In today’s competitive business environment for top talent, your company’s workplace culture is super important, both to how it functions and how it sets you apart from other businesses and your competitors.
Workplace culture is a collection of common values, beliefs, and attitudes that guide a business and define who you are and why you exist. These elements can evolve over time. Your workplace culture underpins the way you interact with your people, your clients, your suppliers, and ultimately how you are viewed by the general public.
The workplace culture you establish is important to integrate into critical activities such as decisions around the people you recruit to your business.
Building a positive work environment with values aligned with people will increase productivity, lower employee turnover, enhance employee engagement, and ultimately increase profitability.
What Is Workplace Culture?
The emotional and relational climate of your workplace is shaped by a combination of your leadership style, direction, values, ways of working, beliefs, behaviours, and attitudes. Often, it’s unstated and unwritten norms that create ties among your people. All these factors merged to create a workplace culture.
Workplace culture plays a significant part in the success of any company. It can influence if your people find the workplace exciting and energised or flat and draining; productive and inspiring, or constricting and complex to navigate. The atmosphere created will influence how your team operates and how a new employee will fit into the organisation … and how long they will stay.
A Good Workplace Culture Attracts and Retains Good People
More and more businesses and job seekers are seeking a cultural match when recruiting or looking for a new role.
In this currently tighter labour market, your workplace culture should be something you invest time in getting right. While some applicants chase dollars, others will prioritise wanting to be part of something exciting and with the potential to learn and grow, aligned to their own values, and where they feel they can contribute to the end goal and truly make a difference.
For smaller companies, recruitment is a time-consuming and costly exercise. You want to make sure the people you bring on are going to fit in and add value to the team you have in place and want to grow with the company.
Research shows that having a positive company culture keeps people engaged and happy in their roles and that regularly checking in on how your workplace culture is going – through mechanisms such as engagement surveys will mean you can continuously tweak aspects of your culture so that your people consistently give their very best – and have no reason to go anywhere else!
How To Create a Positive Work Environment?
To begin building the workplace culture of your desire, start with your basic principles: if you’re a new business – why did you start your business? What did you set out to do? For any business: who are you there to serve? How do you want to be perceived and what do you want to be known for?
Answers to these questions can help both define your purpose and drive the ways of working across your business. The next step is to get everyone on the same page understanding your company’s purpose and how their role contributes to that purpose. You’ll want to establish a set of company values to underpin your ways of working together as a team. Ask us about facilitating a values session with your teams.
Hello Monday are here to help you build an awesome and enviable work culture that prospective employees are keen to join and existing employees don’t want to leave. We’ll work with you to understand why you’re in business, where you want to get to and what and who you need to have onboard to help get you there.
From helping you define your purpose to establishing foundation people practices and policies – we’re here to make HR easy!