In 2014, Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” was culture.
In subsequent years, the need for a healthy company culture has never wavered. What has changed, however, is the understanding of what culture truly looks like for businesses. Previously people believed that a strong organizational culture could be achieved through exciting company perks such as sleep pods, meditation rooms and unlimited snacks in the breakroom.
While all of these sound like great ways to recruit new hires, the truth is, there’s more to it than that.
Creating a healthy company culture that attracts high-level recruits requires you to proactively establish positive and supportive policies from the top down and to provide an environment that is welcoming and accepting for the entire team. A successful organizational culture encourages employees to aspire toward their goals and passions while moving the company forward simultaneously.
Five Reasons Company Culture Matters
Attracting New Talent
Creating a strong, healthy company culture makes you more attractive to prospective employees.
By becoming the “go-to” company for high-level applicants, you’ll reduce the cost of talent acquisition and increase the probability of a diverse workforce—something that, in turn, drives an even healthier company culture.
Retaining Employees
While being attractive to new talent is a great thing, and easy when you have a solid company culture, what’s even more beneficial is the ability to retain your current top performers. High employee retention rates ensure consistency in service, reduced costs for training new personnel and a healthy company morale. As an added bonus, it’s easier to build and maintain a healthy company culture when you don’t have a revolving door of new employees who have to learn the ropes!
As an example of a company with few rotating seats to fill, HubSpot has been continuously named one of the top companies to work for, crediting the stand-out culture as one of the top reasons for employee retention.
Improving Brand Recognition
Culture is a two-way street. While it’s often easy to point out the companies that have great cultures (like Starbucks), often exceptionally poor culture can be just as well-known. What a company is known for can make or break their reputation and trajectory for success.
In today’s current “stand for what you believe in” climate, consumers spend their time and hard-earned money with the companies they feel deserve it most—and often that’s with companies that have an enviable culture.
Ultimately, who your company is on the inside overflows and becomes the public face of the company. What that looks like can be up to you.
Turning Employees Into Advocates
One of the biggest rewards of a healthy company culture is that it turns your employees into walking, talking, first-on-the-line advocates for customers and future hires. With only their positive experiences to go from, they are easily one of the most effective tools for marketing—without the additional marketing expenses, of course.
Increasing Productivity and Performance
Team members thrive in environments that encourage their passions, talents and voices to be heard. Companies with impeccable culture see a distinct connection between employee satisfaction and increased productivity.
According to Todd Davis, author of the book Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work, “Employees with low (or no) engagement come to work for a paycheck. Nothing more. They do just enough to ensure they aren’t put on a performance plan or fired. It’s a ‘check the box’ mentality regarding anything they do throughout the day.”
Contrastingly, Davis states that invested employees “care deeply about results and therefore, they work tirelessly to ensure those results are remarkable. Their productivity is extremely high.”
Creating a healthy culture within a company certainly does not happen overnight. It takes intentional actions to help ensure that everyone is living and working the same values, from the CEO all the way down to the guy working the coffee cart in the lobby.
Once a healthy culture is achieved, however, companies will find themselves in a great position: highly sought after and in demand for customers and talent alike.
To your culture,
-DeLynne