How important is company culture when the rubber meets the road? Is it a vanity term that just evokes feeling of comfort or does it impact the bottom line? Growing your company and profits, requires understanding the connection between company culture and productivity.
What we cover in this episode:
- 01:45 – Defining Company Culture
- 04:54 – Direct and Indirect Impacts of Company Culture
- 13:55 – The Link Between Company Culture and Employee Engagement
- 17:58 – Creating a Positive Company Culture
- 22:28 – How to Measure and Evaluate Your Company Culture
Defining Company Culture
Company culture is a constantly evolving element of your company. Most of us have experienced a toxic work environment, which negatively affects our productivity, happiness, wellbeing, and overall life. With more and more companies creating and implementing a culture, it looks different everywhere. So what exactly is company culture?
Your company’s culture is the living representation of its mission and values. A company must have a suitable culture for its environment, employees, and mission, and enforce it consistently. This process involves everyone and starts at the top.
Direct and Indirect Impacts of Company Culture
One main question that we asked is how company culture affects productivity? There are direct and indirect impacts to a company that lacks a culture or inadequately implements one.
Direct Impacts
With so many recent studies, it shows that company culture and productivity go hand in hand. If employees do not want to be at work, the company will suffer in many ways. Studies show a decrease of productivity in workers that were not happy with their work/environment.
High employee burnout in a company leads to frequent staff changes and poor employee commitment. This results in reduced motivation and productivity, highlighting the impact of company culture on overall performance. This in turn leads to a decrease in customer satisfaction and a decrease in sales.
Alternatively, according to a 2017 Gallup study, highly engaged employees are 17% more productive than less engaged employees. A solid company culture will contribute to engagement across your team.
Indirect Impacts
The indirect ways a company culture can have a negative or positive impact on your business are through brand reputation, talent acquisition, risk management, customer loyalty, teamwork and collaboration.
These are the impacts that most business owners don’t immediately think about affecting business. In fact these can be detrimental to the bottom line. If employees are not happy at their place of work, they will pass this on in service to the customers.
Sometimes one bad experience is all it takes to lose customers. Likewise, all the good experiences customers receive will leave them coming back and becoming a referral for future customers. “There’s a lot of direct and indirect ways, and I think paying attention to those and how important this is, is really a driver that needs to push you to keep tabs on this.”
The Link Between Company Culture and Employee Engagement
Company culture and productivity also link directly to employee engagement. This doesn’t mean employee to employee engagement or employee to customer engagement, but also employee to leadership engagement. Implementing and enforcing a culture of engagement among your employees creates higher productivity and profitability.
If you are more aware of how your employees act, work and handle things, then you will know when something is off with them and can possibly intervene before it is too late. Having one on one conversations, actually caring, and listening to what they have to say and checking in on your employees can go a long way.
Making sure there is a trusted environment to give and receive feedback, will grow your company in not only the direct ways we stated earlier but the indirect impact as well.
Creating a Positive Company Culture
Building a company culture takes time, often months, to create a positive and consistent environment that you desire. You have to build it and tweak it and make the changes when they are necessary to sustain the company culture you are wanting.
This requires input, feedback, flexibility, and engagement. You have to ask for feedback and implement what you’ve committed to changing.
Regularly check in with your staff and directly involve yourself with your team.
If your organization has management and different levels, create a policy that applies to everyone. Since speaking individually with 1,000 employees every month isn’t realistic, this can greatly help with larger organizations.
How to Measure and Evaluate Your Company Culture
So you have created and implemented a company culture, but how do you know it’s working? Assess company culture and productivity before, during, and after implementing to establish their connection.
It will take time and trust but the results will be worth it. You and your team members will have to build trust, because you need their honest feedback. In this process, you may remove team members who don’t share the company’s goals, making the environment stronger.
Conclusion
Creating a company culture is important for all businesses, not just corporate companies or specific industries. They will all look different, finding what works best for you and your company is most important to achieving the success you are wanting. The bottom line starts way before the selling of products or services.