Culture can make or break a company. While good culture leads to high retention and happy workers, bad culture can lead to stress, burnout, and high turnover. A healthy company is a balancing act. Below are a few tips on how to walk that tightrope.
Assessing Your Current Culture
There are a few ways to analyze your current company culture, depending on how much you trust your intuition. If you do trust your intuition, you can simply start paying attention to your employees’ attitudes when they are at work. Are they talkative and energetic? Or are they sluggish? If you want more of a deep dive into the inner thoughts of your employees, send out an anonymous survey. Ask about their general attitude when coming into work and provide a place to suggest improvements and voice issues. A survey allows employees a place to speak their minds freely and (hopefully) respectfully.
Hiring for the Right Culture
You should keep the assessment of your company culture are the forefront of your mind when hiring, so you can build a team that supports a healthy workplace. To “test” for a good culture fit, it can be helpful to have some of your strong office personalities help in the interview process. If you have a couple of current employees who help set a great tone for the workplace, have them interview the candidate. These could be casual conversations, just for them to get the general vibe from the potential employee.
Maintaining Morale
The most important way to maintain a healthy company culture and morale is to listen to your employees. If they have suggestions for improving the work environment, listen to them! They know better than anyone what it is truly like to work for you and would know how to create a happy workplace. As times change quickly, it is critical to stay open and shift with the ever-changing overall attitude toward work as a society.
Though seeing your company culture from an outside perspective can be challenging, I encourage you to take the time to do some reflection and even survey your employees. Happy employees stick around. Be a company where people want to stay!