4 ways to improve your company culture

Company culture may be hard to define, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. While a negative culture drives high employee turnover and hurts team morale, a positive one can increase overall productivity and bolster worker retention. It’s also important to remember that even the best professional environments have room for improvement, and the worst ones always have the potential to change. Here are some tips for improving your company culture:

• Ask questions: You can’t find a solution if you don’t know the problem exists. Similarly, it’s difficult to improve company culture for the benefit of your employees if you don’t know what they perceive as weak areas. Start making it a point to ask how workers are doing, both as individuals and as a team. “Make the energy in your shop a topic for conversation, just like budgets and schedules and other standard business topics,” suggests Liz Ryan, a human resources columnist for The Denver Post. “At the start of each staff meeting, open with, ‘How are we doing? Anything we need to talk about before we get started?’ The more comfort managers show with sticky human topics like conflict and burnout, the more people are likely to open up.”
• Communicate your intentions: Communicate to your employees that you have the resources and inclination to help them solve even abstract problems. For example, say a department is struggling to manage their stress levels. Workers may feel that this is an inappropriate complaint to bring to their boss. After all, everyone has stress! However, as a manager you have access to an array of rich training resources for handling stress in the workplace. Such courses can dramatically improve team morale.
• Consider the individual: While some cultural issues can be addressed at work, others depend more on the behavior of individuals. While you can’t control how much exercise your employees get or what they eat, you can encourage healthy attitudes through Mastery Technologies’ Employee Health and Wellness training.
• Get suggestions: Oftentimes staff members on the ground have the best suggestions for improving the overall company culture. Ask your workers what changes they think could positively impact their professional environment. Some employees might need extra training in managing workplace conflict, while others may be interested in exploring mentorship opportunities. Perhaps you’ll identify a few people who would like to someday be promoted to managerial roles as the perfect candidates to take a career development course.

The good news: Whatever your team’s needs, MasteryTCN can provide you with the training solutions to help you meet them, and improve your company culture for the better.