What does your company culture look like, and how do you improve it? While individual teams can have sub-cultures of their own, company culture is always informed by your larger company core values, mission, and goals. If you need a better grasp of your company culture's current state, a better understanding of why company culture is critical to business success, and how to improve your own culture, this blog post is for you.
So, where to begin? 🤔
Company culture is never a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are some accessible, actionable company culture ideas you can implement today to improve organizational health, which should always be a top goal for HR leaders. Let’s jump in!
--> What's arguably the best way to improve company culture? Ask your employees! Stay interviews can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your company culture. Download the Free Stay Interview Template
What is company culture?
Let's go back to basics. Company culture refers to the essence of day-to-day life at your business. It encompasses shared values and behaviors that characterize how your team interacts with one another and customers in the professional setting.
The culture you cultivate will have a direct impact on hiring, your business reputation, customer loyalty, and employee satisfaction. A great culture will also positively impact corporate health and the company's bottom line.
We cannot—let us repeat!—cannot overstate the importance of great culture and how comprehensive it has to be. Your culture should permeate every aspect of how you run your business on a given day. It must be evident in hiring processes, interactions with workers, and how you serve consumers.
It’s best to view company culture as the unifying force that brings everyone together to achieve a common mission.
The critical importance of company culture
Company culture plays a crucial role in every aspect of your business. It affects worker morale and retention. There’s also a connection between company culture and employee performance.
Think about it this way: if people are happy and valued at work, and feel like their personal values resonate with your company values, they are going to do a better job, put forth discretionary effort, and be more open to feedback and growth conversations.
A strong culture will support your long-term growth and business continuity, too. Job seekers are attracted to companies where everyone is engaged and high-performing. Building a great culture will help you bring in top talent and create a dynamic workforce known for thriving employees and strong ROI.
A positive company culture: key elements
What actually makes a work environment supportive and enjoyable? You’ll need to cultivate several critical elements to achieve a positive company culture.
1. Strong communication
Healthy company cultures foster open and transparent communication. Make sure your entire team feels heard and valued—this will inspire trust in leadership and the company’s big-picture mission. Provide staff with regular updates about what’s going on within the business. Create an open-door policy that lets everyone know they can share ideas and voice concerns.
2. Mutual respect
Balance is another critical element of company culture. While members at different levels of the company will have unique responsibilities, roles, and authority, it’s important that your culture values everyone equally. People should be treated with the same respect regardless of whether they are a 20-year member of the business or a new hire filling an entry-level role.
3. A collaborative environment
Teamwork and collaboration are additional, key components of a positive company culture. Create a supportive environment where employees can thrive, which involves encouraging collaborative projects and providing opportunities for team-building activities.
4. Clearly defined values
Lastly, make sure you have a clear mission and set of values. These can’t simply be words tacked on to the end of emails and marketing assets. You and the entire leadership team must live and breathe these values.
What contributes to organizational culture?
Everything organizational leadership does contributes to company culture. The way you and other employees lead, live out company values, and interact with one another will have a drastic impact on the culture of the business. Your actions and attitudes set the tone for the entire company.
The physical workspace, policies, and procedures you implement will also impact the way employees interact with one another. To fully reshape company culture, employees must be brought into the policies and values you’ve endorsed. Being intentional about these elements can foster a positive and productive work environment.
Types of organizational culture
There are four main types of organizational culture, that was first developed by academics Robert E. Quinn and Kim S. Cameron of the University of Michigan, who researched key qualities of effective, successful businesses. They are:
- Clan: prioritizes collaboration and employee development
- Adhocracy: emphasizes innovation and risk-taking
- Market: prioritizes competition and achieving goals
- Hierarchy: values structure and stability
How to Improve Your Company Culture
1. Embrace transparency
Transparency isn't just positive for employees. The effects of a transparent company culture impact the entire organization by producing highly engaged employees and a psychologically safe work environment.
Trust is the foundation of a great organizational culture. If you want an open and transparent company culture, your first step should be ensuring that your team has the modern technology and collaboration tools to do so. Outdated communication tools can be a major barrier to transparency, especially if you’re working across different offices and remote employees. It's imperative that your team has an easy and efficient way to connect with one another and share crucial information.
In addition to improving your communication and collaboration tools, another crucial step to take is simply defaulting to transparency.
This is primarily a mental, rather than a logistical shift. Instead of asking "is it absolutely necessary to share this?" ask, "is it absolutely necessary to conceal this?"
