Top 5 Ways to Foster Company Culture, Starting Today

Do your colleagues enjoy coming into work every day?

Are your employees engaged and feel appreciated?

How does culture affect the day-to-day priorities?

Establishing a positive company culture seems to be a no brainer.

Why do companies have such a hard time with fostering the right culture?

Company culture is essentially defined by the people working at the company; how they treat one another, how they align with company goals and values, and how those factors are played out in their everyday lives.

If you are like the average American, you probably spend more time interacting with the people you work with at your company than your actual family. Making your community at work a positive and successful place is just as important as the one you work to foster at home.

Top 5 Ways to Foster Company Culture, Starting Today:

1. Effective, Clear, and Regular Communication

Get your team talking! Nobody likes a chatty Cathy, but it’s important to open the lines of communication across your organization, from the senior leadership team to the customer facing employees. We suggest providing employee engagement surveys (and sharing the results), having a suggestion box or emailing your employees for recommendations when applicable to help foster the discussion.  

2. Collaborative Initiatives

Keep the communication lines flowing with group projects, round table discussions and team collaborations. Allowing time for employees to develop relationships, think more strategic, and innovating together is extremely beneficial in fostering a supportive community. 

Consider having 'skip the boss' style round tables, where senior leaders meet on a regular (monthly or quarterly) basis to provide their perspectives to those with the most decision making power within your organization. Or a collaboration project with key employees from different departments sharing how their work is impacted either upstream or downstream in the process - often, many employees don't know how their work impacts others outside of their silo.

3. Positive Distractions

Continue to help your workforce build relationships within your company and your customers through the use of positive distractions! Some great ideas are company afternoon outings like March Madness viewing party, hosting holiday lunches, bringing in outside speakers, or team volunteer days. These positive distractions will foster a collective environment, employees will deepen their relationships with each other, grow trust with different departments, and make your employees feel valued and appreciated.

4. Healthy Competition

Who doesn’t love a little bit of competition?  Sure, your sales organization is competitive to hit their goals and bring in new revenue, but others within your company want to be the best, as well. Whether it's account management team that can up sell their current clients for more business, a finance team who sees opportunities to reduce operational costs, or a warehouse teams who compete within each other to see who can reduce their order fulfillment time.

When structuring this (fun) competitions, ensure you are clear and straight forward with the rules around the competition and the rewards for surpassing the goal. It doesn't have to be a winner take all competition, you can reward team members when their department hits goals, even if other departments also hit those goals. Rewarding as many employees for producing results will yield strong engagement.

5. Limitless Recognition

There are endless ways to recognize your enterprise, so here are a few ideas to help create a culture of acknowledgement.

• Peer-To-Peer recognition
• Hand-written thank you notes
• On-The-Spot recognition
• Designated parking spots
• E-cards
• Service Anniversary awards
• Publicizing success (via newsletter, town hall meetings, etc) 

It is important to start fostering your company culture today! Whether you work in a B2C or B2B industry, a positive work environment helps improve results for you, your team and your customers. 

At Energy 2 Engage, we focus helping our clients build a positive company culture for all team members to enjoy. Our Digital Debit Card rewards platform facilitates recognizing and rewarding employees to boost company culture and accomplish goals with an easy nomination, approval, and rewards redemption model.