What is workplace culture?
Workplace culture is the environment you create for your employees.
It takes personality, morals, attitude and emotional factors into consideration, as well as the business side with policies, leadership style, hierarchies and more.
The accumulation of these things can affect employee commitment and happiness.
Some positive characteristics:
Appreciation
At work, we don’t work hard just to be paid, most employees want a little recognition for everything we put in.
This is why appreciation is important. It doesn’t have to be a huge display of admiration, or a big bonus on the next paycheck (not that anyone would complain).
A “well done” every now and again, a nicely written email thanking them for their hard work… the little things really do help with employee satisfaction.
Sometimes you just want to feel seen and appreciated in the workplace.
Integrity
Honesty and strong moral values are the backbone of any business.
It builds trust with workers and gives a sense of comfort as they know that their employer has their best interest at heart.
Moral values are very important too, this needs to be shown internally towards staff and outwardly to the community.
Transparency and openness will create a healthy relationship between management and other employees.
Freedom of expression
Freedom of expression covers a number of things.
Allowing creativity, self-autonomy when applicable and opinions and concerns to be expressed are a few key points of this.
There will always be rules and regulations to be followed, but outside of them, allowing as much freedom as possible is helpful for employee culture – as long as it has no effect on work quality and company perception, what’s the problem?
Effective communication
When at work, there are expectations that will need to be met every day.
These need to be expressed clearly, or employees will feel lost. People can’t mind-read.
It’ll break spirit, consistently being told that you are you are falling behind or not meeting expectations.
But how do you meet expectations if you don’t know what they are?
Accommodating policies
Simple, but effective. This includes things such as giving reasonable amounts of days off and allowing employees to have a healthy work-life balance.
Holidays, fair pay, allowing time to be taken for religious and cultural events, et cetera.
Workers are human, they have needs and sometimes work can get in the way of meeting those needs.
It makes your life easier as well as your employees, you don’t want employees to be scared to ask for accommodations.
This doesn’t cover everything, of course. The list could go on and with much more detail.
Workplace culture is different for each company.
Think about the individuals within your workplace and do all you can to make the space right for them.
A healthy culture means that nobody will dread coming into work. Mondays shouldn’t feel like a punishment.
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