With every rising wave of young, educated, and talented workers, what they value in a job—and what they expect from their employers—changes dramatically.
High-quality workers aren’t just looking for a large salary, big bonus, or a company car. They’re looking for somewhere that they enjoy working. They’re looking for a strong, positive company culture that supports them in their career goals.
Don’t get me wrong, pay will always be one of the most important factors when it comes to attracting the best talent on the market, but a lot of your potential candidates are placing more importance on company culture.
They’re attracted to companies that have a positive working environment and a reputation for being a great place to work. Some candidates even choose a position that has a better cultural environment to one that pays more. You can help foster this by checking in with your staff, encouraging open communication on how they’re feeling about their work, solving any issues raised, and showing you care about how your staff feel about your workplace.
Having a strong, positive company culture is important when retaining your current best employees and attracting new talent into your company. Here’s how you can create a positive company culture that not only attracts the best talent, but also keeps them for the long run.
How Does Culture Affect Your Employees?
Company culture affects employee engagement significantly. If your company has a company culture that promotes and rewards good performance, dedication, and upskilling, then your employees are going to be more engaged and more productive at work.
Why?
Because staff know what to do and how to behave, and they know what a normal working day is like.
When you have a high-performance company culture, then your employees will understand exactly what you expect of them—and work hard to achieve that.
They’ll feel:
- Connected;
- Involved;
- Supported; and
- Most important, engaged.
Highly engaged employees are 21% more productive. In terms of staff retention, 73% of disengaged employees are actively looking for new jobs, compared with 37% of engaged employees.
So, if you want to improve your employee engagement, retain your best employees, and attract new talent to your company, then you should start by improving your company culture.
Here are three steps to help you create a positive company culture, and improve employee engagement.
1. Define and document your company culture
The very first step of creating a strong company culture is to document it.
That’s right.
Before you start creating the culture in your company you have to do a bit of paperwork (stick with me, it’s worth it).
The culture of your company is the true backbone of your business, and, just like any other successful business strategy, you should start by defining it.
Work with your co-founders and management team to define your company's:
- Mission
- Vision
- Values
- What employees can expect from you
- What customers can expect from you
By clearly outlining your company culture clearly in a document, presentation, or video, everyone will know exactly what you want your company to be going forward. You’ll know what you want to stand for, how you want your employees to feel, and how they will be treated while working at your company.
You can even refer to this when writing your job descriptions to help attract talented applicants who are looking for a company just like yours.
2. Talk to (or survey) your employees
To see if any business strategy is working, we test, test, and test some more. It’s the same with your company culture. You want to see how your employees react, how they’re working, and if they feel happy in the current cultural environment.
Measure your company’s culture regularly by:
- Seeing what’s working
- Seeing what you should improve
- Making employees feel heard
- Asking employees for ideas you might not have thought of
By constantly testing and changing things to make sure your employees are happy with the current working environment, you’ll be able to develop a positive company culture with their unique insight and lived experience.
3. Involve your employees in the process
As soon as you’ve figured out how you want to improve your company culture, it’s time to actively involve your employees in upgrading, pivoting, or overhauling it.
Communicate clearly with them, explain your plan of action, and make them feel involved in the process. You want to avoid rocking the boat too much and staff jumping overboard if they feel they don’t understand what’s going on.
Depending on the size of your operation, you can create focus groups and ask for feedback on the changes you’ve implemented. By getting key players in your workforce involved, you’ll be able to strengthen your new culture’s adoption across the company.
Employees will feel involved, listened to, and generally happier that they’re helping shape the company and making a difference for their colleagues. They’ll not only work harder (and stay on board for longer), but they’ll be a beacon for onboarding new employees in the future.
Plus, increasing your employee engagement by 10% can increase your profits by $2,400 per employee per year. So, what better time than now to start creating a positive company culture and increase your employee engagement?
Creating a positive company culture and improving employee engagement will help you attract more qualified and talented employees to your business. Your current employees are actually one of your greatest assets for providing social proof of the positivity in your company culture.
When applicants are reading job descriptions or watching job ads, they want to hear from the existing workforce. They want an insight into what it’s like to work for your company, and a lot of candidates are even checking out employer reviews on websites like Glassdoor or Indeed.
Your prospective employees are using these review sites as a way to prescreen your company before they apply—as well as analyzing your own company website. For your website, make sure you include plenty of positive employee testimonials and videos showing staff happy at work.
On the review sites, it only takes one disgruntled or upset employee to post a negative review that will do serious damage to your reputation. Try to make sure these platforms have plenty of positive reviews on them by encouraging your current employees to leave good feedback about your company culture and working environment.
By getting your employees to showcase all the positive aspects of working at your company, you’ll be able to secure the best talent that applies for your next opening. Remember, you can include quotes from these positive reviews in your job descriptions to help encourage applicants to apply.
By creating a positive company culture and improving employee engagement, you’ll be able to increase the number of qualified applicants you receive for open positions. By focusing on improving and promoting a strong, positive company culture, you’ll see a huge change in applicant quality and number.
