Creating a Winning Company Culture: Key Strategies for Growth-Oriented Businesses

Creating a strong company culture can make a massive difference in your workplace. Companies focused on growth can build a growth-centered culture that emphasizes inclusivity, employee well-being, personal growth, and gratification. Doing so can improve morale and returns in a short space of time. From there, you can also improve the company’s reputation and employee retention. So how can you work on improving company culture to see these benefits?

5 Important Steps For Building Company Culture In A Growth-Orientated Business

1) Be Approachable And Inclusive When Making Business Plans

The best starting point for building a better company culture is to include everyone and remain approachable. This all starts at the beginning of every project. It isn’t enough to set out a plan of action with upper management and then dictate this to the rest of the staff. This will only create resentment and division.

Instead, it helps to set up a town hall meeting where everyone is invited and free to comment. Reinforce the idea that there is no such thing as a bad suggestion. These meetings are also the ideal chance to ask people what they need from the company to be productive and happy. You need to really listen and engage with every suggestion.

This sense of equality helps level the playing field and makes bosses more approachable. There is a fine line. Your staff needs a strong leader they will go into battle for, but someone that’s also there to toast the victory and laugh about the mistakes.

2) Encourage Communication And Transparency At All Times

None of this is possible without effective ongoing communication. You need an open door so employees can come to you with questions or suggestions and help the project move forward. At the same time, you need to be effective with your emails and memos and encourage a two-way system.

Two-way communication across departments is much more effective with improved transparency. Employees benefit when they know what the company goals are and what the higher-ups are up to. This also means equality of information, with transparency across all data related to the project.

Improved communication and transparency then help when providing feedback across each stage of a project. Staff thrives with accurate and consistent feedback on their performance. The feedback sandwich approach helps a lot, which offers a criticism sandwiched between two compliments. Don’t be authoritarian but don’t sugarcoat and hide all the problems either.

3) Give Employees The Tools To Enhance Their Careers

A company set on growth can’t exclusively mean profit growth and abstract concepts. Employees need the opportunity to grow regarding their career opportunities and personal skills. The best way to do this is by offering time and support for training and education.

Bring experts in on the company’s time and money to teach skills and offer certification. Encourage people to work on distance learning courses related to their skill set. If they do so with your support, they may be more inclined to use the qualification for a position in the company.

Another way to encourage personal growth within the company is to challenge individuals and provide one-on-one support. There will be plenty of employees with the potential to do more, who perhaps don’t feel confident or qualified enough. Delegate an important task to them and put your faith in them. It could push them in a positive direction.

4) Give Employees The Tools To Take Mental And Physical Breaks

It is impossible to build this new culture and improve employee engagement without considering their well-being along the way. There is much less stigma around workplace stress these days, but companies don’t always offer the tools to help. Accessibility as a boss also means checking in with people and offering forgiveness and empathy. People will get overwhelmed, struggle, make mistakes, and that’s fine. Work with people to provide support and help with delegation as needed.

It is also important that workers can physically remove themselves from spaces and projects on their own terms. Companies offering green spaces, break rooms, or sensory rooms for decompression can really help. These are great for short breaks in the day, but sometimes staff need more. So, consider greater flexibility in work schedules and patterns.

5) Recognize And Reward Efforts As Well As Successes

Eventually, your projects will conclude, perhaps by reaching that sales goal or completing something for a client. Companies can continue to improve their culture by rewarding success across departments. It isn’t enough for the manager to say how the company has profited from fulfilling its goals. The team did the hard work, and everyone deserves to be recognized for their part. You can’t focus on the head of a sales team when the website developers built such a great e-commerce store, and your social media worked so hard on marketing.

There are plenty of ways to reward work at the end of a campaign, such as an employee of the month scheme, actual physical prizes, or team away days. However, there is a more modern approach that can help. Workplace gamification is on the rise. This means generating a scheme of ongoing rewards, such as XP, badges, levels, and leaderboards with perks. Research by the Aberdeen Group found that organizations utilizing gamification improved employee engagement by 48%.

Our Conclusion

A final point to takeaway here is that there is always room for improvement. The first time you open yourself up to your employees, give them new tools and create a reward scheme, you might see some noticeable growth. Your team may have the agency and desire to better themselves and the company in turn. Still, that doesn’t mean the approach is perfect.

Ask for feedback on how to do better, listen to concerns, and pay attention to any individual or department that may slip through the cracks. Over time, you will be able to create this winning company culture as long as you maintain those levels of transparency, accessibility, and equality.