Businesses with healthy organizational culture are more likely to retain employees. Furthermore, they retain the trust of customers. Certainly, knowing how to build a healthy organizational culture helps their bottom line.
What is organizational culture?
Organizational culture can be described as the range of values, practices, and expectations guiding the actions of team members.
More so, organizational culture is built through consistent practices and behaviors.
The role of organizational culture in a business
Brand Image
First, it contributes largely to creating the brand image of the business. It also establishes business identity.
Employee Interaction
Second, organizational culture shapes employee interaction. They stay motivated and loyal. Furthermore, they maintain healthy relationships and healthy competition.
Emotional attachment
In addition, there is a greater sense of belonging and commitment. Organizational culture helps foster workplace unity.
Mutual trust and cooperation
Moreover, team members have enhanced trust, cooperation, and participation in decision making process.
How to build a healthy organizational culture
Surely, you should have a clear plan to building a healthy organizational culture. Such plan can be executed with consistent commitment to deliver long-term benefits. Here are some steps to build a healthy organizational culture.
Promote work recognition
Essentially, this involves recognizing the efforts and contributions of all team members. This engenders a positive effect on organizational culture. More so, it promotes a sense of belonging and relevance in employees. However, social recognition is just as important as monetary recognition. You could even institute a points-based recognition program.
Encourage employee feedback
Quite importantly, employees should feel that the business values their voices and feedbacks. Yes, missing this can ultimately lead to demotivated employees. It may even hurt your bottom line.
Perhaps, you can begin by using listening tools to ease the employee feedback process. For example, tools like pulse surveys and workplace chatbots can help you analyze employee feelings to know what is working. Remember to act promptly using such insights.
Ensure leaders walk the talk
Likewise, team leaders and managers should live by example. They should be seen to exemplify organizational culture. Surely, this goes a long way to building organizational culture.
As such, train your team leaders to prioritize business culture in every area of their work lives. Remember, this should be done with the incorporation of relevant feedback from employees.
The business should live by its cultural values
In the same vein, your business values should be evident in all areas of your business. This includes HR policies, support terms, and even out-of-office engagements. Consequently, employees, customers, and partners will learn to recognize and appreciate the practical values displayed.
Build strong intra-team connections
Interestingly, for a strong business culture to withstand adverse times, it has to have strong connections between team members. So, encourage team members to collaborate more and perform team building activities. In addition, create new pathways for team members to build empathy and understanding.
Build a culture of learning and development
Meanwhile, do not forget to invest in staff development. When your employees are highly engaged, they learn to prioritize soft skills development.
Create goals, take action, and track them
Finally, you have to keep your objective in mind. Basically, you have to envision what cultural values you want to promote. Create a SMART objective and plan to achieve them. Take action. And remember to track achieved milestones and metrics.
Summing it up
Knowing how to build a healthy Organizational culture is just the first step. You and your team have to actively work at it. Remember to include the steps of communication, recognition and action. This way, your business can enjoy the benefits of a healthy organizational culture.
