Fostering a positive company culture in your business.
Creating and maintaining a positive company culture is essential for any business to succeed. It helps to attract and retain the best talent, build trust with customers, and provide employees with a sense of purpose. But how do you foster a positive company culture in your business?
One of the topics we here at ActionCOACH address early on with our clients is creating and maintaining a positive company culture. This is essential for any business to succeed. It helps to attract and retain the best talent, build trust with customers, and provide employees with a sense of purpose. So how do you foster a positive company culture in your business?
In this article you will discover how to:
- Cultivate a positive work environment.
- How to create and define a positive workplace culture.
- How to foster your culture by living it consistently every day.
A positive culture is key for sustained productivity, team morale and is a key contributing factor in providing good job satisfaction.
The good news is that you only need to invest time defining your company culture once as it remains fixed over time.
However, you need to invest time on-going to ensure that your culture in consistently lived by you and your team.
Along with defining your culture we also recommend that you define your company mission and vision statements, your future goals, and your Unique Selling Proposition:
- Define your mission and vision statements: Statements that Define why your business exists and that inspire your team and customers about where your business is headed.
- Set achievable goals: You must set future goals that are achievable within the timeframe of your vision statement.
- Create a succinct customer-centric Unique Selling Proposition (USP) statement. A memorable message that identifies the unique benefits that are derived from using your product or service as opposed to a competitor’s.
We deal with these three topics in separate articles.
Cultivating a Positive Work Culture
Creating your company culture is very much about defining the rules of your game, how you want your team to behave whilst achieving the objective of successfully running the business. By having these defined and written down it gives a greater understanding to existing team members as well as new team members as to what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. A thriving culture is key for employee engagement and work performance.
If the business owner does not proactively decide what the culture will be the team will do it for them.
To cultivate a positive company culture, we at ActionCOACH promote these three positive behaviours as a founding principal:
- Taking responsibility
- Being accountable
- Taking ownership
We refer to these behaviours as ‘Being Above the Point of Power’. Where you bring the best version of yourself. Behaviours that generate energy, create opportunities, and model the way for your employees to want to be the best. By encouraging your employees to accept these positive behaviours you engender open communication, a culture where everyone feels heard and valued.
On the other hand, there are negative behaviours that in extreme cases can create toxic cultures. These are:
- Blame
- Making Excuses
- Being In Denial
Fostering a positive culture is about creating an environment that encourages collaboration and creativity, promotes respect for one another, and motivates employees to perform at their best.
Creating a Positive Workplace Culture
By investing time to create a strong company culture that is ‘tightly’ defined you will facilitate a style of management that allows for innovation and growth of the business and team members. By creating an uplifting atmosphere in your workplace, you can help ensure that everyone feels appreciated, valued, and respected. With the right mindset, practices, and attitude from both employers and employees alike, it’s possible to create a positive company culture that will benefit everyone involved.
Key to creating a positive work culture is defining a set of core values that provide the guidelines in how you behave as you pursue your purpose and vision. Collectively these core values answer the question “What do I want to live by?” and “How?”
An example of a core value, that promotes the positive behaviour of ‘Ownership’, taken from the ActionCOACH points of culture is:
’I am truly responsible for my actions, the outcome that my actions will bring, and own everything that takes place in my work and my life. I am accountable for my results, and I know that for things to change, first I must change’.
Having these defined and written by the business owner gives a greater understanding to existing and new team members as to what is, and isn’t, considered acceptable behaviour.
Each core value needs to be clearly described so you know exactly the behaviours that demonstrate that the value is being lived.
So how many core values should you define? We recommend defining 12 points of culture (core values), that together outline the acceptable behavior of the team. They tightly define your positive company culture.
To provide a structure for defining your culture points, you may want to consider creating 3 points for each of these 4 categories:
- 3 points important to the owner/s
- 3 points important to the success of the business
- 3 points important to the team
- 3 points important to the customers
These points should answer:
- What are your values that define how you work?
- With what kinds of people do you like to work?
- What are the values that you reject or that violate who you are?
- With what kinds of people do you not like to work?
As a starting point you may want to consider these 12 culture points, taken from the ActionCOACH company culture:
- Commitment
- Ownership
- Integrity
- Excellence
- Communication
- Success
- Education
- Teamwork
- Balance
- Fun
- Systems
- Consistency.
In writing this article I looked back at the company cultures defined by a range of my clients. You may find inspiration from some of these, loyalty, creativity, positivity, energy, passion, acceptance, experience, improvement, responsibility, choice, trust, focus, unrivalled service, customer service, atmosphere, knowledge, respect, professionalism, contribution, honesty, value and dedication.
Each core value that you choose must be defined to the level of detail in the example above of ‘ownership’. This will result in a tightly defined company culture.
Foster Your Culture by Consistently Living It
With your culture points defined you now need to make them visible and embed them in your company. To foster a positive culture they need to be consistently acted on by living them every day, otherwise they are only “good intentions.
The ways to foster a positive culture and live them consistently include:
- Attract new employees by having them defined in your job descriptions.
- Include them in your employee handbook and company manual.
- Present them when you are inducting new team members.
- Make them part of your performance reviews.
- Use all team communication opportunities to refer to them and highlight employees who are modelling the way by using them.
- Incentivise and reward your staff based on them living your values.
- Use them constantly in your marketing and external communications.
This will maximise the success of your business, promote teamwork, help ensure that your staff are productive at work, that you retain top talent and are doing all you can so that your employees are more likely to stay.
Creating and maintaining a positive company culture is essential for any business to succeed.
Cultivate a positive company culture by placing the three positive behaviours of being responsible, accountable, and taking ownership as a founding principle.
Invest time to create a strong company culture that is ‘tightly’ defined and comprises 12 core values. With each core value expressing “What do I want to live by?” and “How?”
With your culture points defined you now need to make them visible and embed them in your company. To foster a positive culture, they need to be consistently acted on by living them every day, otherwise they are only “good intentions.
By Natalie Simms
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