Your company's culture not only influences your employees' job satisfaction and wellbeing, but also the public’s perception of your brand. This is why you should always be working on improving your culture to make it as strong as possible.
A common trend in all healthy corporate cultures is that they work from a very clear and defined set of values. Examples can include:
When developing your company culture you also need to know what elements of the employee experience are the best to target, so you see the most improvement.
For example, do you first focus on appreciation, benefits or wellbeing? Over time, these changes should result in a healthier and happier culture that supports and nurtures your employees for many years to come.
Company culture is a term that refers to the core values, shared beliefs, and attitudes of an organisation and its employees. Several elements contribute to company culture — for example leadership styles, mission statements and business goals. When thinking about cultivating a healthy company culture you first need to understand what your priorities are and the current state of your organisation.
A good way to get a sense of the direction in which you should be growing your culture is with the Competing Values Framework assessment.1 According to this cultural development tool, there are four types of company culture, including:
Maintaining a healthy company culture is incredibly important. When your employees are aligned with your culture, it means their needs and values are in sync with yours. The benefits of this not only include higher levels of productivity but also engagement.
When hiring new employees, it’s often too easy to focus on their skillset and lose sight of how they’ll fit into your organisation. Of course, you’ll have some idea of how well they work with others — that’s part of the interview process. But you should also ask questions that indicate if they share the same values as your company. This will help you retain top talent for many years to come.
Company culture and team culture are two distinct elements of employee experience. While both feed into the other, it’s not unusual for company culture to be different from team culture.
Team culture is derived from the people who work closely together within a group. For example, a team leader may focus on their direct reports’ wellbeing, despite the organisation having a market culture. Remember, market culture is about hard work and high rewards, with wellbeing not as high a priority. In the opposite scenario, a manager may want to push their team to achieve more challenging goals, despite being in an organisation that has adopted a clan culture.
In an ideal world, you’d want your team and company culture to be similar. But in some instances it’s good they’re different. In the market culture example, prioritising wellbeing is a benefit as it could be preventing burnout. Likewise, in the clan culture example, the team could have been too relaxed and were at risk of losing out on easily achievable targets.
If you want to know how to take your company culture to the next level, look no further. These companies consistently deliver an excellent employee experience.
At Perkbox we like to lead by example. After all, we’re in the employee benefits and rewards business, so it’s important we provide the best employee experience possible. Our core values include transparency and honesty, which is why we hold ‘Let’s Talk’ sessions. Here, employees can ask our exec team questions, no matter how challenging they may be.
Teamwork is another fundamental part of the Perkbox experience. That’s why, when we hit a significant company milestone, the entire organisation celebrates it. Past celebrations have ranged from band experiences to sip and paint parties. We like to make each event different, so all of our employees do something that resonates with them.
How can you be like Perkbox?
Traveltek develop digital solutions within the fast-moving travel technology sector and are always looking for ways to improve their employee experience. To keep their teams engaged and happy they have a dedicated culture squad who run fortnightly updates. Part of these updates involves company-wide shout-outs to showcase the recognition employees receive on the Perkbox app.
Traveltek use employee engagement tools to help boost engagement, but there are best practice methods too.
How can you be like Traveltek?
Around The World In So Many Ways have offices all over the globe, so for them, their teams must stay connected no matter how far apart they are. To maintain a harmonious and collaborative culture, they use Perkbox. Think of the app as a single source of truth for all things culture — you can share company news, updates, pictures, policies, values and more. You can also attach town hall recordings or any other leadership messaging. The best bit is, that you don’t have to worry about immediately adding new joiners to different email lists. Everything you post is easily accessible from our global app.
How you can you be like Around The World In So Many Ways?
You’re probably fairly aware of Zoom, given they were one of the most popular video conferencing programs during the pandemic. But what you may not know is that they have a thriving company culture. Every new hire is invited to attend a training event in San Jose, where they learn more about Zoom culture. Managers also organise a buddy system where new employees are paired with a mentor who supports them in their new role. All employees benefit from weekly company-wide meetings where they share their successes and recognise colleagues who’ve gone the extra mile.
How you can you be like Zoom?
