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Building a Strong Company Culture

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Concerned about your company culture and your ability to retain your staff as a result? The answer doesn’t lie with high salaries, fancy offices or flashy perks like catered lunches or game rooms. The answer lies with leaders who focus on creating a strong company culture that encourages those within the organization to believe in the mission of the organization. You know you have a strong company culture when people say, ‘I want to be a part of this organization.” Here is a recipe for getting there.

Have a Clear Mission

If your leadership can’t articulate your company mission in one or two sentences, you don’t have a clear mission and you can’t expect everyone else to follow that mission. It can be as simple as ‘Keep our Clients Happy’ or ‘Make Nutritious and Marketable Products,’ or it can be more complicated but the leadership must buy-in for the rank and file to even be interested.

Have Integrity

Only by committing yourself, and every leader in the organization, to act within the values you have clearly defined, will you earn the trust of your employees and only then will they buy-in too. Everyone knows when someone is being their authentic selves. You can’t fake integrity.

Listen

You and your leadership clearly understand the company’s mission and can communicate it to others easily. If your employees don’t seem to understand how they fit into that mission or understand where that mission will take them personally, you’ve failed at communicating across the organization and you won’t retain those employees. Create opportunities for every employee to interact with company leadership so you hear the concerns and the confusion. Find ways to make the mission clearer and one that can be enthusiastically supported at all levels.

Physiological Needs and Motivators

Frederick Herzberg has a ‘Two-Factor Theory’  that tells you how to influence motivation in the workplace. He says, though, before you can motivate you first must make sure you are meeting the physiological needs of employees. Working conditions, peer relationships, leadership quality, job security, compensation and status are the variables that must be healthily established before moving on to the motivators. You must have a work space that people want and can successfully work in.

The motivators include responsibility, job satisfaction, recognition, achievement, growth opportunities and advancement. These are the very core parts of any job experience. Making sure your organization has clear job descriptions, career paths and measures that accurately reflect someone’s success in achieving those goals is critical to any healthy and strong company culture. Job satisfaction and recognition easily follow if those basic standards are defined and clear.

Interested in discussing your company culture? Contact Smith Hanley Associates’ Market Research and Consumer Insights Executive Recruiter, Daniel Wilberschied at dwilberschied@smithhanley.com.

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