6 Practical Steps To Transform Your Company Culture

Great culture is a result of conscious collaborative effort by the entire organization.In any organization,  work culture can either serve as an asset or a liability to its business. A healthy company culture will benefit the bottom line by motivating employees and smoothing out lines of communication while a toxic company culture often results in employee push-back and overall disorganization. 

Here are some practical steps you can take to ensure  you positively transform your workplace culture to guarantee business success:

• Conduct a culture audit.Having a documented strategy for the envisioned  transformation would be a great starting point. This would involve clarifying the vision of the culture you want to have as well as determining who, when, how and and what needs to be done. It may be important to highlight with specificity the positive aspects of the culture you'd want to reinforce as well as the negative attributes you'd want to abolish. A root cause analysis for identified behaviours would be helpful to ensure you are effectively dealing with the real causes of issues. Involvement of the employees, team leaders, and management  would be paramount in this exercise.
• Appoint culture champions. One of the ways of ensuring everyone is looped in the implementation process is electing/nominating culture advocates to be involved in implementation of the new culture. This would encourage them to own the vision as they carry out the process. The champions would then be in a better place to bring it down to their fellow employees in a manner they can understand.
• Incentivize the workplace Providing incentives or rewards for their hard work achievements and  completion of certain goals is a sure way of boosting employee motivation. Making their jobs both gratifying and fun is a guaranteed way to employee productivity.Sam Walton,owner of Walmart aptly puts it,"Appreciate everything your associates do. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune."
• Encourage a feedback culture. One of the best ways to generally raise employee morale is to foster an environment that encourages feedback.When a company focuses on being open and honest with itself, it’s easier to communicate corporate objectives, goals, and areas of focus/improvement. If your employees feel free to always share what they think about your organization, management, and other employees, they are more likely to be happy and engaged with your organization.At the same time, taking some of these ideas into account, you can change the objectives of your company or organizational structures, or even open up new avenues of product research, or service offerings generally improving the company. A study from McKinsey showed that clear, transparent corporate communication between internal employees can help boost productivity by as much as 25%. In addition, better corporate communication helps companies engage with employees, and build corporate loyalty more effectively.
• Encourage autonomy.It is crucial to give employees space and adequate time to perform their tasks without unnecessary micromanagement.Increasing employee autonomy can make for a more productive overall working environment. It fosters trust between employees and managers, and an understanding that employees are individuals who work well in many different ways.Employee autonomy can greatly boost employee engagement, provide more opportunities to be creative and can leave your employees feeling more valued.
• Conduct  culture interviews when recruiting. Culture interviews ought to be included as part and parcel of the recruitment process.They help determine if a candidate is a good culture fit for the organization right off the bat. Developing an onboarding procedure that helps the new employee understand the values that the organization wants to promote and their role in creating this culture within the work environment is a great way to integrate them into the work culture. The culture should become part of the greater brand reputation so that everyone knows what to expect from the organization from the beginning.

Contributors: Sam Mwangi, Fortunatus Otieno, Angela Kaberere