5 Ideas to Reinvigorate Your Company Culture

When you’re looking to improve your company culture it can feel like a mountainous task to take on, but company culture is nothing new.

By looking around for inspiration it can often help to trigger your own unique ideas.

“Where do we start?” – This is often the common voice I hear when I go into an organisation to talk about company culture. But when you assess what has been done by others, and what has been done in the past, you can start to build a strong picture of what you want your company culture to truly represent.

These five ideas are here to reinvigorate your company culture.

However, a word of advice. I would steer clear from duplicating or copying any, and instead, use them to simply spark your own creative journey into the company culture you wish to create.

Copycat cultures don’t work. They’re not authentic to the companies vision and values, and therefore end up becoming an employee disengager rather than something that can motivate and drive employees.

Take note of these ideas and start to analyse your company culture.

Get your team involved with coming up with the mission, purpose, and values of the organisation.

As the mission and values are the core of your company culture it’s important that your team feels fully onboard with the vision of the organisation.

Request your team to contribute to what they already like or enjoy about your existing culture. What language do they use? What is important to them?

Alternatively, if you have existing statements request your team to leave their feedback. What do they like or dislike about these and are there any values they would add?

Develop a story of your brand on why this mission, purpose and values matter. Storytelling is a creative way of getting across an emotional connection to your team and emphasizing the bigger picture.

The language used and the way your organisation communicates is a sign of the company culture you are creating.

Communication doesn’t just extend to how you discuss things in your organisation, it’s how you share information and ideas as an entire team.

To improve communication look at creating your own version of show and tell.

Gather your team once a week to discuss what everyone is working on and share the good and bad news about the company.

Communication breeds trust and engagement, and your company will see more innovation and more creativity when the team is aware of an issue and can gather together to help.

As much as money is important to people, there is nothing that kills culture than making cold hard cash the incentive.

For example, there are still organisations that raise pay based on longevity of employment. Does this truly make people more engaged at work, or complacent?

Host an annual company awards dinner that recognises those who have committed to the company purpose and lived by the values.

Awards dinners are often about those who gained the most sales or who won the biggest client. But recognition should go beyond an employees impact on the bottom-line.

When you recognise people for adopting behaviours and actions that really align with the company vision, that’s when people feel most appreciated.

People are ingrained to want to better themselves. It is within our human nature. But very few organisations invest in learning and development despite it being a key factor in retaining employees and improving employee engagement.

Without the freedom and responsibility for employees to manage their learning, you can expect them to be disengaged with their own development.

Conduct 121’s with each individual within the team and get to know what they would like to learn more about and how they learn best.

Create a learning plan for each person so that they have a pathway to improving themselves within the organisation.

The plan should be revisited every few months to ensure the employee is still happy with this path and if there are any adjustments that need making for their development.

Many organisations adopt meaningless benefits that are not aligned with the company culture, or actually beneficial to the employee. It’s no wonder many organisations see only 5% of their employees using benefits.

Create benefits packages that take a holistic approach to each individual.

Enabling people to select benefits that are most appropriate to their lives gives them the opportunity to adopt or drop new ones each year, and feel that the benefits are truly supporting them.

Provide a range of benefits and allow employees to pick 3 – 5 to have, this can especially helpful when you have a diverse group of individuals in your organisation such as a mix of generations, or people with or without families.  

Creating a unique company culture is a challenge many organisations face in today’s modern world of work. If you’re struggling to establish a company culture or improve upon an existing foundation, download my ebook ‘How to Build a Company Culture You Really Want’ or contact me about my Company Culture Consultancy.