Earlier this week, triSearch covered the importance of establishing a positive workplace culture. Now you understand its a crucial step for your practice, here are four tips you can use to help when establishing and maintaining workplace culture.
All of which are designed to help the longevity of your business and its employee satisfaction.
1. Communicate your values
When you launch your business, setting core values is an important step to establish the tone and work ethic you expect.
With each new hire or at set periods it is advantageous to review and re-explain your core values to ensure these are continually followed and respected.
For example, triSearch holds its core values at each step of its business interactions and culture.
These include, valuing people we work with, caring about the success of our clients, operating and delivering with integrity and having a supportive and high-performance culture.
From the interview process and email communications to meetings and social occasions, there are plenty of opportunities to link your everyday business events and activities to real life values.
2. Smart hiring
It’s often said that workplace culture starts at the top, and while this is true in many cases, it still takes the right team to propagate your cultural ideals around the business.
This should be considered when hiring, look for desirable attributes with a positive “can-do” attitude.
Other qualities of candidates likely to support a positive workplace culture include strong communication skills, problem solving capabilities and a collaborative mindset.
When selecting candidates, it’s also important to remember that hiring for cultural fit doesn’t mean everyone has to be the same.
Diversity of ideas and skills is highly beneficial to building a more engaged team who can bounce ideas around and tackle challenges.
Finally, before offering a role, you should consider assessing job candidates for their understanding and alignment with your business’ values, looking for any red flags along the way.
3. Invite feedback and new ideas
Providing employees with an opportunity to share feedback and any ideas they may have – whether it’s related to their job role, your business strategy or services – is an effective way to show that you’re interested and value their insight and intuition.
Better still, with more constructive and informed feedback, you’ll be more likely to avoid mistakes and improve performance. What’s more, fresh perspectives and new ideas are sometimes what it takes to keep things moving forward.
This is best achieved through an internal anonymous survey and open leadership forums.
4. Focus on your leadership style
Take a moment to reflect on what your management style is and how it’s perceived by your team.
Unsurprisingly, many behaviours and practices you engage in every day – consciously or subconsciously – could have a positive (or detrimental) impact when maintaining workplace culture.
There are too many positively influential management techniques and styles to list them all but here are a few for inspiration: Maintaining an open door policy, engaging employees by communicating business challenges and developments, rewarding and recognising achievements, offering working flexibility, showing humour and making sure you’re always across everyone’s role and priorities.
It doesn’t take long to discover the many strategies and initiatives you can incorporate into your business to improve its culture.
But with the benefits of maintaining workplace culture widely known, there’s no doubt investing time into reviewing your practices and adopting a few new habits will pay off in the long-term.
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