As defined by Webster’s, Culture is “the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behaviour that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.”

In your workplace, your culture is the everyday reality of organizational life. It is not the mission statement, your balance sheets, or even the employee handbook alone. Culture is what we do, what we say, the way we behave, the way we treat each other, our services, customers and ourselves.

Here are some of the ways of building a healthy culture among the employees:

• INCREASE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Employee engagement—having employees who are “emotionally and psychologically attached to their work and workplace”—is crucial to creating positive employee relationships and a successful bottom line. Researchers have proven that highly engaged employees are 17% more productive and have a 41% lower rate of absenteeism. To increase employee engagement, you can:

1. Hire and develop great managers. A healthy work culture starts at and from the top.
2. Provide managers with the resources they need. With the proper resources for hiring the right people, your managers can in turn build effective teams that are motivated and engaged.
3. Set clear, achievable goals—together. Employees need to be clear on the goals set for them as individuals, for their team, and your company. To be meaningful, these goals need to relate to their daily experiences and be ones that they believe are attainable. When employees are involved in goal setting, it makes them almost four times more likely to feel engaged at work.

• INCREASE EMPLOYEE RETENTION

Employee turnover has always been a concern for employers, particularly in businesses. However, there have been companies and careers where employees stayed for 20 years or longer. More recently, resumes are more likely to reflect one or two-year stretches at multiple companies. To increase employee retention, you can:

1. Incorporate regular, fair pay raises. Many employees who are actively job hunting are looking for a pay increase, so making sure that you incorporate routine raises to keep your pay rates competitive with other companies is essential.
2.  Provide opportunities for upward mobility. Many employees who choose to leave a job –particularly millennials– do so because they feel they haven’t been offered appropriate opportunities to advance in their careers.
3.   Make them feel secure. One of the primary reasons that employees look for or take a new job is to find job stability. Workers leave when there are frequent firings or a sense that jobs depend on randomly set goals on the whims of management.

• ALLOW FOR WORKDAY FLEXIBILITY

Today’s employees want more than a set five-day workweek or eight-hour workday. The job benefits that employees currently care most about are those that provide them with greater flexibility including telecommuting, four-day workweeks, and/or flexible hours where they can come in at any time as long as they stay and work for the appropriate number of hours.

1. Our research consistently finds that flexible scheduling and work-from-home options affect decisions to take or leave a job.
2. Over half of employees say they would change jobs for flexitime.
3. 37% of workers would be willing to move to a different job where they can work offsite at least part of the time.

• IMPROVE COMMUNICATION WITH EMPLOYEES

While once-yearly performance reviews used to be the standard, the one-sided design of these interactions is giving way to more progressive forms of employee communication. What today’s workers want is ongoing feedback, clearly communicated goals, and a collaborative work environment that they feel is fair, relevant, and encouraging. You can improve communication in a few easy steps.

1. Check-in often. Frequent, informal contacts with managers allow employees to understand how their daily work is linked to your company’s goals. data shows that employees who talk about their goals and successes with their manager at least every six months are almost three times more likely than other employees to feel engaged and motivated in their job.
2. Be available. This means more than just being there when your employees have questions, problems, or concerns. When communicating with employees, make sure that they feel heard by clarifying and rephrasing what they say to make certain that you understand and hear them. Empathize with them, and let them know that you appreciate their frustrations and will support them in overcoming work-related problems.

• BUILD A STRONG EMPLOYER BRAND

Companies today need their employer brand—their reputation as an employer—to be as strong as their customer brand. Unfortunately, many overlook their employer brand entirely, or devote little or no resources to building and strengthening it. While companies don’t need to invest as much money into their internal brand as they may need to invest in their external marketing efforts, they do need to give their employer brand more attention.

A strong employer brand attracts and retains workers. It turns them into advocates for your company and it differentiates you from the competition. This is particularly important in a technological era of heightened competition and constant connectedness. Companies must engage in regular review, CEO approval ratings, salary reports, interview reviews and questions, benefits reviews, and more. This gives anyone the ability to see how former and current employees rate your organization, meaning job candidates are literally able to shop around for the jobs and companies that they like to believe will meet their needs and make them happiest. Employees have become consumers of the workplace.

There’s no simple solution for fixing or improving work culture among employees, it requires momentum, time, and buy-in from managers across your company. Whatever steps you take to make your workplace more healthy among employees, you’ll want to be able to evaluate how your employees feel about their work environment. The above benefit allows the employer to get positive feedback about the work culture among the employees.

Writer:
Funmilayo Majolagbe
Human Resource Manager
SO&C Compliance Services