The Gene Identity
Workplace culture and its importance.
What is workplace culture?
Workplace culture or company culture describes the shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterise an organization. Factors such as the working environment, company policies, company goals and employee behaviours can all contribute to the company culture.
Though company culture is intangible, it can be felt by everyone who interacts with your company: your employees, clients, vendors, partners, stakeholders, and the public. To put it more simply, all these aspects represent the personality of the company, and your team will naturally develop a culture whether intentionally or not. Hence, each company has their own unique culture, and it is important to identify it and improve on it.
Why is company culture important?
The unnerving part about company culture is that it has the potential to help a company thrive or cause it to suffer. Companies with great workplace culture have incredible advantages: they attract and retain talent, improve productivity and innovation, develop strong leaders, and become the company’s driving force for ongoing business success. On the other hand, when the company culture does not align with employees’ beliefs and feelings, they are much more likely to leave, or worse, remain with the company but underperform due to being unmotivated.
Furthermore, forty percent of job seekers view colleagues and culture as a top priority when considering career opportunities. This means that candidates and employees care about culture. However, good company culture does not happen by itself. That being said, how do we improve our company culture? To do that, companies must be willing to take active steps to improve it, starting from the CEO to every leader and employee.
Having a purpose is a reason for being and doing what you do. Without a sense of purpose, it is almost impossible to find the motivation to find the things you want to do, such as making an impact or helping others.
One strategy is to help your current employees see how their work contributes to the organisation’s purpose or success. Being part of the company’s progress is one of the most satisfying achievement an employee could gain. By communicating this clearly and often, employees would have a better sense of their purpose and their worth in the company. Hence, they feel like they belong in the organisation.
Having a purpose is a reason for being and doing what you do. Without a sense of purpose, it is almost impossible to find the motivation to find the things you want to do, such as making an impact or helping others.
One strategy is to help your current employees see how their work contribute to the organisation’s purpose or success. Being part of the company’s progress is one of the most satisfying achievement an employee could gain. By communicating this clearly and often, employees would have a better sense of their purpose and their worth in the company. Hence, they would feel like they belong in the organisation.When it comes to recognition, we need to let the employees know that they are being valued and appreciated for their contributions, attitude, talents, and their hard work. Employees tend to be more engaged when they feel strong recognition from their employers. Recognition carries many positive benefits, such as attracting and retaining talent, increased job performance ad innovation. Showing appreciation does not have to be extravagant. Simple actions like providing treats for the team, sharing accomplishments with the team or giving extra days off around public holidays are all great ways to encourage personal growth and satisfaction.
Team building may sound trivial, however, a bonded team is one of the most crucial ingredients for business success. Especially when we are shifting towards a hybrid work model from the traditional work model, team building is much more required in our workplace. The main objective of team building is to create a cohesive and united team through various activities, either at work or outside of work.
Organising one is of course not an easy task, as it requires careful planning. This involves picking the date, transportation, food or diet restrictions, appropriateness of the activity etc. Many considerations are involved, which increases with more people in the team. Nonetheless, team building offers many benefits, and it could matter more than you think. Team building increases productivity not only by improving Interpersonal Relationships but also improves employee engagement and morale.
There are many ways we can incorporate team-building activities: One example would be to dedicate one day of the week for games day where the whole company participates in the games. Programmes such as cooking classes or educational programmes like the Corporate Team Building Mystery by TinyGene Academia. More active programmes could be Escape rooms, Karaoke, Go-Kart Racing, Company retreat on Cruise or Trampoline Park.
It is never too late to start building your culture.
Who knew that workplace culture could affect the company on such a big scale. Nonetheless, it is better to start building one than ignoring the problem. Furthermore, in a recent study, employees were asked to describe their current company culture in a word or two and found the most common term to describe their workplace culture is “stress”. What we want is to have a culture that has motivated and happy employees which would reap many benefits for the company. So start planning now!