Building and sustaining a healthy and constructive workplace culture is one of the greatest challenges for business leaders. In a highly competitive talent market, it is imperative to position your organisation in the best possible light, to attract top talent and continue to drive growth.
We’re all familiar with the big corporates and tech start-ups that do really well in this space – Google, Apple, Zappos – but even without massive budgets and built-in brand recognition, there are plenty of strategies any business can adopt to build a great company culture.
The first step in this journey is defining what you want your company culture and values to look like. Your core values should be evident throughout your business – from the board table to the factory floor. They need to be reflected in your corporate strategy as well as every decision-making process in the business. Your values should speak to your customers and your employees – job seekers will be checking to see whether or not you uphold these values when they are considering new opportunities.
Before you can make any change you need to understand your current position – what does your culture look like now? Consider this at all levels of the organisation. Quite often, the culture present in the board room disseminates down throughout the entire business.
Once you know where you are and where you want to be, you need to start hiring the right kind of personalities and backgrounds to positively influence your culture. And that starts with your people person – this doesn’t mean hiring someone in HR – you need someone in a strategic leadership position with an unrelenting focus on driving cultural improvements in your business.
When it comes to recruiting and hiring, take the time to get it right. The people you bring into your business will help shape the culture, so you need to optimise your hiring process. It could be as simple as including questions related to culture during your interview process and testing to see whether potential candidates share your company values. Rethink what is really important – is it a person with 10 out of 10 for skills or someone with 7 out of 10 for skills but who is a great fit culturally and is excited about the opportunity.
A great company culture is reflected in everything a business does. So, find ways to constantly reinforce the values across your business. This could be anything from reward and recognition programmes through to how your business approaches corporate social responsibility. Create a culture of opportunity in your business where career opportunities are clearly identified, and employees are given the chance to pursue them.
If you are not sure how you are tracking, measure, review and readjust – you can measure the effectiveness of company culture using any number of metrics like employee engagement and pulse surveys, retention rates and employee rating and review sites.
For your business to succeed, you need to hire and retain the best people. Getting your culture right makes more than good business sense.
Need help?
If you are looking for support to identify, develop and implement strategies to establish and build a positive internal company culture, get in touch with us. We’d love to chat.
The Decipher Team
To stay on top of current recruitment trends and technologies follow Decipher Group on LinkedIn.
