As the renowned Greek philosopher, Heraclitus once said, ‘change is the only constant.’ And this holds true for every organization in terms of culture. As a corporate entity evolves, its vision, mission, and culture also need adjustments.
After all, organizational culture can be one of the prime factors in improving efficiency and business results. If you’re wondering how to drive culture change in an organization, here’s a list of 10 simple tips that you can use.
10 Simple Ways To Drive Culture Change In An Organization
There are several factors influencing organizational culture change. This list can help you understand the key areas of focus and thereby facilitate the desired culture transformation in your organization:
1. Listen to what employees have to say
One of the key factors affecting corporate culture is employee satisfaction. To ensure this, your workforce should feel seen and heard. Provide your employees with a platform to raise opinions, complaints, and suggestions.
By doing so, you can focus on their inherent wishes and make holistic changes to your organizational culture. By listening to your employees, you can earn their trust and improve performance and retention in the long run.
2. Bring about transparency
As per Bonusly's 2020 Engagement and Modern Workplace Report, “Highly engaged employees are 2.1 x times more likely to report working for a transparent organization than actively disengaged employees.”
Your team deserves to know about the company’s dealings and overall ambitions. Share with them the successes of the business and give them ample opportunities to divest solutions together. This encourages employees to be a part of the bigger process and thereby instills within them a sense of belongingness.
3. Prioritize employee engagement
Organizations across the globe are focused on improving employee experience. Educating your people about the company’s purpose, and annual objectives, and helping them understand their role in driving organizational efficiency can go a long way.
Take regular surveys to understand if your employees feel connected at work. At the same time, invest efforts to drive higher employee engagement in meaningful ways. Check out our 10 simple employee engagement strategies to drive employee engagement.
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4. Give and request regular feedback
A prime factor in driving culture change is awareness. The more you know about the employees and their needs, the better you can serve them and vice versa. Thus, seeking and giving feedback is key.
However, it is also important to understand the timeline for giving and soliciting feedback. An annual review simply won’t cut it with the dynamic needs of today’s organization. It is therefore advisable to have weekly or monthly checkpoints with employees to help them perform better and in turn help the company grow at a steady pace.
5. Implement a rewards program
HR leaders serving vice president ranks and above have often stated how their company’s employee recognition program has enhanced workplace culture. Show your people that you value and appreciate their efforts.
You can do so by introducing a recognition and rewards program. Provide colleagues with tools and resources to make anonymous nominations, and earn or give reward points, awards, and other recognitions.
Check out 3 steps to build an employee recognition program that works here.
6. Introduce flexible work practices
No one likes to be timed and micro-managed. While work needs to be done, it needn’t be enforced in an arbitrary manner. More and more companies are therefore adopting a flexible work culture as a means of supporting teams and helping them perform better.
Research too has shown that 55% of employees are now expecting flexible working practices as part of their benefits package. Having a flexible work culture can help you gain employee trust and build a positive image.
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7. Embrace inclusion and diversity
Honoring differences and seeing them as vehicles of value-add is at the center of good organizational culture. To drive change, companies must embrace inclusion and diversity and enable equal representation for employees.
To aid this, employers can work on programs and methods to reduce discrimination and cognitive bias. This can be achieved via fun quizzes and informative videos for team members. On a larger scale, this can be actioned by devising strategies to leverage the skills of a diverse workforce.
8. Invest in employee wellbeing
To grow and sustain in the long run, it is essential to build a culture that supports the well-being of employees. This is possible by understanding the mental and physical stresses of the workforce and employing means to tackle them.
Companies can also invest in holistic well-being programs and introduce well-being practices in the workplace. Easy ways to adopt this include healthy work hours, providing well-being subsidies, hosting marathons/fitness classes, and spreading the word on mental health.
Want to learn how to promote wellness in the workplace? Read this insightful article.
9. Communicate the purpose
People have an inherent need to engage in meaningful work. The mundane can be taxing and make employees question their value in the bigger process. It is, therefore, important for companies to go above and beyond in delivering a sense of purpose at the workplace.
Ask yourself if you regularly show team members the value of their work? Do you recognize them for their efforts and how they impact company goals? Communicating with employees effectively and positively is half the work done.
10. Encourage learning
While a lot of effort is concentrated on team-building and collaborative activities, companies often miss out on leveraging employee learning and development to drive culture change.
This can be achieved by providing employees with the means to sharpen their skills and cultivate talent. Knowledge exchange programs, subsidies for higher studies, skill-based learning activities, and other development models can be used to encourage learning and thereby better company culture.
Align Company Values with Performance and Better Results
Strong company culture can help you define a set of desired values and shift employee behavior accordingly. It enables you to bring about more accountability, improve the quality of work, and chase targets more efficiently.
If you’d like to learn more about ways to enhance company culture, check out Loop’s resource center today. Alternatively, you can reach out to us to know more!
