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A company culture is what defines each business; impacting the quality & consistency of employee performance. Learn how to build a high-performance culture. It is the true and unique identifier of a successful business. Aspects of your organization like product and techniques can be replicated by another company; however, your culture is irreplaceable. It is the personality, its essence, and it is what differentiates your company from the competitors in the minds of the stakeholders.
A high-performance culture is important since it is the formula that guides the team, motivates, and inspires employees to perform better. It also attracts the best talent and retains them inside the organization. A high-performance culture attracts and retains the best partners for successful business. What you believe in and stand for will make others want to associate with you. It defines how your team interacts among themselves and with the outside stakeholders specifically customers, media, partners, and suppliers.
The following elements define a company culture:
Paradigm:what the business is, its values, mission, and what it does.
Control systems:Control systems: What process is established to monitor what is going on within the organisation.
Organisation structures:The hierarchy and workflow.
Power structure:the base of power, who makes what decisions and the spread of this power.
Symbols:Includes logos, unique designs, office locations, special parking spaces, and washrooms.
Rituals: these include management meetings, events, and board reports.
Stories and Myths: the values within the organization, stories about the company history, legacy, events, and people.
Emotional benefitsHealthy cultures motivate employees to perform better hence optimum utilization of company resources resulting in better returns.
It helps develop strong relationships for productivity. Since organizations bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and cultures, a high-performance culture makes all employees work as a motivated team hence personal and organizational productivity.
A high-performance culture makes each one feel part of the team and empowers self-development — both on a professional and a personal level.
It brings sustained productivity increase as employees normally give only about 20% of their full potential. When leaders continue to work on the culture, productivity can keep increasing — there is no limit to improving performance.
With an increase in building the company culture, employees continue to take more personal responsibility for cost minimization to improve business profits.
A favorable attitude at work encourages employees to give their full potential enhancing overall business productivity. This reduces costs of production, resulting in low prices for the products, a better market share, and the growth of the organization.
The company culture acts as a guide to how things should be done. This clear guidance sets the policy that when adhered to results in employees performing tasks as required, therefore attaining company objectives.
More successful companiesA high-performance culture creates a competitive advantage for the company. This results in clear differentiation, easy access to information and more productive teamwork, hence a workplace that produces better results. Organizations with a high-performance culture tend to ask questions about why they are not optimising then find ways to solve the bottlenecks to productivity.
Such organizations also find it easy to copy effective business strategies from other organizations. This is possible since such organizations can easily share information and work in teams as everyone understands how things are done. You can then customize these strategies and create your own recipe for success.
There is a strong link between the level of employee happiness and company profits. Research has shown that there is a 12 percent increase in productivity in happy employees and a 10 percent drop in productivity for unhappy employees. Actively engaging employees in their work through high-performance culture results in increased profitability for the business.
Being a great place to work is the difference between being a good company and a great company.
When a company establishes strong values and a high-performance culture, it gains both internal and external advantages including:
A company with strong culture influences the clients, potential customers, and suppliers to adopt its culture and way of doing things making the chain one big organization or employees, customers, and suppliers for easy business processes and a stronger competitive advantage.
Strong core values help in decision-making in companies. A good example is a company culture that focuses on quality products, no poor quality product will be allowed to pass through processing or packaging.
With the ease with which people can now search for company information, a high-performance culture acts as a recruiting and retention tool for the best-skilled employees.
The organizations that practice culture experience improved performance while allowing employees to individually achieve their greatness at work. Here are some ways this effort to improve employee performance impacts business sustainability and performance:
1. Improved morale: when your employees feel great about going to work their energy levels are elevated in the entire organization. Employees know that the workplace is where they grow and achieve their potential making them want to work even harder. This is evident in meetings when employees are buzzing and do not want the meeting to end.
2. Increased employee retention: employees only stay at a job because they want to be there. A high-performance culture should make everyone want to be a part of the team for the long run and not just stay because of the money. Start-ups commonly give shares to new employees to make them stay, however, a poor culture will make them leave in spite of that. A supporting environment will automatically make employees do their best and work for many years.
Related article: 5 Tips to Ensure Employee Retention of Remote Workers
3. Loyalty: a work environment that is unsafe and not supportive results in less productivity. When they feel supported emotionally and professionally, employees become more engaged naturally resulting in a productive team that is more accountable.
4. Boost reputation of the company: with a high-performance culture, an organization will attract competitive candidates whenever a position requires filling. There will be more media coverage of the culture and work environment is favorable.
When you notice the employees adding value to the organization, they should be appreciated both privately and publicly. This can be their positive attitude, the effort put into a project, creativity, among other positive attributes. When employees know you appreciate their input, they will perform even better. People like being appreciated and this is even more valuable to them than money. Do it with sincerity and your organization will greatly benefit.
When you involve employees in the mission and vision of the company and clearly explain to them what the culture of the organization expects, they will do better than if they are left to their own devices. Give them a bigger purpose behind what they are working on and the interest will grow resulting in a stellar performance. An employee will not feel like they matter if no one has spared some time to explain things to them. Each person even the lowest in the hierarchy should be made to feel important to the attainment of the company objectives.
