Your guide to creating a positive corporate work culture for business success!
Corporate or company culture is a set of ethical principles that characterize an organization and guide its practices. It includes values, beliefs, ethics, and attitudes and governs employee and management performance regarding negotiation, performance, and handling business transactions.
Corporate culture refers to the cumulative qualities of the people who work in a company, expressed through social interactions and the work environment. It develops a positive work environment, improves employee engagement and productivity, and builds the company’s identity to outsiders.
Common Types of Corporate Culture
The following are four common types of organizational culture practiced by corporates:
Adhocracy Culture
Adhocracy culture refers to organizations focused on innovation, creating an intrapreneurial workplace. Management acts as risk-takers, and employees bring new ideas, creativity, or innovation.
By managing effective leadership, the organization values employees, allowing them to work beyond the status quo. Organizations hold strategy sessions to encourage new ideas from employees and advance company goals.
Clan Culture
Clan cultures, or family cultures, involve a team-oriented, proactive, and adaptable work environment. Businesses that use clan culture respect each individual and encourage clear feedback and communication between staff members.
Management focuses on employee satisfaction in the same way as an employee makes every possible effort to satisfy his customers. Startups and small or family-owned companies mainly indicate a clan culture, where each individual is respected in this highly collaborative workplace, and communication is ranked high.
Organizations emphasize horizontal organizational structures to help facilitate mentorship opportunities and reduce barriers between managers and employees, often associated with clan cultures. The goal of this type of corporate culture is to reduce the distance between executives and workers. Clan culture is very adaptable, action-oriented, and focused on thriving in change.
Hierarchy Culture
Businesses with hierarchical cultures focus on traditional business processes, which implies conventional business practices. Work environments are characterized by well-defined procedures and risk avoidance, where companies usually have strict policies, such as setting work schedules and dress codes.
Daily tasks take priority over employee relations and feedback. Hierarchical cultures support traditional corporate structures with multiple levels of management. All types of businesses, from fast-food restaurants to banks, have this culture.
Market Culture
In this culture, the business objectives of the company are given priority. In the market culture of organizations, profitability, and market share are given top priority by businesses. It focuses on results-driven businesses, prioritizing the bottom line over financial success and workers’ happiness.
Businesses prioritize achieving goals, achieving quotas, and generating results. Market culture requires all employees to have the same goal of maximizing shareholder or customer value. Industry leaders and large companies generally favor this type of culture.
Why You Need Positive Corporate Culture for Success
Employee engagement: – Organizational culture has a specific purpose for employees: to encourage them and to accomplish objectives. It also maintains efficient interactions within the organization, thereby increasing engagement and productivity.
Employee engagement establishes a broader organizational culture in which positive engagement creates a meaningful relationship between employees and management to ensure a long-term relationship.
Brand value: – The organizational culture of a company is reflected in its reputation and public image. People form their perceptions about a business from conversations inside and outside the company. Some external factors can influence brand image, most of which arise from the company culture and people’s interactions with leaders and employees.
A strong brand identity helps businesses attract more customers and jobseekers who share their values and are committed to the same goals. Employee advocacy plays a pivotal role here in establishing a strong brand image.
Decreased attrition rate: – Reducing attrition means it saves costs in the recruitment process. Since organizational culture creates a happy relationship with employees, they are less likely to leave the organization.
Hence, it reduces time consumed in recruitment, onboarding, and training process for new employees and costs. Reputable companies with solid brands try to maintain a company culture tied to their core mission.
Increase productivity: – A well-established organizational culture brings together small-skilled employees, allowing them to share ideas. In this type of organization, employees feel valued and perform their work efficiently.
It enhances the overall performance of the business, thereby increasing productivity. A positive work culture motivates employees toward the organization’s objective and influences the job role for the best work output.
Effective onboarding: – Organizational culture impacts efficient onboarding processes for training new employees. Orientation, training, and performance management programs are examples of onboarding processes that help new employees gain access to the resources they need to succeed in their roles.
It encourages employee longevity and loyalty and reduces the frustration that some employees feel when they lack the knowledge necessary to do their jobs effectively. Businesses can ensure that new employees are aware of their company’s core values through onboarding.
Signs of Great Corporate Culture
High employee retention: High retention of employees in an organization affects their work culture mindset. In the age of multiple opportunities, an organization with positive work experience retains accurate and valuable employees.
Toxic work environments, unsatisfactory pay, stress or unbearable workload, lack of salary benchmarking and no opportunities for advancement are some of the former reasons for an employee leaving the job. If people within the organization are satisfied, it is reflected in the policies and overall approach.
Clear corporate values: It is essential to create a company’s corporate culture with a clear vision of long-term goals. Before being implemented by leadership and employees at all levels, it must be communicated and shared throughout the company. In a positive workplace culture, every employee is familiar with the company’s values.
