How well is your corporate culture operating for your work team and company? As a leader, you’re responsible for the quality of workplace relationships and team cohesion. Leaving your corporate culture to chance is a sure pathway to workplace frustration.
A positive corporate culture can be one of the most important contributing factors to employee productivity and retention. Beyond creating a happy workplace, developing a distinct company culture can increase referral hiring and foster an environment of creativity and innovation.
Developing a strongly positive culture isn't the only task: conveying that message is also a priority. Talent acquisition and marketing should become involved in developing and propagating the message of exactly what your workplace culture means.
Corporate culture is one of those hard to define things, and can be interpreted in slightly different ways depending on the organization which is applying the meaning to itself. The most general idea of a company culture could be expressed as the set of common feelings and aspirations the management wants to infuse across the entire organization.
The culture is largely dictated and driven by the management; after all, the employees look to their supervisors and their supervisors’ supervisors to determine what behavior is acceptable and encouraged. This can and should include the vision, mission, and values established for the company, and the degree to which the members of the organization or the employees of the company are aligned with these goals. If the management team fosters a creative, dynamic environment which empowers the employees, this will spread throughout the company.
Conversely if the management micromanages the employees and publicly derides them for their own misguided purposes, this too will infect the organization and eventually create a toxic culture. The culture of a company is a difficult thing to alter or change, as it is rooted in the human behaviors of its members.
Corporate culture must be assessed and molded in a regular and intentional way by the management, human resources staff, and executives of the company if there is to be the desired alignment of the employees' goals and the company's goals. This should entail a well thought out and detailed strategy that is consistently and regularly reassessed and followed through on. The time frame for changing the culture in a company will depend largely on the size of the organization. In a small to mid-sized company, realigning the culture will be naturally easier and thus take less time. In larger companies, this time frame can be much longer, sometimes requiring a significant time investment to see the kind of changes that are significant.
The long-term effects of a properly implemented corporate culture shift are usually extremely positive for the company, yielding higher productivity, higher employee satisfaction, and larger growth for the company. At Relocity we believe the culture of the company starts in the on-boarding process. This is especially important when it comes to relocating employees. If you are uprooting an employee and his family from their home and comfort zone we believe it is incumbent to make sure the employee and his family find the right fit in their new city, neighborhood, school, all of it.
We work hard to help the transferring employee find happiness in their new home so that they bring this first major positive experience with them to their first day of work. If the first impression of your organization is that the company cares about them on a personal level and will do what ever it takes to help them settle-in and be successful, then you have taken a huge step forward towards building a culture of success.