How Negativity Impacts Your Company Culture

Negativity spreads faster than a wildfire. You may not recognize it yet, but all it takes is one unhappy, unmotivated person to turn your whole office against your company.

Example: Your best employee, highly motivated and achieving great accomplishments for your company, sits right behind an unmotivated person. This negative person constantly complains about their salary, their position and constantly challenges your key contributor’s positive outlook. Over time this wears on your motivated team member and they become frustrated and start to think they are unhappy.

Now you have two unhappy, unmotivated employees and the cycle just continues from there.

How to Stop Negativity from Impacting Your Culture:

Measure & Survey Your Workforce

You need to first determine the state of your company culture. You can evaluate the status by company wide surveys, 'skip level' meetings with senior executives and front line employees, comment boxes, or even seeing the outlook employees have over a casual lunch meeting.

Determine how your employees view your company, whether it be frustrations, successes, happiness or failures. With this knowledge, you will be able to accurately compile a strategy with effective goals and objectives to start making a positive impact.

Say Goodbye to the Unmotivated

From the example above, the only thing worse than a negative employee is when they rub their grim outlook off onto your key performers. Negativity spreads. 

As unfortunate as it is to let someone go, it is also an important move for your company. Eliminating the negativity will help keep both your key employees positive and motivated, leading to higher retention rate and stronger company culture.

Develop a Turn-Around Strategy

After determining what is currently affecting your company culture and productivity, you need to sit down with both top management and individual contributors to develop a strategy combating your challenges. 

• Does your strategy include making your employees feel valued and appreciated?
  
  
• Does your strategy facilitate peer-to-peer engagement?
  
  
• Does your strategy include ways for managers to reward employees On The Spot for going above and beyond?
  
  
• Does your strategy include the rewarding for innovation?
  
  
• Does your strategy reward employees for their tenure with your organization?
  
  
• Does your strategy recognize behaviors that contribute to the culture you're seeking?
  
  
• Does your strategy enable middle managers to be rewarded for implementing strategic initiatives?

Reward for Beneficial Behaviors

You have worked extremely hard up to this point to determine your company’s biggest people challenges and develop an effective strategy to combat the negativity impacting your company culture. To reinforce desired behaviors within your organization, we suggest investing in an Employee Engagement and Recognition Program.

Be cautious of rewarding with catalog items or gift cards, but reward them with incentives they actually want.