We can’t talk about company culture and not include Google! It’s quite obvious from the outside that Google have a highly organised culture. Yet unlike most other organisations that operate in this way, they’ve maintained a high degree of flexibility. How? Because they trust their teams, and every employee is treated as an individual. Google knows their people are experts in their fields and they treat them as such. Of course, you’ve probably heard about their nap pods, on-site doctors and free food. But what doesn’t get talked about is the amount of work Google put into understanding what their employees value. They didn’t just introduce nap-pods on a whim, they did it because survey responses indicated employees wanted them.
How can you be like Google?
Your company culture encompasses many elements. When describing your company culture you may want to focus on your:
Your mission statement summarises your values and describes what you want to achieve. Creating a meaningful mission statement is incredibly challenging, but when done well, it can resonate on both a functional and emotional level. When you have an empowering mission statement it can act as a North Star and help steer your company in the right direction during periods of expansion. That said, a mission statement can change, especially as your company grows and you create new goals.
Examples of mission statements include:
Your ethics and values are reflected in the day-to-day comings and goings of your organisation. They’re what you believe in as a company. It sometimes helps to think of ethics as the compass that guides you towards the values you choose to practise in your business.
Some examples of values include:
If your organisation is in line with your values, every decision you make will be guided by them. For example, if sustainability is an important value, you would choose packaging that has the least impact on the environment, even if it’s more expensive to source.
Your environment is a physical representation of what you value. For example, if you value collaboration, then your office should have plenty of break-out spaces where people can get together to discuss different ideas. On the other hand, if you have lots of cubicles it suggests your employees are more suited to working by themselves — or need lots of quiet spaces to take video calls.
Neither approach is right or wrong, it’s simply a matter of what your employees need to do their jobs well. Don’t install one or two meeting rooms if your employees need to work in large teams. Nobody wants to book a meeting room 3 weeks in advance’ it’s a very frustrating employee experience. Also keep in mind that if your employees are mainly working with remote colleagues, it’s important each room is set up for video calling and has excellent connectivity.
Are your teams open and honest with each other, do your employees feel they have a safe space to raise issues that concern them? If so, keep going! We recommend always including a communication section in a pulse survey to gauge how your employees are feeling. This applies to social events and workshops too. After every event you should ask for feedback, as this is the only way to understand what your employees enjoy about them.
Improving company culture can be daunting, after all, you’re changing the mindset of an entire company. Before you begin to make any big changes we recommend focussing on these three elements of the employee experience:
Appreciation is one of the most important drivers of engagement and motivation.3 You should always encourage peer-to-peer recognition, in addition to praise during one on one meetings.
Fortunately, our platform makes showing appreciation both easy and intuitive. With Perkbox your teams can recognise each other on the go, and tag each recognition they send to a company value. This boosts team morale and highlights what behaviours you value as an organisation.
Prioritising wellbeing has many benefits, the obvious ones being fewer absences and instances of burnout. But mentally and physically healthy employees are also more likely to be productive and engaged.2
To support employee wellbeing, we wanted to create a holistic digital solution to support mental and physical health. So, when we began curating our wellbeing content, we wanted it to be capable of holding an ever-expanding library of resources. Whether it’s workout videos, guided meditations, sleep stories or guides to things like quitting smoking — there’s something for everyone.
Investing in perks and other benefits is a great way to show your teams you care about them. When choosing a benefits package, it’s important to understand what your employees value. Otherwise, you run the risk of not seeing a return on your investment, as your benefits won’t get used.
Perkbox offers over 9,000 global discounts and deals, which your employees can take advantage of no matter where they are in the world. Additionally, you can give your teams an allowance of Flexi points each month, which they can spend on Flexi Perks — a huge range of extras — at no cost to them. These range from coffee and therapy sessions to streaming subscriptions and sausage rolls.
There are many ways to create a supportive company culture, like investing in corporate benefits. Because each company is different, what works well for one may not for the other. For this reason, it’s important you research similar companies to your own, and make notes on what they do well.
Usually, companies focus on improving the employee experience as a way to enhance their culture. Often, they see value in using an all-in-one employee experience solution as all of their benefits, perks, and wellbeing resources are in one place. Plus, they can also easily track what benefits their employees value. Not to mention using the platform to stay in touch with their teams.
A strong company culture is one that’s in sync with its employees, processes and mission. An example of this would be a progressive corporate culture. Usually, organisations with this type of culture see higher levels of employee engagement, because they prioritise wellbeing. They understand that happy and healthy employees are better for business.
Get 2024 off to a flying start! This planner has ideas and initiatives that’ll help you care for, connect with and celebrate your people — all through the first three months of the year.
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