How to Improve Your Corporate Culture in 2023

Nothing generates productivity and high morale like a positive corporate culture. Not only does it make your company an exciting and pleasant environment to work in - a good thing in and of itself - it also improves employee retention, strengthens the performance of all of your employees, and even boosts their engagement in individual and collaborative work.

According to a QuantumWorkplace report, 67% of employees believe their culture is positive, and no less than 66% of this group believe it positively impacts their day. This tells us that corporate culture matters.

But how can you influence your corporate culture meaningfully? There are many simple changes you can make to achieve this goal, and this article will go through 6 areas of office culture that you can focus on today.

What Is Corporate Culture?

Corporate culture is the way that your organization operates. This is based on its core beliefs and values and how employees are trained to behave and work. In essence, it’s your team's personality (particularly pertinent in customer-facing industries) and a guide for how to act in your workplace.

There are many benefits to an office experience bursting with positive energy, and these are just a few.

1. Cohesion & Productivity. It streamlines responsibilities so that everybody is striving for the correct goals and operating under a productive mentality.
2. Customer/Client Satisfaction. If corporate culture can positively affect your employees’ day-to-day, then this is likely to translate to customer-facing situations. When your employees care about their company and how it is represented, they will do more to ensure that it is doing well.
3. Enhanced Employee Engagement. Employees will have a clearer idea of how to conduct themselves in certain situations, which increases their engagement through autonomy.
4. Communication. Important interactions between management, employees, clients, and customers will be more directed, streamlined, and in relation to the desired culture.

Improving Your Corporate Culture

Now, let’s take a look at a 6-stage process that will get the ball rolling and the ideas manifesting!

1. Develop a culture. Firstly, you need a workplace culture that compliments your USP (unique selling point) and business development needs. Depending on what your company does and the industry you do it within, this will differ from case to case. The trick is to make it fit with your USP to enhance your organization's uniqueness, which is great PR and gives everybody a cohesive workplace experience.‍
2. Train Your Employees. All of your new and prior employees must be trained in your culture. This can be done through culture-building activities such as lunch & learns with seasoned teammates or even social bonding activities. Rules and procedures must be learned, too; for instance, is there a specific way to respond to an email? You want new hires to be aware of your standard operating procedures for the sake of continued cohesion. One of the main objectives here is to guide your team in working towards the same goals. ‍
3. Build strong employee relationships. The greater your employee relationships, the easier it will be to work out the culture. Good communication (both ways) makes it easier to share your goals with everybody.
4. Attracting New Hires & PR. It also works for attracting new hires and improving your company’s PR. According to Builtin, 35% of American workers say they would pass up the perfect job if they felt that the company culture was not a good fit.
5. Encourage Company Transparency. Moreover, the more transparent you are with your employees, the better you will be able to communicate what you need from them. Also, it makes them feel more connected with you as an employer and with their job as a whole. This is because good company culture breeds trust and job satisfaction through honesty and a trusting employer/employee relationship.
6. Embrace Employee Autonomy. The more autonomy an employee has, the greater their engagement levels. This has been proven by many sources. For instance, studies by Effectory found that 52% of employees lack autonomy in their work. Furthermore, their research also revealed that autonomy increases role clarity by 20%, engagement and commitment by 17%, satisfaction and alignment by 15%, social safety by 15%, and adaptability by 15%.

Recurring office lunches

And how about some recurring office lunches for all of the team? This might seem like a small gesture, but recurring staff lunches carry as many benefits as autonomy. Good food boosts morale (who doesn’t look forward to a fulfilling meal in the middle of the working day?), lifts the burden of making lunch from the shoulders of your staff (one less thing to worry about, whoop!), and people want to show up for meals at the office because it connects them with their colleagues!

The Conclusion

Improving your company’s corporate culture is a process where multiple aspects of your office must be taken into account, and every company is different. With this in mind, there could be many areas that you can identify which are worth working on. There may also be small ways how to improve the workplace experience as well, such as investing in new furniture and/or decor to spruce the place up. 

Some of these ideas will take time to implement, but one that you can integrate tomorrow is recurring weekly lunches, which can be done through a user-friendly, local business-supporting platform such as Ritual.