It's that easy.
Here are some other ways to embody transparency in your organization:
Share success
If you're going to do one thing, start with this. Openly share and recognize the successes of individuals, your teams, and your organization with everyone. It's a major motivation boost for the team to hear the positive results of their hard work.
Share challenges
You hired the best and smartest people in the room for a reason. By being open about the challenges you and your company are facing, you’re presenting opportunities for the team to come up with solutions together. This doesn't mean you need to share every minutia of every logistical challenge, but when it comes to solving complicated challenges, several minds—especially when those perspectives come from diverse backgrounds—are more powerful than one.
2. Recognize and reward valuable contributions
Did you know that companies that emphasize having a recognition-rich culture also tend to have dramatically lower turnover rates?
Employees who don’t feel recognized are twice as likely to quit their job in a year. In fact, a recent Bonusly survey found that nearly half of respondents have left a job because they felt unappreciated.
Almost half (46%) of respondents have left a job because they felt unappreciated. Another 65% admitted that they would work harder if they felt like their contributions would be noticed by management. On the flip side, the top 20% of companies with a recognition-rich culture have a 31% lower turnover rate.
If you'd like to see that kind of impact on your own turnover rate, you can. Here’s our first suggestion: identify specific behaviors and results aligned with your company's goals and values, then recognize and reward those behaviors as frequently as you can.
Most importantly, get everyone in on it! Employee recognition doesn't have to come exclusively from the top. It's often even more impactful when acknowledgment comes from all around—from leaders, from peers, from everyone.
Peer-to-peer recognition is the most effective method of infusing recognition into your culture. Peer-to-peer recognition also dramatically reduces the managerial overhead required to make sure everyone's being recognized for the work they do. In a recent customer survey, 73% of respondents said they spend 1.5 hours on Bonusly admin each month! (If that doesn't convince your leadership team to invest in recognition, our webinar about securing executive buy-in might.)
Employee appreciation is also a great way to organically build stronger relationships between coworkers—which is the next step towards cultivating an outstanding company culture.
If you need to start somewhere, start with employee recognition.
-> Make improvements to your company culture before employees leave. Download the Free Stay Interview Template
3. Cultivate strong coworker relationships
Having strong relationships at work drives employee engagement, but it doesn't happen automatically. Building strong coworker relationships takes time, effort, and sometimes, dedicated team-building activities. 😉 (Don’t groan. Our list is fun!)
But more than that, employees also shouldn’t make it a practice to scatter the moment their leader approaches the water cooler.
In fact, research suggests you could benefit from doing the exact opposite—companies should be creating spaces that encourage, and even generate “collisions.”
We’ve learned, for example, that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office... our data suggest that creating collisions—chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization—improves performance.
Think about both the physical and cultural environment in your own organization. In addition to providing space for focus, productivity, and collaboration, something that many offices miss out on are these collision areas.
For example, think of where you eat lunch. Is there a dedicated kitchen and eating area? Or is there only a microwave, and then everybody goes back to eat at their desk? Eating lunch together is one of the easiest ways to get to know your colleagues if you’re on teams that don’t normally interact, and it's an easy and low-budget way to encourage relationship building.
If your organization is hybrid or remote-first, it's still important to find time for in-person connections, even if that means once a year as an entire company, or having co-workers from the same city get together on a regular basis. (Bonus points if you offer stipends so employees can enjoy lunch together if they live close to one another!) Check out this list of remote team-building ideas, too!
4. Embrace employee autonomy
No one likes to be micromanaged at work. It's ineffective, inefficient, and does little to inspire trust in your company culture.
You hired them, so you should trust your employees to manage their responsibilities effectively!
There are a few ways you can ignite employee autonomy, like allowing employees to exercise choice, letting go of the 40-hour work week concept, establishing autonomous work teams, creating decision-making opportunities, and reining in overzealous bosses and coworkers who tend to hover or bully others.
Embracing your team's autonomy allows them to make the sometimes difficult, but incredibly rewarding, leap from being held accountable to their responsibilities to embracing accountability as they begin to take on and own their initiatives.
5. Be flexible
Many companies have begun to understand the value of providing their employees with added flexibility. It can improve employee morale and reduce turnover.
Workplace flexibility could mean many things, from a parent stepping out for a few hours for a school event, to flex time (employees work a set number of hours but can dictate their start and end times), four-day work weeks, work-from-home opportunities if you have an office-first culture, or an employee taking a much-needed sabbatical.
