“Company culture” is more than a buzzword. It’s the ways your employees communicate, work together and function. And its effects are felt in your levels of burnout, absenteeism and turnover – or your lack of them.
A lagging company culture creates a noticeable drag on productivity and makes hiring harder. Turning your company’s culture around won’t happen overnight, but it can start with just a few simple steps:
Begin with the basics.
What is “company culture”? How does it form? What influences it? How can it change?
To start revitalizing your company’s culture, you’ll need to find the answers to these questions. A company’s culture is made up both of how your employees act, and the shared values that lead to employees making certain behavioral choices over others. Leadership plays a key role both in creating and in changing a company’s culture.
Walk your talk.
Making a list of values and declaring it “our new culture” is pointless at best and damaging at worst. Instead, a cultural change “sticks” when leadership decides the old ways no longer work, chooses a change they want to make, and begins to model it in their own behavior. For instance, if you want to improve communication, make your own decisions more transparent and ask for feedback more often.
Ask: Is this change easy? Is it rewarding? Is it normal?
Behaviors are difficult to change unless the change is seen as easy, rewarding, and normal. In other words, the change should be one your staff can implement; it should be one that will pay off in a way that is valuable to them; and it should be a change moves them closer to being the kind of person they admire.
Reinforce the “new normal.”
Even the most enthusiastically embraced change will stop in its tracks if employees discover their work isn’t being recognized – or worse, the “old ways” are still being rewarded. Instead, reward employees for doing things right, communicate honestly about how things are going, and focus on the positive outcomes that result from behavior changes.
At SoloPoint Solutions, our recruiters specialize in helping our clients turn around a lagging company culture and develop a workplace that retains its top talent and attracts the best candidates in CAD design and other fields. Contact us today to learn more about our engineering recruiting services in California.