Poor workplace culture leads to low morale among employees, loss of productive employees and high turnover. All these things ultimately lead to low profits. If your company isn’t experiencing the right level of workplace culture, you’re not alone. Every Canadian company experiences poor workplace culture at one time or another. The key is doing what is necessary improve your workplace culture.
Here are some steps to take to improve your workplace culture –
1. Let Employees Create the New Ideas
Sometimes the best ideas come from other employees. After all, they are the ones who are interacting with customers and doing the day-to-day work. Encourage your staff to come up with ideas. If they turn out to be mistakes, don’t point the finger of blame. Keep encouraging them to innovate and learn from their mistakes and successes.
2. Address workplace concerns and problems
Employees will see an improved workplace culture when problems and concerns are addressed as they happen. It’s one thing to encourage an open dialogue, but that will only be successful if you are seen to be acting upon what they share. Unfortunately, in a poor business culture, problems are left to fester and build until it’s time to fire someone or good employees leave. If you address these problems as they arise, your employees will know you care.
3. Look for the right people
It’s easy to hire someone, however, it’s hard to find the right person for the job. Although technical skills are important, you want to find someone who will help improve the culture at your business as well. Be sure to ask questions related to your culture and the culture that they are looking for in a company to see if they align.
4. Listen to Your Employees
Listen. Yes, listen. You may be thinking that you do that already. However, this is a different type of listening. To really listen to your employees you must go beyond just asking how their work day is going. Administering anonymous employee surveys can be a great way to solicit honest feedback.
When talking to employees one-on-one, don’t stop at the pleasant phrases or plain, generic answers. Ask more questions and use silence to bring out honest answers; this may not feel natural at first. You want to create an environment where employees actually feel comfortable to reach out to you regardless of their position.
5. Let Your Employees Know about Your Open Door Policy
It’s easy to place an invisible divider between you and the rest of the employees. It creates an “us” verse “them” culture. Instead, let employees know that you want to hear their workplace problems and help them solve them. You may need to do a lot of the outreach at first to build that trust, so be persistent (but not intrusive). Let them know you’re invested in their overall professional growth and be sure to acknowledge what a valued team member they are.
6. Empower and Create Trust among Your Employees
It’s a fact that no leader of a company knows everything that goes on in the business. This means you have to empower and trust your employees. Pick three things that are important to complete on one day which you can delegate and let your team handle the tasks instead of you. When you trust your team to accomplish vital tasks, you create trust and empower them. There’s nothing better than workers who know they are trusted to solve a problem or complete a task.