If you're unsure how to begin implementing a policy of flexibility in your workplace, start here: The Dos and Don'ts of a Flexible Work Schedule.
6. Communicate purpose and passion
Over the past 40 years, researchers have confirmed that people have an inherent need and desire for meaningful work—work that they experience as significant and purposeful.
Today, experiencing a sense of purpose in work seems more important than ever. Studies show that when people believe that their work matters, they’re four times more likely to be engaged, are more motivated, learn faster, and are more fulfilled. However, today's workplace reality paints a somber picture. Gallup recently reported:
"In 2023, employees in the U.S. continued to feel more detached from their employers, with less clear expectations, lower levels of satisfaction with their organization, and less connection to its mission or purpose."
The good news is we know how to fix this. It's possible to find purpose in any type of work, but it’s up to a company’s leaders to connect their employees to purpose. Arthur Woods shared an excellent explanation:
We find that purpose is derived from your relationships, your sense of impact, and your sense of personal growth... If you think about it, those three things are possible in any job. Anyone can build deep, nourishing relationships; anyone can feel like their work matters, and anyone can push themselves to develop in any setting.
–Arthur Woods
One of the most influential functions of a leader is the ability to infuse purpose into people’s work and enable positive meaning.
Reflect on your own company culture: do you regularly show team members how their work benefits others? Do you often recognize team members for the impact they’ve made on your company’s goals?
If not, that’s a good place to start.
7. Break down silos
It's easy for organizations to fall into a siloed culture.
An organizational silo occurs when a team or a department is separated from others, which can impede collaboration between groups. Silos are typically inadvertently created as a result of barriers between people and systems.
It's critical that you avoid thinking of the other employees at your company as simply groups of other people you work with—you need to embrace them as integral members of your team. This shift in mentality from people working toward individual goals to a unified team, all pulling in one direction, can make an enormous difference in the results of your work.
8. Give and solicit regular feedback
Giving—not to mention receiving—feedback is hard.
It doesn’t help that a lot of feedback, even with good intentions, is vague or not actually helpful.
You may be thinking, "We do annual performance reviews. Feedback: Check."
We’ve got news for you.
Once-a-year feedback doesn't provide an employee with the tools they need to improve and grow. 😬
Ideally, you should be providing feedback on a regular cadence, like in your one-on-one meetings, and allowing your employees to give feedback in stay interviews, as well. Sending out regular employee engagement surveys is a great way to understand your team's concerns and challenges in a timely way—and is a way to understand what your company is doing well, too!
Take it from our State of Employee Engagement Report:
Highly engaged organizations are more likely than other organizations to measure engagement, and they are more likely to measure it more than once a year.
Giving frequent, candid feedback is a benefit to everyone. You can reward good behaviors and results as they occur, which just encourages more of the same.
Plus, an employee who’s having trouble meeting management's expectations should never be blindsided at an annual review. Asking your employees meaningful questions and soliciting discussion provides the support they—and you!—need to make corrections.
It's vital to recognize employees when and why they're doing well and work together toward solutions when a fix is needed.
--> Retain your top employees by getting their candid feedback on your company culture. Download the Free Stay Interview Template
9. Stay true to your core values
Core values are much more than a list of bullet points on a company's About Us page. Core values are a company’s North Star. They’re informed by an organization’s mission and goals and are the principals at the heart of an organization.
As such, they're not something you pick just because they sound good on your website.
Your values determine what is important and meaningful to you. They align with your purpose, and speak loudly and passionately to others—and to yourself—about who you are and what you're called to do in this world.
–Lolly Daskal
If you want your organizational culture to stick, you need to develop genuine core values and stay true to them. You can start by reading about the value of aligning recognition with your company values.
10. Give culture building the effort it deserves
Few things will have a greater impact on your organization than its culture.
Building a company culture takes time and energy. It doesn't just happen. Your culture should align with your mission and values—and it should resonate with everyone in the organization.
Failing to allocate the necessary time and effort into building a company culture you can be proud of will leave you with a company culture you simply accept, or worse, dislike. 😰
There's no finish line. A truly amazing organizational culture is a constant work in progress, because as a company evolves, so do its people.
Devote time to nurturing your company culture. Exemplify it in every way you can so that your team will be able to recognize and emulate it.
How to assess your company culture
Okay, now that you know how to improve your company culture, you still may be asking: how do I know if my culture needs a boost? Before you can create the best experience for workers and customers, you need to determine where your organization’s culture currently stands. There are many different ideas to help you read into your current culture and identify how to make it better.
