5 Strategies to Help Company Culture Expand and Cultivate

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Anyone who has worked in an organization knows that a company’s culture can have a profound effect on one’s experience in the workplace. While many organizations may tout their values as priorities, few are able to successfully cultivate truly exceptional company cultures.

While creating a strong, lasting, and effective company culture may seem like a complex task, having some guidance around effective strategies can make this goal feel more achievable. Here are five strategies to help company culture expand and cultivate.

Define Specific Values and Goals

A strong set of values is an integral aspect of any worthwhile company culture. Without a clear understanding of the values that an organization’s company culture aims to exemplify, it will be nearly impossible to keep large groups of people on the same page. In addition, it’s important to set goals for one’s company culture that everyone can collectively work towards reaching.

It can be helpful to condense the values and goals of one’s company culture in a short paragraph. Summarizing the values and goals in this way will force a company to be more thoughtful and specific about what they intend to gain from their company culture. Furthermore, by having a simple and easily digestible outline, all employees will be able to have a clear understanding of the types of values they should strive to demonstrate on a daily basis.

Once a specific set of company culture values and goals have been defined and communicated to employees, expanding, and further cultivating a robust company culture will become a far more manageable task for organizational leaders. This being the case, it becomes clear that starting with company culture goals and values is vital to efforts to further strengthen one’s company culture.

Reward Employees Who Embody Company Culture Values

While having a written statement outlining one’s company culture is a great place to start educating employees on what they should strive for, having role models to look up to can make the process of cultivating and expanding company culture even more effective. To do this, companies can benefit significantly from rewarding employees who embody the values of their company culture.

Rewarding employees is a practice that can be done in many different ways and will vary based on one’s industry and specific company culture. Examples of ways to reward employees who exemplify the values of a company culture include awarding bonuses, featuring individuals in memos, or granting promotions or other opportunities for career advancement. When other employees see these individuals being recognized for embodying the values of a company’s culture, they’ll strive to act in similar ways.

Retain More Talent by Allowing Employees to Grow

One of the biggest challenges that organizational leaders face when looking to strengthen and expand their company culture is the turnover of employees. It can take some time to develop a thorough understanding of how to act in accordance with a company’s cultural values, and constantly onboarding new employees and letting go of experienced ones can make this extremely difficult. As such, investing energy into implementing employee retention strategies can make cultivating a resilient company culture more achievable.

As of late, a notable trend that has been gaining in popularity is the practice of upskilling. Put simply, upskilling refers to the organizational practice of encouraging employees to develop new skills while also offering them the resources to do so. Many organizations have found that upskilling their employees benefit their company in several impactful ways.

Studies have shown that organizations that practice upskilling employees have experienced both higher retention rates and a more positive company culture as a result. Accordingly, leaders’ intent on cultivating an enduring and robust company culture have the opportunity to do so through the practice of upskilling.

Establish Strong Leadership

While the process of expanding and cultivating an exceptional company culture would be far easier if employees took the initiative to develop it on their own, the truth is that it’s incredibly unlikely that this would happen. Consequently, it makes sense that strong leadership is an imperative aspect of bolstering company culture.

Organizational leaders must demonstrate key management skills to inspire other employees to participate in the growth of the company culture. Without convincing and inspiring leaders spearheading efforts to improve company culture, organizations will have a difficult — if not impossible — time fostering and strengthening their company culture.

Value Employee Input and Foster Communication

Though strong leadership is an important aspect of cultivating an amazing company culture, valuing employee input and making leadership accessible for employees to communicate with is also a vital part of crafting and growing a noteworthy company culture. While it can sometimes be difficult to take criticism, genuinely considering the opinions and suggestions of employees can result in more opportunities to perfect and advance one’s company culture.

Without employees, company culture is nothing more than a philosophical idea. As such, it’s important to consistently encourage employees to provide leadership with feedback about ways to improve company culture. By making it accessible for employees to provide management with input, organizations will likely be provided with potent and novel suggestions that they may not have been able to come up with otherwise.

Organizations can take many different approaches when it comes to encouraging employees to communicate with organizational leaders. There can be scheduled one-on-one meetings between employees and leaders meant for discussing company culture or leadership can make it a point to express the fact that they welcome feedback through email or surveys. However an organization chooses to go about this, taking employee feedback seriously has the potential to greatly improve and expand company culture.

Creating a Company Culture That Thrives

While the process of effectively crafting a phenomenal company culture isn’t always easy, it’s more than possible for leaders to make it happen. By taking advantage of some key strategies and making the cultivation of a strong company culture a priority, organizations can build a company culture that inspires, excites, and brings the best out of employees.

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Organizational Culture, also referred to as Corporate Culture or Company Culture, is the set of underlying and shared beliefs, vision, assumptions, values, habits, business philosophies, and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of the organization.

Organizational Culture permeates the organization, affecting all functions and all levels. It starts with what employees do and how they do it—and ultimately drives why employees do what they do. Culture is like the DNA of the organization.

That is why a healthy Company Culture leads to strong Performance, Growth, and Excellence—and the opposite is also true. For any initiative to be successful, we need a Corporate Culture that inherently supports that initiative.

Learn about our Organizational Culture (OC) Best Practice Frameworks here.