We’ve talked before about the importance of a good company culture. In fact, according to Gallup, highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability. And highly engaged employees come with a good organisational culture.
But before you start creating a more attractive company culture, you first need to define and assess your current company culture. Even if you don’t have an official one and you plan to develop one from scratch. You still need to take the temperature and assess what the current working environment is like. So, where do you start?
As with many exercises related to your employer brand, company culture and company reputation, you must start with your onboarding process. This is the first impression you will give to new employees and a bad onboarding process can have a lasting effect.
Assess the steps your company takes when a new employee is coming in, from their job acceptance to at least six months into their job. A good onboard means all HR and admin elements are prepared ahead of time, a structured plan for the first day, first week and first month and ongoing training and check-ins. Check out how you can make your onboarding process as smooth as possible here.
The next step in assessing your company culture is to look at the leaders in your organisation. This means your team leads, managers and your C-suite leaders. How often do employees go to them with suggestions, ideas or brainstorming sessions? If they don’t, is this because they don’t feel they can?
Every company culture is unique and some elements will be stronger than others in certain organisations. One might prioritise health and fitness, while another might prioritise creativity and innovative thinking. However, no good company culture has a closed-up leadership level. Much like promoting employee recognition, an open-door leadership is a universally accepted positive and should be a critical part of every good culture. This assessment will come from general observation and also speaking to employees and managers.
An employee value proposition, or EVP, is an important part of your company culture. Put basically, it’s what your employees get out of working for you – and it’s not just their salary. We’ve discussed EVP and why it’s important in more detail here.
Knowing what drives your current employees will give you a strong picture of what your company culture is like. In a sales-driven environment for example, money is most likely a driving factor, with good commission and bonuses, but what else drives your employees? What makes them go that extra mile? Are there promotion opportunities? Do you offer training? What has made your current employees stay with as long as they have? More importantly, what were you lacking that has made others leave? If you don’t already, start thinking about exit interviews for your staff who are moving on. It’s one of the best tools at your disposal to improve company culture.
While there are plenty of company surveys and culture interviews you can do with your employees that will come at a later stage of your assessment, it’s important to also consider a physical walk around the office to impartially observe how different teams work and interact with each other.
If your office has multiple floors and departments, consider working remotely in the different spaces for a week at a time and quietly take note of the dynamics at play. Which ones are working, which ones aren’t? What’s the communication like between team members or between different teams? Are there different cultures within your company?
These are all atmospheres you should observe for yourself before interviewing or surveying different members of staff. If you are at a level where you worry that everyone acts differently when you’re there, entrust another member of your team to carry out the quiet observations.
Once you’ve observed all you can for yourself (and remember, this is not something you can do in a day), it’s time to find out how your employees feel. This is a step you should take both to simply assess your current culture and also to prepare improvements. You can combine anonymous surveys with short culture interviews both with managers and junior level staff to build a realistic picture of what the current organisation’s culture is like.
With this in mind, you should consider both questions about what it’s currently like to work there and ask for ways your employees would like to improve the culture. Here are a few questions to get you started:
Once you’ve assessed your company culture, you’ll probably start putting measures in place to improve it. However, once you do create a better company culture, it’s important not to dust off your hands and decide it’s done.
Having a good company culture is about reviewing it regularly. An annual review should be your minimum target, but ideally having systems in place to review the company culture more regularly is key to ensuring it’s healthy and always evolving in a positive way.
At RECRUITERS, our experts are not only adept at finding top talent, but they’re also experienced in solving your business and staffing challenges. Just check out our success stories here. Want to learn more about how RECRUITERS can help your business? Check out our hiring solutions here.
Written with contributions from the RECRUITERS team
Two men photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
