4 Company Culture Ideas that Will Bring New Life to Your Business

4 Company Culture Ideas that Will Bring New Life to Your Business

Company culture is an important element in every business. Does yours need a makeover? Read these 4 company culture ideas for a renewed environment.

Depending on the industry that you're in, the cost of onboarding an employee can cost you upwards of $25,000. If you're not working to keep everyone you have and help your most talented employees thrive, you're not working to build a stable company culture. If you're searching for company culture ideas, don't run to order ping pong table and beanbag chairs when it's your employees that make the culture.

Here are four ideas you should consider to build a better company culture.

1. Make Collaboration a Must

If it's not already baked into what you do, you need to create a culture by having your team collaborate more often and more effectively. Without a team building effort and an atmosphere that inspires people to work together, you won't have much of a culture at all. Only when everyone on your team feels valued will everyone buy into what it takes to build a strong team culture.

When you have a series of good workers, they might work together well, but it's not always dependable. If your employees feel separate from one another, working on their own parts of large projects, they'll fail to see where they fit in and don't think about others.

You need to make sure the team atmosphere gets a buy-in from everyone where the whole team understands how their work helps others. This will ensure they communicate and find ways to meet the needs of the people whose work connects to theirs.

Teams can also be more efficient than a gang of separate workers. Teams will work to ensure that everyone hits their goals, as their work will depend on one another. Get your team to pull in one direction together and you'll see a huge change in the results of their work.

2. Show Your Cards

When you avoid transparency in your organization, you do so to the detriment of your culture. The less involved your employees are in the goings-on of your business, the less they'll involve themselves. This will make it hard for you to build a strong company culture.

The future of your organization is in the hands of your employees. They need to see the vision of your mission the way that you see. It's your job to get them excited and get them to become invested in the company the way you are.

Start by making sure you're using the best tools for the job. HipChat, BaseCamp, and Slack are all productivity and communication tools that your team could be using. Having a way to text or chat with one another, without having to clog your personal texting or chat feeds, can use the tools your employees love hassle-free.

On top of that, have regular, if not daily, scrum meetings where you tell everyone what's going on, how they can help your team succeed and what you expect. Tell them what you're doing and what you need help with. When you need help as much as they do, your team will see that you're working just as hard as they are.

The difference between a manager and a leader is that the former delegates as the latter get into the trenches with employees.

3. Support Creativity

Autonomy and creativity are important for every employee. When employees get the chance to use their own voice and try out their own ideas, they will invest in your company culture more.

If your employees are encouraged to go off on their own, do their own research, and come back with their own ideas, you'll be pleased with the results. They'll come back to the table with ideas you might never have considered. When you put those ideas into motion, they'll see your company name and feel like it represents them and who they are.

Trust your employees to manage their own time and their own workload. Trust is vital to every company and the morale of their employees.

Having everyone working individually may seem like it could conflict with a team-based work environment. However, you can balance everyone's need for managing their own time with daily or weekly meetings that bring everyone together.

Fight the urge to micromanage, hover over your employees, or get aggressive when you need to have something done.

4. Reward Great Work

When your company encourages recognition of important achievements, you'll see more of them. If your employees have no incentive for achieving your goals, they might be disconnected from their efforts.

A company culture that's rich with recognition will help you drop your turnover rate immensely. When you lower your turnover rate, you save money on training, lost productivity, and lowered morale.

Recognition also encourages other employees to get to know one another. Lots of friendly and quiet workers are creative, talented, and massively productive. You can let the team know that they can rely on these workers who you recognize as having talent and ideas to share with your team.

Recognition doesn't have to come from your executive or management level. You can have your team members recognize and nominate one another for rewards.

Peer recognition can deemphasize how much employees have to please managers. Employees will work to fight for the favor of their peers when you make their voices matter. Your team will be more critical of their own work and find ways to be intelligently critical of one another.

Company Culture Ideas Bring People Together

When you work to promote some of these company culture ideas, you are building a culture that won't be broken by personnel changes. People need to leave a company for lots of personal, familial, or professional reasons. With a strong culture, you'll ensure they never leave for the wrong reason.

If you're not sure that your HR team is meeting the needs of your company, check out our guide for tips.

^{Disclaimer: HR Branches provides general information about Human Resources. Please note that the information provided, while reliable, is not legal advice. Please seek legal assistance, or assistance from State, Federal, or International governmental resources, to make sure your legal interpretation and decisions are correct for your location and circumstances. The purpose of this information is for guidance, ideas, and assistance on general HR matters.}