Start by looking at your day-to-day business processes. Consider everything from C-suite corporate activities to hiring and even how customers view your organization. Examine leadership styles, employee behaviors, and management practices. Most importantly, examine your attrition rates. Organizations with poor company cultures will have high turnover rates—that's a fact.
Each of these data points will provide a piece of the puzzle. Together, they’ll give you a great view of your organization’s culture and whether team members are effectively collaborating to achieve big-picture business goals.
What does a positive company culture look like?
While no healthy company culture looks exactly the same, they all have similar core elements. First and foremost, you should focus on creating a balanced culture for all employees. People at all levels of the organization should feel welcome, heard, and respected.
Employees who feel valued and respected will have a stronger sense of loyalty and respect. They may also be more receptive to feedback, trainings, and other growth efforts meant to make higher-performing and more productive.
The businesses with the best culture also have recognition and reward systems in place to celebrate achievements and motivate employees to do their best. Work-life balance is prioritized, ensuring everyone’s well-being. Additionally, the company’s mission and values are clearly communicated and reflected in everyday practices.
Does this sound like your company? If not, begin applying the simple strategies outlined above to create a more dynamic and inclusive workplace.
Which of these steps are you going to take first?
A truly amazing company culture will always be a work in progress, evolving in tandem with your organization and your people, which is why it’s up to you to decide where to steer that evolution and which of these steps to take first!
Our tip? Start with employee recognition. It contributes to so many of the factors we discussed and is an initiative that'll make everyone feel good.
For a simple way to start improving your company culture today, download our free Stay Interview Template. 👇
The free PDF template includes:
👉 Step-by-step instructions for conducting stay interviews and using the template.
✅ Guided questions around manager feedback, company feedback, and building connections.
💡 Tips on how to make the most of your stay interviews.
⚙️ Additional tools and resources to build engaged, resilient teams.
FAQs
What is meant by company culture?
Company culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that define how employees interact and work within your business. It shapes the work environment and influences employee satisfaction, performance, and overall company success.
What is a good company culture?
A good company culture promotes a positive work environment. It also values employee well-being and encourages innovation. Your culture should align with the organization’s mission and goals while simultaneously optimizing engagement.
What are the 3 Cs of company culture?
The 3 Cs of company culture are communication, collaboration, and commitment. Organizational leadership and getting your team members to talk with one another are foundational to creating a great culture. Everyone should also be committed to achieving organizational goals and passionate about collaborating to do so.
What are the 4 types of business cultures?
The four primary types of business culture include:
- Clan Culture (collaborative)
- Adhocracy Culture (innovative)
- Market Culture (competitive)
- Hierarchy Culture (structured)
There aren’t any “wrong” or “right” archetypes. Identify the framework that best aligns with your company and build that type of culture.
Even more culture questions: answered
Some folks have read this article and shared it sparked even more culture questions—we love this! Check out some of the answers to your questions below.
1. The article mentions the importance of recognizing and rewarding valuable contributions as a way to enhance company culture. Could you provide more specific examples or case studies of companies successfully implementing recognition-rich cultures?
Recognizing and rewarding valuable contributions is crucial for fostering a positive company culture. Examples of effective recognition initiatives include peer-to-peer recognition programs, regular acknowledgment of achievements during team meetings, and personalized rewards tailored to individual preferences. Case studies of companies with successful recognition-rich cultures often highlight the integration of recognition into everyday workflows, such as using digital platforms for easy and immediate recognition. Additionally, emphasizing the importance of recognition at all levels of the organization, from leadership to frontline employees, helps create a culture of appreciation and motivation.
2. Building strong coworker relationships is highlighted as essential for driving employee engagement. Can you offer additional advice or strategies for fostering these relationships, particularly in hybrid or remote work environments?
Fostering strong coworker relationships, especially in hybrid or remote work settings, requires intentional efforts to facilitate connection and collaboration. In addition to traditional team-building activities, organizations can leverage technology to create virtual spaces for informal interactions, such as virtual coffee breaks or chat channels dedicated to non-work-related topics. Encouraging regular one-on-one check-ins between group members and providing opportunities for cross-functional collaboration can also strengthen relationships and build a sense of camaraderie. Furthermore, promoting a culture of openness and vulnerability, where employees feel comfortable sharing personal experiences and challenges, can deepen connections and foster mutual support among colleagues.
