Have A Great Culture By Improving Employee Communication

Company culture. It’s not just a buzzword…er, buzz phrase…it can have a real impact on your employee’s engagement, satisfaction, and productivity, and that means huge changes to your bottom line.

Proactively creating a company culture that fosters a sense of inclusion, commitment, and ownership for results can propel a company forward with higher quality, greater consistency, and more creative innovations, while letting culture grow stagnant and keeping it unresponsive leads directly to high turnover rates and far less return on every HR dollar spent.

Given how important company culture is, it’s unfortunate that 64% of the American workforce doesn’t feel that their workplace has a strong sense of culture at all.

That means well over half of the workforce isn’t nearly as engaged as they could be, has no sense of community or commitment with their colleagues or their employers, and is most likely looking at their job as day-to-day drudgery rather than as a career.

And there’s no one but the bosses to blame.

Culture is Created—But Not Dictated—From the Top Down

CEOs who know that their job is to keep the whole organization energized and aligned on a clear purpose spend their time talking to, and listening to, their employees.

That’s according to Shannon Mullen, founder of New York City-based Mullen Marketing Search and long time business strategy and recruitment expert. She’s preaching what the research has been saying for years: the most successful CEOs get all the value they can from all of their company’s assets, including the knowledge value held by their human resources.

In order to allow growth, innovation, and commitment blossom from the ground up, the best executives instill a culture of listening and communicating with the lower levels of the organizational chart.

To put it simply: if you’ve hired right, your people know their business. You’d do well to keep listening to what they have to say.

Mullen stresses that one of the best ways to show inclusiveness and respect to employees is to let them help shape their behaviors, purpose, and the realization of that purpose.

Overall strategy and goals have to be set from a perspective that takes the whole company into view, but the tasks necessary for accomplishing those goals—and the methods used to complete those tasks—can often be left up to the individuals responsible for the outcomes.

While many managers have an affinity for standardization and uniformity, allowing employees to shape their workdays and their workplace as they see fit (and with the necessary compromises to maintain harmony with everyone else, of course) actually yields better results.

Creating a culture your employees will love is a big task, but it’s easily accomplished by simply communicating with them!

First, make sure you have the right communications platforms and systems in place.

This is why we say culture is created from the top down: it takes someone with the power to call the shots to put the right structures for an effective culture in place.

These structures, though, don’t hand down specific cultural values or practices, but rather let them grow from the ground up through engaged employee input.

With robust and omnidirectional communications in place at the foundation of your company’s culture, you can get ongoing feedback from employees that will help you implement HR changes geared toward greater productivity.

You’ll be letting your team members take part in creating the why and the how of your company, giving them a greater sense of responsibility for the results and a greater sense of commitment to the cause—in other words, creating a culture geared towards productivity and inclusion.

And you’ll be rewarded for it!

Something as simple as a mood lift can increase productivity by as much as 12%. Change the entire working atmosphere and give everyone on your team a positive sense of ownership for their company culture, and you’ll see even bigger gains.

You’ll be able to promote from within more frequently and with greater effect, keeping your culture and your workforce more consistent and efficient.

Need Help Improving Employee Communication?

Talk to your employees. Get their ideas. Compare them, test them, rank them, and make gradual change based on employee feedback a permanent part of your company’s culture.

In the comments below, share some tips that’ll help other companies improve employee communication and get their employees recognized for their feedback and accomplishments from management.