By Jeremy Mclendon, JewelersHealthCare.com
Dynamic company culture is not about beer on draft, lounges, a snack bar, or a game room. It is much deeper than those things. We have put together six steps to help you evaluate your company and your team to create a more dynamic company culture to better serve your employees, customers, and community.
1. The Basics are Clear
Everyone starts somewhere, this we know, so why not start with the simple things you may already have in place when working on your company culture.
Look at your company’s values, mission statement, passion, and vision. These items may be dated and might need some tweaking to fit your current goals as a company. Change these as needed and ensure they are clear and simple. Then share your new vision, mission, and values with your team!
2. Support Your Team
Speaking of teams, have you looked at yours lately? Are they getting everything they need? This is a great question to ask during the current job market. Compensation is at an all-time high, and so are expenses. So ensure you support your team in as many ways as possible.
Support can be more than compensation. It can be paid time off, banking holidays, rolling paid time off to the following year, maternity/paternity/adoption leave, 401k, or vesting interest. These are ways to show your team you care about their well-being. Then there is the ability to help them better care for themselves through health insurance.
JewelersHealthCare.com can assist you in finding the right healthcare coverage solution for your team. This is more than health insurance—it’s a daily benefit of keeping money in your team’s pocket. JewelersHealthCare.com has over 130+ carriers across the United States with full medical coverage, ancillary benefits, and more for your team of 1-100+ employees.
3. Leaders Lead
This may sound a bit redundant but look at your leadership team. Are they putting forth the effort? Are they able to meet the standards of your new vision and mission statement? Your leaders are the lifeline of your company culture. They are the beginning of the culture in many aspects. Give your leadership the space to mentor the team, help them grow, and feel appreciated in their role.
4. Culture is a Feeling
Culture is more than your values and mission. It isn’t your logo and slogan, and it’s not how your team dresses or even how you greet the customer. It is so much more than these things, though they make up your culture’s outward view. It is about the ties that bind your team together. It is feeling appreciated knowing you are supported and have space to grow in your field. Creating a dynamic company culture means friendship, understanding, humor, learning, problem-solving and decision-making, and working towards a common goal.
Culture is how your team feels when they are at work and how they view work when they are at home. To know where your company can grow, it is a good idea to talk to your team and ask them to be candid about their views on work. Many companies boast about their amazing culture, although they create unhappy and unfulfilled employees.
5. Risks are Encouraged
When was the last time your team stepped out of their box, came up with a new idea, and you used it? Encourage your team to step up and bring ideas to the forefront, then put some of them into place. If after putting an idea to work and it doesn’t seem to fit the need, make changes, or try something else. Failure is not trying and not succeeding; failure is never trying in the first place.
6. Recognition—Above and Beyond
Everyone likes to be needed, and there is nothing better than hearing you did well at something. It can be as simple as a shout-out meeting where everyone notes how someone helped them this week or a praise board with sticky notes. Thanking someone for being helpful takes seconds and means so much. It can unify your team, help leaders be better leaders, and change a mindset.
These six steps could be a huge shift for your company or a few small changes that make a world of difference for your team. So give them a try: look at your goals, how you support your employees, how your leaders lead, how your team feels about work, how you react to ideas, and how you praise others. By making these changes in your company, you will see it also affects your team outside the workplace, creating happier, healthier, fulfilled employees.