Other than the presence of the employee at work, they bring their history, personal stories, and personal life to work. Take notice of their life and create a connection so that you can better understand where they are coming from, where they are, and where they want to go. This will make them work better knowing that they matter.
Most employees value a company that takes open communication seriously. People prefer being engaged in an organization. They wish to continue contributing ideas and feel they are being heard — it helps to create a sense of belongingness.
Charles Ellis’ book on “What It Takes: Seven Secrets of Success from the World’s Greatest Professional Firms” clearly talks about the most effective ways to build success in an organization. A high-performance culture is crucial and to build it, the company should focus on the power of the narrative. It is through the narrative that the company culture is communicated and shared with new employees. It is through the narrative that the organization can establish its brand identity within the business, with partners, and customers.
The narrative value in your organization goes beyond just telling stories in the annual reports and regular newsletters. When applying narrative through the daily work of the business, its brand identity is made clear and more appealing, the target audience is immediately engaged, and knowledge is easily gathered.
Brand identity: the best way to make the intangible values and attributes of the organization easy to define is by use of stories. Every organization has the big story and the small ones supporting the narrative. The big organization narrative is at the core of the mission and vision. When the smaller stories are shared consistently, your brand is strengthened.
Audience engagement: your organization can be humanized through stories about the people involved like clients, staff, and donors. These small stories reiterate the larger organizational narrative making it memorable, relatable, and easy to spread.
Smart leadership: this is the best easy to build credibility and form trust within your organization. This deepens your relationships with everyone involved with your business.
Knowledge sharing: stories effectively lay the sustainable structure for sharing knowledge and clearly showing the seemingly invisible connections within the organization narrative.
Company history as told in the large and smaller stories goes a long way to building trust with the brand. The customers will feel at ease and employees will feel secure working in the organization. It acts as a strong basis for attracting highly skilled employees and engaging suppliers.
A good example is Coca-Cola and its museum. The world of Cola-Cola showcases the history of this great company containing so many areas of attraction. It takes the visitor through the history of the company from inception through the century.
The setup of the physical environment of a workplace is a major contributing factor in employee productivity. An example is an Open architecture vs. cubical environment. Here is a comparison:
Socialization: With the growth of technology, chats, and emails, employees tend not to socialize when in cubicles hence the need for an open architecture to encourage people to talk.
Privacy: Based on what task an employee is assigned, privacy may be needed especially for executives or senior managers. The open plan may not work best for the employee who is always on phone. It should be implemented on a per employee basis.
Teamwork: When the task requires teamwork like in public accounting, the employees are better off working in an open architecture space than in cubicles.
On Distractions: An open office has one major disadvantage of inability to shut out the interference around you. The distractions can result in reduced productivity for some people.
Transparency: Open architecture creates a sense of transparency. This is towards the customers and fellow employees.
These range from the monthly birthday party or quarterly rewards for best-performing employees. Other than the enjoyment of the party, the organization as a whole can benefit. Employees gain intangibly through these events. The benefits include:
This gives the employees recognition for their accomplishments in their personal lives as well as in the business. Recognitions show the employees that you care and are paying attention to what they do. Involving the organization in personal events like weddings, birthdays, and the birth of new babies make them feel like a part of the community.
Celebrations at the workplace bring employees together from different departments, cultivating better relationships and a sense of unity. It gives the team a chance to bond in a relaxed atmosphere where they can get to know each other better informally.
Recognizing staff during celebrations is a sure way of boosting staff morale even for those who have not received any recognition. It provides an enjoyable time to be off work and just rejoice. This results in better productivity at work.
When employees see their colleagues receive rewards and recognitions, they too get motivated to work harder to increase their chances of being honoured in future celebrations.
The leaders of the organization should take celebrations and organizational traditions seriously due to the following benefits:
Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first
Developing a growth mindset in the organization is beneficial to the business since:
1. It seeks out those who are always eager to learn. The business will not stall as long as employees keep on learning. This will help build a learning organizational culture that empowers innovation and it adapts to changes easily.
2. It is a way to allow employees to break the routine of their daily work and learn something new. It presents the opportunity for employees to develop their skills for the betterment of the company and themselves.
3. It builds a culture that is ready to accept risks and accommodate failure. This is the way to decrease stagnation and make employees be creative and try out their ideas.
4. those working at a growth mindset organization feel more committed mainly because they know their growth potential can be realized in that environment. This motivation translates to improved productivity individually and for the organization.
The company culture can benefit from a growth mindset in the following ways:
For a business to develop a high-performance culture, the most valuable assets in the organization are your employee. Experiencing the real pleasure of working in a supportive organization is both exciting and stimulating and creates the energy to support a profitable business. This results in genuine enthusiasm and pride in being part of the team and improved productivity for better profits — both financially and emotionally. Employee satisfaction goes hand-in-hand with performance improvement.
Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.
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