All internal and external communications of the company are branded with these values and mission statements. Organizations need to make clear to their employees what their role is and what the company expects from them.
Workplace involvement: A good company culture encourages participation, providing staff members with enjoyable opportunities to come together in activities to develop their personal and professional lives. Generally, successful organizations, from a cultural perspective, celebrate the day on a particular day of the week or plan trips regularly.
The degree of participation demonstrated by each employee is indicative of the success of the company culture. It is essential to maintain a healthy work-life balance to reduce the workload on the employee.
Internal solid communication: In a great corporate culture, communication between employees and management flows seamlessly. Positive workplace cultures encourage transparency, so all team members know their status and where the business is going.
Thus, corporate executives should understand how important it is to establish effective communication among skilled employees. Organizations that want to create a great environment need to know how important open lines of communication are.
Comfortable workplace: A company’s work environment reflects how employees feel about their jobs and their response to the organization. Businesses with strong corporate cultures generally put their employees first. A pleasant work environment with significant benefits and additional employee facilities boosts morale significantly.
The organization’s efforts to ensure that its employees are well taken care of also impact the behavior of its employees. Thus, it is appropriate that organizations provide competitive advantages to employees, depending on the nature of the job.
How to Build and Maintain a Positive Corporate Culture
Here are a few steps that an organization can follow to build and maintain a positive corporate culture:
Set Goals
Company goals should be consistent with the organization’s culture and describe the goals of each team so that employees have specific goals to strive for. It will not only support teamwork among the members, but will also help in directing individual performance.
As needed, ensure specific options are in place to receive regular employee feedback to modify goals further. For example, if a team continues to complete work before the deadline, the organization can allocate some more work per the employee’s capacity. It will ensure maximum profitability, and employees will be prepared to handle essential tasks.
If you are uncertain how to best define your business goals, you can use strategy mapping templates to make things clearer.
For a positive corporate culture, foster a welcoming and inclusive work environment by embracing the diversity of individuals and celebrating their individuality. Encourage staff members to use inclusive language, and think about creating a committee to support diversity initiatives.
As the company expands, ensure diversity and inclusion remain vital components by collaborating with the HR department to incorporate diversity into the recruiting strategy. The diversity of employees includes their cultural beliefs or gender-based principles. For example, In a 2019 survey, 65% of total participants from the LGBTQ community believe that diversity in an organization creates a positive workplace to work in. Overall, 35% of total male participants equally shared their views.
Respect for Employees
Moving to create an employee-centric culture, organizations must ensure the value of employees within the organization. All employees, regardless of their position in the organization, should feel valued and included. Every employee should feel empowered to share their ideas and hold an essential position in the organization, as there are chances of getting great ideas from them.
For example, if an organization has a diverse group of people with different types of knowledge, managers need to ensure that no one is overlooked in the workplace. Many knowledge-based beliefs will help the organization create business value from that cultural perspective.
Provide Support to Employees
Empowering employees is as important as welcoming new employees. Organizations must ensure that workers understand their rights and that individuality is protected at work. Giving staff members the freedom to discuss their problems inside and outside the workplace freely is a critical element of any organization.
Additionally, organizations may need assistance and resources to support this issue, an essential component of a supportive work environment. Make sure HR staff members can adjust their schedules to accommodate private meetings when required. Organizations should also consider setting up an anonymous hotline for employees to report incidents of sexual harassment in the workplace, which will provide them with a safe and discreet means to do so.
For example, several companies offer paid parental leave to employees when they have a newborn baby. It means that mothers and fathers can take the leave they need to care for their children, and they will also receive pay during the leave. It is included as a moral support for the employees, providing reassurance to the employees that the organization is thinking about their family also.
Also read: PTO Tracking Software to Stay Ahead of Leave Requests
Provide Flexibility
Flexibility is an essential element that an employee wants from an organization. Employees shouldn’t worry about consequences if they take time off to deal with personal obligations or other emergencies.
Organizations should take care of employee pressure to build organizational culture. It increases the brand’s reputation and makes highly skilled employees want to work at that location.
A great example of flexibility within an organization is the case of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). India’s leading IT company allowed its employees to work even after the lockdown. In this, the company gave the employees the freedom to do their work independently of anywhere in the world, thereby reducing the burden for office purposes. With this, companies also benefited from saving organization costs for employee facilities.
Final Words
A corporate culture is an essential tool for any organization to create a positive workplace. Culture is the behavioral attitudes of a company’s employees and how these attitudes are manifested.
We have to pay attention to the profitability of the business as well as the emotional values and morale of the workers. Our employees expect the same behavior or attitudes that we shared when we hired them, as this is part of employer branding.
Corporate culture is an essential key to attracting and retaining employees and supporting high-quality employee performance and company longevity.
⚠️Don’t forget, rewards and recognition are an integral part of fostering a positive corporate work culture.
Next up, employee recognition software to reward the best workers.