In a recent study, Columbia University found the likelihood of turnover at an organization with great company culture is 13.9%, whereas job turnover at businesses with poor or no company culture is 48.4%.
Retaining employees is an imperative feature of any competitive business, you want your good employees to stay, but you also want them to be happy about staying.
Building a great company culture not only retains your best talent but it makes work more enjoyable as a whole for you and your team. Nobody wants to come to work just to collect a paycheck. They want to come in and feel valued for the hard work they do for your organization.
In order to keep your employees loyal and engaged, here are our 6 tips to building a great company culture:
Hire Passionate People.
The culture you build in your company is only as good as the people who support it. The people you hire should be passionate and eager to help your business thrive because their attitude and work ethic reflect your businesses success.
If you hire people who value what your business is trying to accomplish it’ll make it that much easier to get your team involved in building a company culture.
Make the Workplace Fun.
According to a study completed by the University of Warwick, unhappy employees cost US businesses $300 billion each year. The University also found that there is a correlation between happiness and productivity, citing happy employees were 12% more productive than the average worker.
It’s important that your employees want to come to work, and that they have fun when they get there. Happier employees are more productive so make their workplace fun by holding a weekly lunch or incorporating things that they enjoy doing on their off-work hours into their work day.
Engage and Recognize Your Employees.
Your employees want to be recognized for the hard work they put into your company every day, and they deserve to. Without your employees, your brand wouldn’t be where it is today, so recognize their dedication and accomplishments.
You can do this through daily team huddles or a monthly office get together. With a mobile engagement platform you can even broadcast message highlighting accomplishments or meeting reminders. It’s important to engage them by showing them you appreciate their interests and want to celebrate events that are important to them, even if it doesn’t correlate directly with work.
Communicate Effectively and Ask For Feedback.
It’s important for your teams to meet one on one, to sit down and talk about their work and how they feel about the environment you’ve built. Pushing for a company culture is great, but you need to know how to tailor it so that all departments, whether a customer-facing team member or someone responsible for back-of-house operations enjoy it. Schedule meetings with people in different roles, see what you are doing well and where you need to improve.
If you have a large and dispersed network of team members, consider having real-time feedback tools like mobile surveys or other applications so you can get a pulse on employee satisfaction on a regular basis. This can allow you to determine trends in satisfaction over various periods of time. If you can also map this to real-time customer feedback, you can see if any lows in employee satisfaction negatively impact the customer experience and make changes to correct this.
Be Transparent.
Create a clearly defined vision of what you want from your employees and what direction the brand is heading in. Your employees should consistently be in the loop of what is going on, and shouldn’t feel intimidated to ask you questions on your vision or tasks they’ve been assigned.
Keeping that clear vision ensures no employee feels left out or in the dark about their role in the company’s future. Again, if you are asking for feedback from employees on a regular basis, try incorporating these goals into the questions you ask them to ensure you are aligned.
Invest.
According to Get Bambu, happy employees are more likely to solve difficult problems faster and outperform the competition by 20%. Investing in your employee’s happiness is an investment into your business, because employees that feel like they have a purpose at work are more productive.
Whether you invest by putting funds towards an outing every month, organizing a Christmas party every year, or even bringing in streamers to hang around the office. You should be willing to invest in things that make their job more enjoyable. Likewise, investing in tools for listening to your employees should be as big a priority as listening to your customers.
