The One Thing That Will Transform Your Company Culture

Company culture has been at the forefront of competitive businesses for a long time, and for good reason. Good company culture has many benefits, including increasing engagement, reputation, attractiveness for potential candidates and retention of existing employees.

We’re currently in a time where the competition for great talent is high. It is a candidate-driven market, where there are plenty of opportunities, but not enough talent. Therefore, company culture is so important as it can become one of your biggest selling points to get people on board.

However, to really sell a candidate on your culture, your culture needs to be clearly defined and consistent throughout your organisation. The only way to make improvements to your culture is to know what needs to be done and how to do it, and you can only get this information by asking and listening to the people who experience it daily – your employees.

“Listening also helps you see whether you have the kind of culture that attracts candidates, one that aligns with people’s values. According to a 2019 survey of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, nearly two-thirds of employees listed “corporate culture” as among the most important reasons that they would stay with their current employer or start searching for work elsewhere.”

Source: LinkedIn.

As a business, where should you start?

Use surveys to find out what people are thinking

The great thing about surveys is that they can be anonymous. By using an anonymous survey to ask questions, it encourages people to be openly honest, as there are no repercussions for expressing their, possibly controversial, opinions.

With the increase of hybrid and remote working models, online surveys allow you to ask everyone their opinions at the same time. Online surveys will also allow you to quickly analyse the data and feedback that comes back, so you can focus on making the relevant changes to your company as quickly as possible

Not only will this enable you to find out what you need to improve, but it will also shine a light on what you do well and what you should use as a selling point when speaking to potential candidates. Be strategic about the questions you include in your survey, as people don’t want to take part in long, time-consuming data collection.

Establish a multidimensional way of listening

Everyone in your company is different. Some are introverts and may prefer telling you things through email, surveys or messaging; others will be extroverts and like expressing their opinions in person or in group meetings. Having multiple feedback streams will enable you to get the most information possible so you can get a full picture of how people are feeling and what you can do to improve that.

Listening sessions are also a great way of getting people’s opinions and suggestions for improvement. Why not add 20 minutes into your next team meeting to ask what could be improved to make their time with the company better?

Act on the feedback

It’s great to have all these streams of feedback; however, if you don’t make any changes and do nothing with the information you’ve collected, your efforts are wasted.

Not actioning people’s feedback can be worse than never asking for feedback in the first place. If people have taken the time to give you their internal opinion on the business and you don’t listen, people will likely feel that their opinion is not valuable, which can lead to being demotivated and unengaged.

When you analyse your feedback, you should be partnering this with a possible solution. It may not be possible to action all your solutions at one time but showing that you are making constant improvements and changes to your business shows you care about your employees and bettering your company culture for them.

Why listen?

• Listening to your employees shows you respect them and their opinions, which is vital to company culture

• Showing that you care about your employees’ opinions shows you are a supportive leader, which is important when it comes to employee attraction and retention.

• Regularly listening to employees creates loyalty and inclusion.

• Listening to your employees shows you are committed to continuous development and improvement of company culture, contributing to higher retention rates in employees.