If you’re not focused on creating a strong and positive company culture, it’s time to start! Good company culture ensures employee retention and happiness, which in turn is good for your business. Here are four things you can adopt in your own workplace to start building and maintaining strong company culture.
Check in with your employees
Transparency and communication with your team is one of the most important elements of building and maintaining a strong company culture. Regular touch points and conversations with everyone is essential to keeping a pulse on what might be going on in the office (good or bad), so that you can focus on what might be going well, or fix an issue that arises before it spirals out of control.
We encourage all managers to have bi-weekly meetings with individual team members. Some of the questions we like to ask are:
– How have the last two weeks been going for you?
– Is there anything I can help you with, or is there anything you need from me?
– Have there been any roadblocks or red flags in terms of current projects?
This helps develop strong teams and bonds between managers and their teams.
Additionally, our CEO and CFO find it invaluable to conduct one-on-one performance reviews after each quarter. In these reviews, team members get a chance to express how they felt the quarter went for them, and give feedback on projects, management and anything else they want to discuss.
This ensures that communication lines are constantly open, and everyone has a chance to be transparent. Checking in with your employees also shows that you care about their well-being and growth in the workplace. Make sure to make time for these interactions.
Ask for feedback regularly
On top of having face-to-face interactions with employees, it’s also a good idea to ask for feedback in different ways.
One way we do this at Mindable is by sending out a bi-weekly Officevibe survey to all team members including all of our outsourced staff.
These are optional, anonymous surveys that ask a wide range of questions about our business, and how people really feel about different issues such as:
– The mission and vision of our business
– How aligned they feel various departments are
– How they feel about the product/services offered by our business
– How good their relationship with their manager is or is not
This produces important information that helps us measure team engagement, further develop employee performance and set managers up for success. Think about incorporating some sort of anonymous employee survey into your workplace so that you can help improve culture, and show everyone that they have a chance to be heard.
Encourage everyone to continually learn
No one likes feeling stagnant or “stuck” at the place that they work. While there are essential responsibilities that each employee must dedicate themselves to fulfilling, you should also be able to leave some flex space for learning and growth.
If you have a designer who wants to try our marketing, why not let them tackle a project with the marketing team for one quarter?
While we all have certain job titles, we don’t put people in boxes here at Mindable. We continually focus on helping people do what they love here by encouraging them to consistently learn and step out of their comfort zones.
Once you give your own employees a bit of freedom to flex their skills and learn new things, you can bet that amazing things will start to happen.
Dedicate time for team bonding
Finally, we think it’s important to have moments in-between all of the work and hustle! All work and no play is truly not healthy, and we make sure to try and balance both elements in a way that brings our whole team closer together.
One thing that we have incorporated into our culture is Fun Fridays. Each month two members are able to plan a half day for the whole office, which includes lunch, and some sort of activity around the city.
We also host office-wide meetings each Friday where employees are encouraged to write anonymous notes of gratitude that are then read out loud, as well as morning team yoga twice a week.
Think about ways that you can create moments of fun and balance for your own team, and watch the benefits unfold.