Business leaders today are looking to build company cultures that retain best talent and help them grow as they move forward. Culture is a tool that helps companies function effectively while helping them adapt to changes and prepare for challenges.

The pandemic changed the way organisations function. Employee expectations from their companies are evolving with time and company culture has gained a new degree of importance. Employees want to be a part of an organisational culture that gives them opportunities to grow both professionally and personally. 

Simply put, company culture is a set of practices and values that distinguish your company from others and define your organisational functions. 

Benefits of a Strong Company Culture

A strong and positive company culture isn’t about the perks you provide your employees. It’s about the relationships you build with them. It's about building a nurturing and inspiring space for your stakeholders where they share values, practices, behaviours and stories that guide them across the functionalities of the company. If you are still having second thoughts about shifting your focus to building a strong culture, here are some of its benefits. 

Productivity - A strong and positive company culture drives employee engagement and employee satisfaction by giving them a sense of ownership of their work. It prioritises employee happiness and employee development. When employees are satisfied and happy with their work, they are more likely to go the extra mile, increasing the overall productivity of their teams as well as the organisation. 

Employee Retention - Attracting the best talent is challenging but retaining them over time is almost impossible if the company culture isn’t strong enough. Everyone wants to be a part of a company culture that focuses on employee engagement and helps them evolve. With open lines of communication, strong culture creates a sense of belonging where the employees feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. This drives employee satisfaction and helps a business improve its employee retention. 

Accomplishing Goals - A strong company culture communicates its vision across teams effectively and allows them to understand their goals clearly. This drives engagement and improves team productivity and eventually organisational productivity. When employees understand their priorities and work towards them, it is easier to increase customer satisfaction and reach key business goals.  

Strong Brand Identity - A company’s identity isn’t just about how it is perceived by its customers. It is greatly defined by the relationship between the company and its employees. Your company's authenticity and level of commitment to its customers can be demonstrated by building a strong company culture that mirrors the brand.

6 Ways of Building and Sustaining A Strong Company Culture

A company's culture can attract or lose the right talent because the culture speaks a lot about employee happiness and satisfaction. Companies that cannot communicate their culture clearly can disengage employees and negatively affect their morale. Building a culture takes a lot of effort and evaluation at every step. Once you’ve built your company culture, the challenge is to maintain the culture. Here are a few tips for building a company culture that actually lasts: 

Understand your current company culture and redefine your company values if needed. Understand the areas that need your focus or need improvement. These values are crucial because they act as a guide for your employees to go through the organisational functionalities. These values help employees understand the company's priorities and allow them to align themselves with them.

Promoting transparency helps you foster a culture where employees feel comfortable talking openly about their failures and successes. Keep the lines of communication open. This facilitates continuous feedback from employees and stakeholders about the values and culture. Having a transparent company culture helps employees to understand how they contribute to organisational success and what they can do to improve themselves. 

Company culture is not just about changing the way your employees function, it is also about how you evolve with them. Many businesses struggle with low employee morale because they’re unable to recognise and appreciate good work. Encourage recognising employee accomplishments and build a culture of support and appreciation. This will help employees work more dedicatedly towards their goals and contribute to organisational success.  

A strong company culture helps employees understand their role in organisational success. Align individual goals with organisational goals and let employees monitor them to see how they contributed to the success of your business. You can utilise OKRs to keep track of the progress on goals. At Mindset AI, we use quarterly Rocks, which are part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). This creates a sense of ownership and belonging within employees that drives employee engagement and engaged employees tend to be more productive. 

Learning is a crucial part of building a company culture. Provide learning resources and give your employees time and space to improve themselves. Learning is a process and encouraging continuous learning helps employees to grow professionally while applying what they learn in real-time scenarios. While there are many professional development platforms available, you can also build your own professional development platform with Mindset and utilise our learning journeys to create micro-learning that enables long-term behaviour change.

Recommended read - Creating Engaging Learning Experiences: A Guide for Professional Development Businesses

This aspect is often overlooked when it comes to building a strong company culture. A company culture can be positive and strong when the company prioritises employee happiness and well-being. It is crucial to build a culture that commits to employee well-being and happiness. Sometimes just organising employee engagement activities isn’t enough. Employees work through the same stressful situations day in and day out. It is important to address the impact of this on their mental health and create a safe space for them to seek help when they need it. 

Building a strong and positive company culture and sustaining it is a long journey that requires a lot of effort, focus and consistency. But prioritising company culture can help your business accomplish its goals by improving productivity, retaining and attracting the right talent and facilitating better decision-making by having a clear vision. 

Find out how Mindset can help you with building a culture that lasts.