide problems with productivity. Line kaizen can refer to issues that affect both a single point as well as issues down the line, for example, a problem in processing also causing problems in customer service.
Give the Process Time
Contrary to popular belief, company culture isn't something that you can just turn around overnight by throwing money and resources at it. Company culture takes time to improve, and a simple change in management isn't going to suddenly fix a toxic culture and environment. Implement steps to help create a positive change and stick to them. Persistence is key to improving your culture along with being patient.
Following these strategies, you'll be able to take middling or toxic company culture and start steering things back in the right direction. It won't be easy, and it might take some time to see results, but given time, you will see the results you're looking for.
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